Empire: World History - 142. Isabella of Castile: Uniting Spain

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

To some she is Europe’s first great queen, to others she is one of history’s great villains, but there is no doubt that Isabella of Castile holds one of the most significant legacies in European history. Born third in line to the throne of Castile, she asserted herself and rose to be queen of Castile and then through her fiery marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon, laid the foundations for the unification of Spain. But as soon as she rose to dominance, she made it clear that she was willing to use terror to enforce her rule. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Brian Catlos to discuss the rise to power of Isabella of Castile. **Empire Live** Empire live show tickets are ON SALE NOW!! Join Anita and William at the London Barbican 8 July 2024! Buy your tickets here or here. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnance. And me, William Duremple. And today I'm delighted to say we are joined by Brian Catloss, author of the brilliant kingdoms of faith, a new history of his life. Islamic Spain, a man who recently, and it's only freshly baked, it really is very new, isn't it? Got a Guggenheim Fellowship, which we are all incredibly in awe of and horribly jealous of.

Exactly. Very handy things to have. We are small-hearted people, Brian. We were happy for you through gritted teeth. Oh, well, thank you. Thank you very much. It's definitely an honor and I'm glad to have it. Look, we've got you on. You are exactly the right person to talk to about a woman who is just filled with contradictions. Isabella of Castile sometimes called Isabel the Catholic, a woman whose life changed Spain forever. She was a uniting force in some respects, but also too many a monster dripping in blood and gore because this is the same Isabella and William, you were really very keen that we talk about this right from the off, that presided over the inquisition and the misery

and expulsion and torture and burning of thousands. I mean, we don't have numbers of Jews and Muslims from Spain. Yeah, our last episode was Nurjahan, and we were coming from a Mughal India, that particularly in the reign of Akbar, was celebrated for this coming together of different traditions, a king who could bring into one room, a Catholic, a Sunni, a Shia, a Sufi, a Vashnav, and a Shavite Hindu, and make them all talk to each other. Isabella is almost the diametric opposite of that. She's someone that comes with an incredibly mixed cosmopolitan, Spain and she unthreads that woven tapestry, expels the moors, tortures the conversios, and gets rid of the Jews. And she is a woman who is extremely pious, who believes that her piety and her religious ideas are sent

by God, and she is going to purify as well as unite her kingdom. Brian, I loved your book, Kingdoms of Faith, as you know, because I chose it everywhere as my book of the year when it came out. And you create in that book this very complex picture of this extremely mixed European country when Muslims, Jews and Christians, cohabited for hundreds of years. In many ways, is Isabel to you the kind of undoing of that, the person that locks that door that you have thrown open for us? To a certain extent. But I think there's some things we have to consider that, you know, first of all, history is very much in the eyes of the beholder. So when we look at a figure like Isabel the Catholic or really virtually, you know, any historical figure that is sort of on the cusp of these grand changes and transformations, really depending on what perspective you're coming from, you may see them as a monster or as a heroine.

So certainly from certain perspectives, notably the Jewish and Muslim perspectives, Isabel the Catholic is no hero or no heroine, but from the perspective of many people who look rightly or wrongly from the viewpoint of European history or Spanish history, she's really seen as a heroine. So she's a complex figure. We really ought to sort of date Isabella of Castile. So we're talking somebody who was born in 1451 and lived until 1504. We're talking about Castile, as if everybody knows what that means. What did Castile mean when she was born?

Sure. Let me maybe take a couple minutes to just give you a little bit of background because we're used to thinking about Spain as a country. This is how we see things through the sort of lands of modern nations, but Spain didn't exist as a country in the time of Isabel the Catholic. In fact, there was not officially a kingdom of Spain until the 18th century under the Bourbon kings. I don't think I knew that, literally. I mean, the Romans called it Hispania. They saw it as a unit, didn't they?

Exactly, exactly. And that memory of that unit stayed, that was a persistent memory, and it was used politically, particularly by the kings of Leon and Castile, in order to justify their dominion over that whole space. But what happened was that in the Middle Ages, of course, Spain, or most of what is now Spain, was conquered by Muslims in 7-Eleven. and over the centuries as Muslim power sort of waned across the peninsula, there was a series of Christian kingdoms that coalesced along the sort of northern frontier of the Iberian Peninsula. And these various kingdoms were independent. And so when we get to the Middle Ages per se, say we're looking at the period, say of about the year 1,100 or so, right? We're not looking at a Spain. What we're looking at is a kind of mosaic of several or many Muslim kingdoms that are independent and several or many Christian kingdoms that are independent.

And in a larger sense, these kingdoms are sort of opposed in the sense that some are Christian and some are Muslim, and in some ways this sort of shapes the way they interact in their alliances. But in many ways, the most important vectors of competition between these kingdoms happen within their own sort of religious communities. So we have the Muslim kingdoms fighting the Muslim kingdoms, the Christian kingdoms fighting the Christian kingdoms, and the two sides align with each other. So who were the big players? The big players at this time were Castile, which is the kingdom that Isabel became queen of. And the name refers, it's the same route as castle, isn't it? It's a reference to the fortifications which defied the Muslims and which locked them out in a sense. Absolutely. And this

speaks to this history of sort of endemic warfare that we see in the Iberian Peninsula. In fact, Catalonia, which is one of the other major regions in Christian Spain, also its name comes from the same route. So we can see just how important this sort of dynamic of conflict, of fortification, of frontier engagement was. So the major players, we have the kingdom of Castile, which had merged with Leon. So we have Castile Leon, which is one power in sort of central Spain. We have Portugal in the West. We have Navarre in the northeast. And then we have a dynastic agglomeration, which is referred to as the crown of Aragon. Not to be confused with Lord of the Rings. Exactly. It's Aragon, not Aragon, which consisted of a agglomeration of the Kingdom of Aragon,

the Catalan counties and various territories across the Mediterranean that had been added to the sort of dynastic patrimony of these kings. Including bizarrely Sicily. Yes, Sicily, eventually parts of mainland Italy, various Mediterranean islands, parts of Greece, little bits of North Africa. All the places you most want to go on holiday. Exactly, exactly. And Barcelona into the bargain, yeah.

Yeah, Barcelona the capital. I mean, you've mentioned two names, which will resonate with anyone who's gone to school in this country. You mentioned Aragon and Navarre, because there is a huge intertwining with British history. We're talking about the mother of Catherine of Aragon. We're talking about, you know, Henry of Navarre, who we might have read about in school. There is an intermixing of British history here, isn't there, with Spain? Absolutely, absolutely. So in many ways, these Christian kingdoms were highly integrated into the political framework of Northern Europe.

And this is really part of the story of this transformation that we see around 1500 with the reign of Isabel and Fernando, which is essentially that the Northern Europeans end up taking over the Iberian Peninsula in the form of the Habsburgs. Okay. Now let's get down to the woman herself. So we know when she was born, every pen portrait I've read about her, all historians bang on about her beauty. And her beauty is related to this sort of urban hair, which is sort of almost backlit in Renaissance pictures. Very fair skin, green eyes. They talk about her green eyes. And much fairer than you'd imagine a Spanish queen to be. Yeah, of a Spanish person. She doesn't look like the people around her.

She looks like primavera or something. One of those wonderful Renaissance images of spring, and you see in the infancy. Well, you know, it's notoriously hard to really get a grip on the sort of personality and the personas of these historical individuals. So I would say, suffice to say that a successful queen is going to be beautiful. Right. Good point. You know, the unsuccessful ones are ugly and the successful ones are beautiful. So, you know, how much of that is literary license? How much of that is the sort of the

synchapacy of courtiers? It's really difficult to disentangle. You know, we have some pictures, some portraits. Some rather gorgeous portraits. Yeah, she looks nice, but again, these are photographs. You ain't going to paint an ugly picture of the queen, right? Particularly not that one. Although ugliness does figure and propaganda quite a lot in this period of time, we'll come to that in a moment, but she's a woman who is not destined to be queen because it is her half-brother who is in line for the throne. I mean, just tell us what that relationship must have been like, because we've done many empires where being the half-brother or half-sister of the monarch in waiting, it's a dangerous person to be. You know, it is not without risk. So what was her position in the court at that time? Yeah, absolutely.

you know, it's a delicate position. She was the daughter of Juan the second, the king of Castile. And this was from Juan's second marriage, which was to a Portuguese princess, Isabel of Portugal. Now, Juan had been married previously to Maria Varegon, an Aragonese princess. And she had given him a son, Henry, Enrique, who became Enrique the fourth. Who was less of a picture, by all accounts? Well, I mean, was he? I mean, Brian, was he as ugly as they say? Because they do paint a picture of a really almost disfigured with our gleness man. Enrique, the impotent, is not a name you're going to get a battle with, really.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's hard to say because, again, this is all, you know, it's like reading Shakespeare's history. Enrique was the loser. And so, you know, for the next century or so, or beyond, there was a concerted effort really to villainize him and diminish him. And, you know, this really became key in the story of Isabel because it is, in fact, the whole reason she became queen. Okay, so there is a horrible story. Tell me, tell me, tell me, with Enrique the impotent.

Let me say it for you, because you're a delicate, nice man, and I'm a horrible woman. And so, you know, the story goes that he couldn't do it. He just couldn't. And so it might be one of the first reportages of artificial insemination involving a golden tube. And a team of doctors. And a team of doctors. I mean, good Lord, use your imagination. But, I mean, where has that come from? Is that after and during Isabella's reign or, you know, from people who supported Isabella more than him? Okay, let me rewind the tape a little bit, okay? So we have won the second who's King of Castile. He has his son, Enrique, by his first marriage, and he has two children by his second marriage.

He has Isabel. A heroine. Exactly. Or anti-heroine. Exactly. And then he has his... Little Alfonso. Little cute Alfonso.

Exactly. His son Alfonso. So who's older? Isabella's older. Exactly. But Alfonso's a guy and Isabel's a girl, right? So Alfonso has the advantage. But it doesn't matter.

because the first born son is Enrique, right? So Enrique is going to inherit the throne. The problem is Juan, his father's head over heels with Isabella Portugal. He's so in love with her that, you know, according to the sort of cartoon historiography, he'll do anything, anything she says. In fact, he ends up at her behest executing his royal favorite and all-powerful aide, Alvaro de Luna. So Juan dies and Enrique comes to the throne.

And in one's will, he entrusted the care of Isabel and her brother to his widow on the condition that she never marry again. Okay? If she kept that promise, she would be able to keep care of her children. So what happens is that Isabel and her brother, Alfonso, spend their infancy essentially in exile, living with their mother in a castle in a place called Madrigal, which is in central Castile, while Enrique is trying to establish himself in power. And this is no easy thing in Castile. It's not easy being King of Castile, because the whole game as King of Castile is you've got to somehow control the nobility. It's the old story of royalty. The king is trying to establish, or queen is trying to establish themselves as a sort of ruler sui

generous above the nobility. And the nobility is always trying to undermine the power of the monarch in order to get more power for themselves. So Enrique is facing a rough ride. Now, Enrique's mission as king, one of the most important missions you can have as king or queen, and we know this from British history, more or less contemporaneous, is to reproduce, right? You have to reproduce. Why? Because reproduction, particularly of a male air, means stability. It means political stability. A male air in particular is really important, not because these people were chauvinistic, although for sure they were. Well, they so were. But anyway, yeah.

It's because if it's a woman, you will have to marry her to someone. And that husband will come in to the kingdom and he will bring with him his own clients, his own nobility, and that will displace the local nobility. So everybody wants an heir. So like a good prince, Enrique is married and marries Blanche of Navarre, the queen of Navarre, right? And they're married for several years and no children. Okay, this is where the rumors start.

That he can't do it. That he can't do it. And artificial dissemination medieval style involves a sort of brass cylinder. Gold, my friend, gold for a king. Well, exactly. Plus gold is antisept. Who knows, right? I prefer not to think about it, honestly.

So the sort of consensus is, well, that, you know, maybe somehow he's been bewitched. So this isn't necessarily a physical problem with him. It's kind of a particular problem of bewitchment. And because he's also. had to be putting it about with other women in the kingdom. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, there are reports that, you know, prostitutes are having no problem with him getting it up kind of thing. So it's all rather hazy.

So he marries again, this time he marries a Portuguese princess, one of Portugal. You'll notice these royal marriages are happening within the Iberian Peninsula in this period. The royal houses are marrying into each other. What this is, it's a complicated game of marital chess in which they're trying to outmaneuver themselves not on the battlefield, although that happens occasionally too, although war is best avoided. But rather, they're trying to outmaneuver themselves on the marriage bed in order to engineer the sort of biological absorption of their rival kingdoms. And just to clarify, our heroine, Isabel the Catholic, is out of all this for most of her childhood. She's with her

mother. I mean, the promise that was made was she and Alfonso could grow up with their mom. And she's having a good education. She is well-read, intellectual, proficient in Latin, all that sort of stuff, or is that also later legend? No, I think she's being educated, but she's really out of the main court until the age 11. And the problem is that, and again, we have to disentangle, you know, legend from fact is that the woman that she's living with, her mother, Isabel, is also having some, it seems, some serious psychological after effects due to the grieving for her. her late husband. She was very much in love with him. How did they manifest the psychological? Well, you know, odd behavior, you know, extreme grieving, so on and so forth. And I'm going to

give a plug now for a wonderful book. It happens to be written by my wife, called The Politics of Emotion, love, grief, and madness, and medieval and early modern Liberia. Her name is Nouria Seiras-Fernandez, and that's where I got everything here. So if there's anything wrong, that I say, blame her or not me. I didn't say that. So, you know, Isabel's kind of on ice. So she's living in this sort of gilded cage. And all through this, Enrique, is trying to sort of pressure the mother Isabel into doing something wrong, which is going to have to make her give up control of her children. Because once she no longer has control of her children, then Enrique has control of her children.

Right. And then he can neutralize any potential threat in the future if he's got control of the prince and princess in or out of a tower. Exactly. He read my mind. And Brian, just so that we deal with this right up front, there is a whole variety of different takes on the multiculturalism, the multi-religious nature of Spain at this time. There's this legend of the convivants here, this happy coexistence of different communities. There are those who say that's rubbish, that they were always at war with each other. Where do you stand on this? There's someone that's actually spent a lot of your career examining this. Well, sadly, as everything, it's complicated. It's like I say about golden ages. Golden Ages exist. for those who have the gold. So certainly we had across the Iberian Peninsula at this time, we had Christians, Muslims, and Jews, which were living in some ways in sort of self-contained communities. But there was a lot of interaction and overlap, and it really makes it difficult to generalize about these things. So you could say, yes, in some sense, Christians, Muslims,

and Jews were hostile. They were opposed to each other. But in other senses, they engaged in long and durable relationships of mutual benefit right across the social spectrum. You can see this most clearly with the nobility. I mean, you can think of Muslims fighting Christians, but you show me any battle that happened in the Iberian Peninsula in the 13th, 14th and 15th century between Muslims and Christians, and you'll find Muslim and Christian soldiers on both sides of that battlefield. That's interesting. That's interesting. So it's more for stakes and how you said golden age, which takes him back to the golden tube. We've kind of left that slightly hanging. You've got to let go of the tube, Anita.

No, no, no, I'm letting go. I'm letting go because also he let go, because his wife does become pregnant. I mean, the golden tube thing didn't work. Yes. But then there's a question mark. Is it his kid? I mean, does that start right from the beginning? Daughter, son, what happens after the non-insemination? Well, again, very, very complicated. So I mentioned how Isabella Portugal, Isabel the Catholic's mother, and you're going to have to bear with me because everybody has the same name. Everyone's called Isabelle. It's like everyone's called Elizabeth here. It's fine. Yeah. Exactly. So I had mentioned that Isabella Portugal is said to have engineered the execution of the royal favorite, Alvaro de Luna.

So when Henry VIII was looking for a favorite, a favorite becomes a really important person at the Castilian court. A favorite is kind of, as you guys know from English history, sort of the right-hand man of the king, right? a trusted counselor, a helper, so on and so forth, sometimes something more. So Enrique looks around and who is he going to make his favorite? Well, you know, it's tricky because if he picks one of the members of the leading noble houses, all of the other noble houses are going to be ticked off. Right. And this is going to precipitate a struggle within the nobility, which he wants to avoid. So he picks a sort of low-level courtier, whose name is Beltran de la Cueva. And he makes him his royal favorite. Showers all sorts of privilege on them, so on and so forth. Great, you would think.

Except that all of the upper nobility hate Beltran because they see him as a parvenu. So rumors start circulating. And the rumor that circulates most consistently is that Enrique is impotent, and therefore the daughter that his queen, Juan of Portugal, gives birth to, was actually the daughter of Beltran de la Cueva. So she's known as Hwana La Beltrana, the daughter of Beltran. No proof of this whatsoever. There's no proof of this. And there are good indications that it was not the case. So this is, again, the winner writing history. This is Isabel Catholic's guy's rewriting history after the event. No, no, no, even before, because this is happening in real time. Because this gives the nobles a wedge to pound into Enrique's edifice of power.

because waiting in the wings is another son. They could back Alfonso. If they back Alfonso, Alfonso owes them. And they do. And actually at one point, the rebellious nobility or the rebellious factions of the nobility of Castile stage a kind of pageant, which was known as the farce of avila, in which they crowned Alfonso king. That must have driven Enrique nuts. I mean, you know, he must have been furious.

Absolutely. particularly if, as a sort of historical consensus is, Juana La Beltrnejo was really his daughter. So he's kind of done everything right. He finally got it going, right? And now he's got a daughter to inherit his kingdom, and he's being told that she's illegitimate. And he's got these two half siblings waiting in the wings. And so this basically leads to a massive civil war in Castile. Okay, but just before that, I mean, does Enrique, I'm just thinking about ticked off Enrique, you know, he's finally created an air. And everyone is saying that's not his. And that's hurtful on a very human level and it's dangerous on a statecraft level. Is that when he decides,

okay, then, I'm going to take these two kids that were promised to stay with their mother, who is, you know, driven mad by grief, or probably not a great mother in that situation. But is that the point where he says, right, I'm taking them away? Is that what happens? It's all part of that process. He realizes that as they're coming of age, he's got to take control of them. But they're only little. I mean, she was 10 and Alfonso was, what, eight. I mean, they're only little when they're taken away from their mother. Well, they're old enough to be dangerous. You know, we have to keep in mind that, you know, if we look at the history of royalty in, well, across Europe, but in Spain in particular, you know, we're talking basically of a collection of psychopaths, even dangerous as children. Jalmi Primae, one of the greatest kings of the crown of Aragon, came to power when he was 13. He took control of his own realm and went to war against his nobility and won. So don't underestimate these royal children. And Enrique was certainly not going to underestimate anyone. your eldest, Rita?

Well, I mean, he's 14, and honestly, I think stroppy teenagers surging with hormones. I can see it happening. So, okay, so you've got Isabella, young Isabella, now taken away from her mother, with her little brother Alfonso, presumably clinging to her skirts. Where does Enrique put them out of the way and out of trouble? He takes them to court because he wants to have a closer eye on them. And basically, he is trying to maintain control of them while the nobility are trying to kind have hijacked them as potential figureheads, particularly Alfonso, as potential figureheads for

a rebellion. The problem comes when Alfonso dies because that leaves only Isabel. Well, don't leap to that. How does Alfonso, it's a good story. Well, here we have, you know, the intervention of another force in history, which I think historians are only really starting to come into grips with, and that is the effect of plague and pandemic. Since 1350, more or less, the black death had been recurring across the Iberian Peninsula and Europe. And the black death is interesting because unlike warfare, unlike political violence, disease does not distinguish among members of social class or condition. And so in one of these outbreaks of plague, Alfonso dies. And we should say this is something which has swept through Europe. It's come in

with the Mongols from the Crimea, arrives in Genoa, and within 50 years, a quarter of the population of Europe is dead from hideous boobles and swellings and death within a week? Yeah, in fact, this is only the average, right? If we look at the way the plague travels around the Mediterranean and around the coastal areas, its impact in the Mediterranean was far more. There are locales in the Crown of Aragon where 90% of the population died in the first year. So you can imagine what sort of effect that had on everything, on people's cultural, religious, social outlook on the economy. So with Alfonso gone, now Isabella is the only one there, all the Dukes and nobles who supported Alfonso, she's kind of inherited them from her little brother.

Does she then get pressured to sign fealty to Enrique, who is still the king, I mean, who does have the power in the region? Well, Isabella is really caught between several different forces. One is Enrique, who is trying to keep her down in order that he can ensure the succession of his daughter, Hwana. And of course, Hwana by now is married to the king of Portugal. So Portugal is becoming engaged in this. And the nobility who are taking Isabel as their figurehead have their own ideas as to her future. And this is really where I think you see something interesting, which is Isabella taking control of her own destiny. Because it's Isabel who engineers and supports her marriage to Ferdinand, Fernando of Aragon, very much against the opposition

of even her own supporters. Brian, so give us a pen portrait now of this girl. How old is she? How come she's got the gumption to choose her own marriage partner in a time when, presumably, girls didn't usually do that? What kind of woman is she? Well, you know, again, she would have only been about 17 years old when this whole process started. And I think it's hard to appreciate the dangerous game that these people were playing. To be a member of the royalty or the nobility at this time, you know, it wasn't all banquets in polo. The price of political failure, you know, was death or something just as bad, lifetime in prison. And I mean, we have scores of stories of queens and princesses who spent decades in seclusion and effectively

in prison. So how did she manage it? I mean, she must have had a real sort of determination and self-possession that was inculcated in her as a result of growing up in this bizarre environment. First, with her crazy mother, always under pressure from Enrique, and then being taken, placed in this hostile court, being pulled by these various different factions. Watching her brother die, watching thousands die around her. Exactly. And then somehow she pulled it together and she had the wherewithal and the strength of character or whatever you want to call it to say no, this is the way it's going to go. Well, it's a good point to take a break. So we have Isabella choosing her own husband and her own path. And as Brian says, playing with something

very dangerous. Join us after the break when we find out what happens after the world learns of her choices. Welcome back, Brian. So I don't want to pick a fight because I think we're probably on the ready to being good friends. But you keep saying, Isabel, and I keep saying Isabella, shall we call the whole thing off? What's going on? What is the right way? Yeah, you say tomato, I say potato. So there's an English version and a Spanish version. This is basically it. So in the English language version of her name is Isabella. Isabella of Castile, we say. Isabella of Castile or Ferdinand of Arragon. But in Spain, they say Isabelle and Fernando. And that's basically the difference. And they call her Isabel the Catholic is the additional thing.

La Catholic. Exactly, exactly. Isabella Catholic. So it's not Isabella. I don't know where the law comes from. The English added it sounds great, but there you go. So every one of these countries, Portugal, Aragon, Catalonia, and Castile have their own versions of these names. So it becomes immensely confusing.

One question, just straight out. I mean, presumably this is a point when everyone in Spain is Catholic. So why is she, the Catholic? It's like calling you Brian the American? I mean, well, she's Uber Catholic. She's Uber Super Catholic. Exactly. Exactly. It's not a mere descriptor. It's not like there were any other options for her, right? Exactly. It's Catholic with a capital C. This is a title that she and Ferdinand are awarded by the papacy in I think it was 1496. And it's kind of in recognition of all of the various heroic and fantastic things they had done for the church. So look, just before the break, before you and I fell out about pronunciation, And now we get it. And now I hope everybody gets it.

So if we do slip from one to the other, I hope it makes sense. If you do call him Fernando, I'm going to sing Abba. It's my only warning to you. Do you want to do it now? Do you want to know? Fernando, Fernando. Hear the drums, Fernando. I told you.

I'll never say it again. I'll never say it again. I'm sorry. That'll learn you. But look, just before the break, we were talking about the marriage of Isabella. And she has chosen Ferdinand. She's 17 years old at the time. How old is he?

I mean, is he a similar kind of age? He's a year younger. Oh, wow. Okay. And to top it off, they're cousins. They're all part of the same family. They're all part of the same Trostamara family that has been ruling Castile and Aragon since 1412. And so they're not unknown quantities.

Fernando is a fascinating character, too. I think in, you know, in many ways, even more interesting than Isabella. So when they met, Fernando was the heir apparent of, of the crown of Aragon, this mega Mediterranean kingdom. Before they married, he was already king of Sicily, but his father was still alive. His father, Juan or John the second of Aragon, another nasty piece of work, killed his own son, who was plotting against him at one point, or so it said. So, Fernando, or Ferdinand, is, you know, this 17, when they marries, this 17-year-old kind of

wonderkin. I mean, again, you know, if you have a teenage sons, think of what they're doing at 17. Fernando was already king of Sicily, already had a, you know, a collection of lovers. He was a man of the world before he was hardly a man kind of thing. So this encounter between Fernando and Isabella is arranged. You know, they wouldn't have known each other before this. I mean, essentially this was a political marriage. But it's they themselves that arrange it. It's not arranged for them. They make the moves. Exactly, exactly. Isabelle, I think this is a way of her taking charge of her own destiny. You know, really, the most important thing that's going to happen in her life is who she marries. So she has to choose very carefully, right? She has to choose a husband who's going to be strong enough

to reinforce her position without overwhelming her position. Okay, but Enrique's not going to like this because she's just made herself stronger. How is she able to do it against Enrique's will? Well, to cut a long story short, they do it. They elope. They sneak it. Exactly. Exactly. And again, this was not something that even a lot of Isabel's own supporters approved of.

Members of the nobility, well, maybe they would have liked to marry her. This is a way of getting your family into the royal house, right? But it was the most astute choice imaginable for Isabel, because the marriage that was established between Isabella and Fernando was, I think, one of the truly great historical partnerships in terms of a marriage. It's a marriage that works, amorously as well as politically. Also, you know, passionately, because there is one chronicler who says that, you know, they couldn't keep the hands off each other.

And the Archbishop at the wedding ceremony had to say, behave yourselves until I say man and wife or whatever. I mean, have you come across that? I mean, they were hansy, it is said. Well, you know, it's pretty clear. that they were in love. And what does love mean? It's hard to say. It's really difficult to get at the emotional life of people in power at this time. For one thing, the way that they communicated with each other aside from, you know, when they communicated in person, which we're not privy to,

was through letters. And we have to remember that when royal people communicated in letters, unless these were secret letters written in their own hand, which usually don't get preserved, these were public documents. They were letters which they dictated and then which were then sent, then dictated out loud to the recipient. And there are people listening and copying and circulating copies of. I mean, courts are filled with intrigue, yeah. Exactly. So, you know, it's performance as well.

You're not going to get a lot of heat. Well, we know there was some heat because, you know, she has a child a year after they're married, and this is the first of seven children. So something is definitely sparking between these two. Oh, absolutely. And what I was going to say is, even so, despite this sort of filtering that goes on, we see hints of this in their correspondence. For example, five years after their wedding, Fernando sent a letter to Isabel referring to her as

my lady and saying that it's hell not to be close to her. And speaking of the pain of the separation that they've been in. And is this just courtly love? Is this not the kind of tone of the time? Isn't this this longing for your lady part of the Netflix of the day? Well, I don't think it's necessarily expected that sort of tone. In fact, you know, one could say that it shows weakness in a man to show that sort of, emotional debility. But the fact is, you know, there were these two young people who obviously hit it off and, you know, they were hot for each other, Brian. They were horny adolescents, right? They were. And they were a king and queen. I mean, you know, now you two, calm down.

How could it get any better? Just think back, William. You know, how it was. Once they were married, it's not like they moved into a semi in the suburbs, right? Isabel was off doing her thing. Fernando was off doing his thing. They hardly saw each other. So if they were married, they're They had a string of children. It meant that every time they saw each other, they were taking advantage of that. So obviously, there was something there. And Brian, you've got a really instructive letter, a love letter between the two. Will you read it to us?

Yeah, well, this is an example of the kind of stuff that Fernando was writing to Isabella, particularly early on in their relationship when things were still fresh and they had been forced to spend so much time apart. So here's just an example of how he was really putting himself on the page. he writes to her in 1475, I cannot sleep. So many are the couriers who arrive without letters from you, not of any lack of paper or because you do not know how to write, but because of lack of love and out of pride. So he's frustrated, he's laying on the guilt. God knows how it weighs on me not to see your ladyship in the morning such that I swear on your life and on mine that I've never loved so much.

And I close with my desire to serve your ladyship more than ever. Oh, that's gorgeous, but I mean, but... Given all that, though, what's Ferdinand doing? He's off having a great time. He's partying with prostitutes. He's having illegitimate children by the busload. You know, I think, you know, if you want to understand Fernando and Isabella, maybe there's a little bit of a Bill and Hillary dynamic here.

Clearly, they're in love. You know, she is a powerful, self-possessed woman. Yeah. And he is this highly... Exactly. Yeah, that was... No pantsuits in the 16th century, thank God. So, you know, it's this sort of chemistry between them.

And, you know, there's a lot of tension. I was just again going to say, you know, where is Enrique while all of this love is blossoming? Because he must be grinding an axe somewhere. I mean, are we looking at a Spain that is about to go into civil war again? Even, you know, it was saved from it when Alfonso died. But now it's back there on the brink. Absolutely. This is the situation that things are lining up.

Once Isabella has buried Fernando, the stage is set for the contest between Enrique and his daughter, Juanah La Beltranja, and Fernando and Isabella and their allies. So Brian, what you're saying is that we're back to the brink of civil war. But then Enrique does pretty easy, simple thing, doesn't he? William, what does he do? He does. He goes hunting and his health is in decline, but rather, surprisingly, he drops down and dies, which is, of course, provokes the accusation that he's

been poisoned. And even he seems to be surprised by his own demise. He calls his doctors, and he says to them, can't your combined knowledge give me two more hours? And they all say, no, sorry. And he dies half an hour later. So does that clear the pitch completely for Isabella and Fernando? Is that it? They can walk in. Yes and no. In fact, Enrique's last years must have been tough. He was forced, essentially, as a consequence of the civil war, to disavow his own daughter before he died and acknowledge Isabel as the heir to the crown. So when he died, this was Isabelle's chance. And she takes it. She takes it. Now, the only thing is that Hwana La Beltrana, the daughter, and her husband, the king of Portugal, are not going to take this lying down. And so

this immediately provokes a new war. This time, a war between Portugal and Castile. And let's just clarify why, because not only is she not the male air or the legitimate air, she's a totally unexpected outsider, and she's come to power partly through a coup, effectively, through her own strong will, through her, the marriage that she has forced through, already at this stage in her career, she's already showing extraordinary determination, pre-planning, and ruthlessness. Also, she knows symbolism. So when, you know, when Enrique dies, Brian, I was completely fascinated with this parade that she enacts where somebody walks in front of her or behind her, maybe you'll be able to explain, but with a sword upside down,

showing that I am justice and I will slice you if you try and take this from me. Well, you know, this is a delicate time to be a female ruler. Many European kingdoms actually prohibited the accession of women to the throne. So in many places, Isabella would have been passed up for the mere fact that she was a woman. But Castile had a long tradition of women serving as rulers and inheriting royal title. So this gave Isabella, as well as her half-sister Juana, an opening. Now, again, we just have to remember when we talk about Isabella as queen and what she's doing, we have to remember that however much of it was her, so much of it was the noble infrastructure that she had behind her, the people that were behind the scenes that were making this happen. And now the stick that she had, which was the stick of Fernando of Aragon, right? A woman on her own was seen as weak. But this was still an age where kings were expected to take the field, sword in hand and fight. And Fernando was someone who had already

distinguished himself in that way, and there was no doubt that he was there for business. Fernando was, well, Machiavelli held him up as the ideal prince. Ha, and Machiavelli also points out that she, even by the standards of the time, is remarkable for what he calls her pious cruelty. Absolutely, you know, this sort of determination and sang foie, which, again, this depends on your perspective. You can see it as a gift and something which is a positive force for history, or you can see it as something which is evil and destructive.

Now, Brand, we've talked a lot about Spain and Castile and Aragon, but we haven't mentioned so much about Portugal. So could you just pay this a little pen portrait of Portugal at this point? Already we have Portuguese expeditions sailing down the coast of Africa. Lisbon is a considerable city, a metropolis. And so when Portugal declares war on you, this is no joke. Yeah, so Portugal, the origin of Portugal was it was a break. of Castile and Leon, right, as a consequence of one of these kind of dynastic fracturings. And Portugal was sort of hemmed in on the Iberian Peninsula by Castile and very deliberately sort of pushed away from conquering a lot of the rich Muslim territory that ended up making

Castile so wealthy and powerful. So in a way, it was kind of small potatoes. And the rulers of Castile always saw Portugal as sort of theirs. And so there was this concerted effort to bring Portugal back under the control of the Castilian crown, and that was done chiefly through marriage. So as I said, Juan II, Isabel the Catholic's father married a Portuguese princess. There was this constant intermarrying between the houses of Castile and Portugal. So the two kingdoms were sort of linked, but antagonistic.

And it was, as you say, just that towards the end of the 15th century, that Portugal starts to blossom. This is when the sort of age of navigation starts to open, the age of discovery. And, you know, as happens sometimes, what is a tiny marginal country, you might think of England, suddenly is in a position to become a global empire just because of these sort of geographical accidents. And again, like England, through the use of naval power and exploration and conquest. But despite all of that flexing that Portugal can do, there can be only one winner. In the words of Highlander, they can only be won.

And it is Isabel who prevails. I mean, she wins the war of succession in 1479. She officially becomes the queen of Castile. And some pretty ruth, we should say, some pretty ruthless stuff. There's a moment when Portuguese defenders of a particular fortress are hung naked from the battlements of a fortress alive, to bake alive in the sun and this sort of stuff. I mean, it's from the beginning. She's not afraid to use violence

and she's not afraid to use terror. This is a blood sport. People are playing for keeps. I mean, it's a horrible place to leave it, but it's a sensible place to leave it because you've got a taste of what life under Isabella's going to be like. So we're going to carry on

and we're going to talk about in the next episode with Wonderful Brian about the Inquisition and how terror becomes an instrument of state. If you want to listen to that next episode right here, right now, members of the Empire Club can get that episode right now and if you want to sign up you can do so www.mpepoduk.com. But till the next time we meet Brian, thank you very much. It is goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye for me, William Durunpool.