The Life of Spain’s Queen Isabel

                                                                                   Chapter 1

Towards the end of an autumn day in 1461, a small mounted cavalcade was cantering along the narrow winding road between Madrigal and Arevalo in old Castile. Slightly in advance of a column of armed men, rode a middle-aged man in armor, evidently a hidalgo, or one of the lower nobility. Beside him, on a pair of strong mules, were two girls of about ten years of age. One was dark, with restless black eyes and a smiling mouth that was never long at rest. The other was of a fairer northern type, with light reddish hair, a determined chin somewhat too large for her other features and blue eyes in which there were greenish lights flecked with gold. Both were wrapped in long woolen cloaks to keep out the cold wind that cut diagonally across the road, whipping away the grey powdered dust that arose in a cloud from the hooves of the horses. Under their small, jaunty hats, each had a silken kerchief, or cawl, tied around hair and ears and bound under the chin.

The dark girl, taller of the two, wore newer clothing of a somewhat finer quality. She was Beatriz de Bobadilla, daughter of the royal governor of the castle of Arevalo. Yet she showed a certain deference to her shabbier companion and never failed to address her as "Dona Isabel." Even at ten years old, one was taught in Castile what was due a princess of the blood royal and granting that Lady Isabel lived with her mother, the Dowager Queen, in very straightened circumstances, almost forgotten by her half brother, King Enrique IV, the fact remained that she was the daughter of the late Juan II by his second wife and that when she grew up would probably marry some powerful noble. Indeed there had already been talk of betrothing her to Prince Fernando of Aragon.

To all the chatter of Beatriz, Dona Isabel listened with a serene self-possession uncommon in a child. She liked to listen, it appeared, rather than talk. When she spoke, it was briefly and to the point. Even at that age she had a majestic presence, which was not surprising perhaps, considering that she was descended from Alfred the Great, William the Conqueror, the Plantagenet kings of England, St. Louis, King of France, and St. Fernando, King of Castile. Yet it seemed unlikely that she would ever be a queen. Her younger brother Alfonso, was nearer to the throne than she, but even he seemed unlikely ever to sit upon it, there were formidable obstacles. Beatriz had much to talk about that day, for her father the governor, had taken them to Medina del Campo, where the greatest fair in Spain was held three times a year and they had seen merchants from allover southern Europe buying choice Castilian wools, grains and blooded steers also horses and mules from Andalusia. They had seen cavaliers from Aragon, sailors from Catalonia on the east coast, mountaineers from the north, turbaned Moors from Granada in the south, bearded Jews in gaberdines, peasants even from Provence and Languedoc and an occasional blond German or Englishman. Now they were on their way back to Arevalo, to resume the routine which the Dowager Queen had prescribed.

In spite of the King's neglect and the fact that she and her mother often lacked money for food, clothing and other necessities, and were obliged to live like peasants, Dona Isabel was receiving the usual education of daughters of noblemen in Spain at that period. She had learned to speak Castilian musically and with elegance and to write it with a touch of distinction. She studied grammar, rhetoric, painting, poetry, history and philosophy. She embroided intricate designs on velour and cloth of gold and skillfully illuminated prayers in Gothic letters on parchment. A missal that she painted and some banners and ornaments she made for the altar in her chap 1, are still in the cathedral at Granada.

She had inherited from her father a passionate love for music and poetry and she undoubtedly read the works of his favorite poet, Juan de Mena and probably a Spanish translation of Dante. From her tutors, who had studied at Salamanca University which was soon to be called the Athens o Spain, she learned much of the philosophy of Aristotle and of S .Thomas of Aquinas. If she read the Vision deleytable, composed especially that year for the instruction of Prince Charles of Vienna, to whom she was betrothed by the King, she probably learned that motion as the cause of heat and a great deal else on what makes the win s blow, why climates differ, why materials are unlike one another; what causes the sensations of smell, taste, and hearing; what are the properties of medicine, and why some plants are large and others small, all this sugar coated in the form of a novel, to introduce the silence of the period as pleasantly as possible into the young royal brain. Spanish versions of The Odyssey and The Eneid were popular in er brother's court. She was especially interested in the songs, or concioneros, that had been so dear to her father. From these she learned the heroic story of her crusading ancestors.

Even in sleepy Arevalo, it was known that all Europe was threatened with conquest by the pitiless barbarians ho had been disturbing the peace and prosperity of western men for nigh upon a thousand years. For nearly eight centuries, in truth, Christendom had been fighting for its very existence. In Isabel's childhood the fanatical Mohammedans had reached the Danube, overrun Asia Minor, seized lower Hungary and a greater part of the Balkans a d devastated all Greece, after battering their way into Constantinople , the key to the West. In a Europe where kings and princes too often placed their own selfish interests before the common good of Christendom, only the Pope could speak with universal moral authority. Although one pontiff after another solemnly called upon all Christian men to unite in defense of their homes, little attention was paid to he warnings, except by the wretched people on the first line of defense. The Emperor Frederick III, ruler of all central Europe, as too busy planting a garden and catching birds. England was on t e eve of the War of the Roses. When the people of Denmark raised mon y to support the crusade, their king stole it from the sacristy of he cathedral at Roskilde. Meanwhile, the terrible Mohammed II, known as the Grand Turk, whose very name evoked terror in European hamlets, was fighting his way towards Italy, striking at the very heart of civilization.

Isabel knew only too well that Spain had bled under the heel of the Mohammedans for more than seven hundred years. CERTAIN SPANISH JEWS, WHO HATED CHRISTIANITY AND WISHED TO SEE ITS INFLUENCE DESTROYED, HAD INVITED THE BERBERS TO CROSS NARROW STRAIT FROM AFRICA AND TO POSSESS THEMSELVES OF THE LANDS OF THE CHRISTIANS. THE INVITATION WAS ACCEPTED. THE MOHAMMEDANS CARRIED FIRE AND SWORD THROUGH THE PENINSULA AND WHEREVER THEY WENT, JEWS OPENED THE GATES OF THE CITIES TO THE MOHAMMEDANS WHILE OTHER JEWS, TRAGICALLY ENOUGH WERE FIGHTING IN THE ARMY OF THE CHRISTIAN VISIGOTHS.

When the Berbers had learned to speak Castilian musically and with elegance and to write it with a touch of distinction. She studied grammar, rhetoric, painting, poetry, history and philosophy. She embroidered intricate designs on velour and cloth of gold and skillfully illuminated prayers in Gothic letters on parchment. A missal that she painted and some banners and ornaments she made for the altar in her chapel, are still in the cathedral at Granada. She had inherited from her father a passionate love for music and poetry and she undoubtedly read the works of his favorite poet, Juan de Mena and probably a Spanish translation of Dante.

From her tutors, who had studied at Salamanca University which was soon to be called the Athens of Spain, she learned much of the philosophy of Aristotle and of St. Thomas of Aquinas. If she read the Vision deleytable, composed especially that year for the instruction of Prince Charles of Vienna, to whom she was betrothed by the King, she probably learned that motion was the cause of heat and a great deal else on what makes the winds blow, why climates differ, why materials are unlike one another; what causes the sensations of smell, taste, and hearing; what are the properties of medicine, and why some plants are large and others small, all this sugar coated in the form of a novel, to introduce the science of the period as pleasantly as possible into the young royal brain.

Spanish versions of The Odyssey and The Eneid were popular in her brother's court. She was especially interested in the songs, or concioneros, that had been so dear to her father. From these she learned the heroic story of her crusading ancestors.

Even in sleepy Arevalo, it was known that all Europe was threatened with conquest by the pitiless barbarians who had been disturbing the peace and prosperity of western men for nigh upon a thousand years. For nearly eight centuries, in truth, Christendom had been fighting for its very existence. In Isabel's childhood the fanatical Mohammedans had reached the Danube, overrun Asia Minor, seized lower Hungary and a greater part of the Balkans and devastated all Greece, after battering their way into Constantinople, the key to the West. In a Europe where kings and princes too often placed their own selfish interests before the common good of Christendom, only the Pope could speak with universal moral authority.

Although one pontiff after another solemnly called upon all Christian men to unite in defense of their homes, little attention was paid to the warnings, except by the wretched people on the first line of defense. The Emperor Frederick III, ruler of all central Europe, was too busy planting a garden and catching birds. England was on the eve of the War of the Roses. When the people of Denmark raised money to support the crusade, their king stole it from the sacristy of the cathedral at Roskilde. Meanwhile, the terrible Mohammed II, known as the Grand Turk, whose very name evoked terror in European hamlets, was fighting his way towards Italy, striking at the very heart of civilization.

Isabel knew only too well that Spain had bled under the heel of the Mohammedans for more than seven hundred years. Certain Spanish Jews, who hated Christianity and wished to see its influence destroyed, had invited the Berbers to cross narrow straits from Africa and to possess themselves of the lands of the Christians. The invitation was accepted. The Mohammedans carried fire and sword through the peninsula and wherever they went, Jews opened the gates of the cities to the Mohammedans while other Jews, tragically enough, were fighting in the army of the Christian Visigoths. When the Berbers had conquered all Spain except a mountainous strip in the north, where the remaining Christians took refuge, they invaded France and would probably have completed the conquest of Europe if Charles Martel had not defeated them in a desperate eight day battle near Tours in 732. For seven centuries the Spanish Christians had been slowly winning back the lands of their ancestors from the invaders. Year by year, century by century, they had driven the enemies of Christ back toward' the Mediterranean. Isabel knew from many a song how Christians, fighting against overwhelming odds near Clavijo, had conquered by the help of one of the Apostles of Christ who, appearing on a white horse, led the broken ranks to victory.

He was St. James the Greater, or as he is call in Spain, Santiago, who had been the first to preach the Gospel in Spain and whose body, after his martyrdom in Jerusalem, had been brought to Spain by his followers according to the Spanish tradition, after being lost for eight centuries, had been miraculously found, and was venerated at the celebrated shrine of Compostela. From then on, st. James was the patron of Spain, and in battle after battle the Crusaders rode to victory with the war cry, "For God and Santiagol" until the Moslems retained no political power save in the rich and powerful kingdom of Granada, among the mountains of the south. There they remained a constant menace to the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, for at any time they might bring new hordes of fanatics from Africa and reconquer all Spain. 

At this moment, there was need for a strong and able king in Castile to unite the various Christian states and complete the reconquest. Yet the scepter of St. Fernando had fallen into the hands of a weakling, for Isabel's half-brother was a degenerate known throughout Europe as Enrique the Impotent.

When the little cavalcade from Medina reached Arevalo that evening, the children and the Governor found the sleepy castle and village in a strange state of excitement. The King, the King of Castile, had come unexpectedly to visit his poor relations.

Enrique was a pathetic, rather repulsive, awe-inspiring creature, loose jointed, tall and awkward. His long woolen cloak fell from him in slovenly folds and his feet, which were too small for so large a man, were not cased in boots, such as the Castilian cavaliers wore, but in buskins, like those of the Moors. There was always mud on them, making them look all the more peculiar on the ends of his long legs. His eyes were blue and somewhat too large, his nose, wide, flat, and crooked. In his forehead were two vertical furrows into which his bushy eyebrows curled most oddly.

Even his shaggy beard with auburn streaks in it stuck out so queerly that it made his profile look concave. A flattering courtier wrote that the King's "aspect was fierce like that of a lion which by its very look strikes terror to all its beholders." But another chronicler of the time wrote that his eyes were restless, like those of a monkey.

Isabel's mother, who was a Portuguese princess, disliked and distrusted Enrique intensely.

She was a person of high principle and strong will. Years ago, as the most beautiful woman in Spain, she had influenced her weak husband Juan II, to free Castile from the tyranny of his favorite Don Alvaro de Luna, by having that charming but dissolute and unscrupulous gentleman beheaded. Since the death of King Juan however, she had suffered from a form of melancholia, which was becoming chronic and was destined to end in a mild form of insanity.

Like many others of the nobility, the Dowager Queen deplored the fact that Enrique, to whom the people had looked to deliver them from the menace of new Mohammedan invasions was, to say the least, a lukewarm and indifferent Christian. His favorite companions were enemies of the Catholic faith, Moors, Jews, and Christian renegades. It was said that the favorite pastime at his table was the invention of new blasphemies and obscene jokes about the Holy Eucharist, the Blessed Virgin and the saints. The King attended Mass, but never confessed or received Communion. He had a Moorish guard, which he paid more generously than he did his Christian soldiers. When, in response to popular demand, he organized a crusade in 1457, he led his thirty thousand troops through the beautiful southern countryside in such a flippant fashion that his Christian subjects suspected him of having secretly assured the Moors that he intended them no harm.

Enrique professed to be a pacifist, who abhorred bloodshed. Yet he gave employment to a drunken highwayman named Bassasa who, with another footpad known as Alonzo the Horrible, had assassinated a wayfarer and peeled the skin off his face to prevent his identification. He gave a place in his Moorish guard to an apostate who had participated in the murder of forty Christians. Hence the Catholic nobility were inclined to regard the King’s pacifism less as a virtue than as a symptom of degeneracy.

The King was fatuously generous to his favorites. To please them, he had reduced his country to a state of bankruptcy and anarchy. He had “farmed out” the privilege of collecting taxes to the wealthy Rabbi Josef of Segovia and to Diego Arias de Vala, a converted Jew, to whom he gave the most astonishing powers, including the right to exile citizens for nonpayment of taxes and even to put them to death without a hearing. The nobles, despising the King’s character, began to flout his authority, to wage pretty wars with one another and to coin their own money. Usurers wrung the last maravedi from the farmers, laborers and merchants, while robber barons and bandits preyed upon them, burned their houses and violated their women. In Sevilla, a beautiful city of the south with a large Jewish population, the King turned over certain taxing privileges to Xamardal, Rodrigo de Marchena and other greedy extortioners. Civilization seemed on the brink of destruction under a king whose abnormal vices were the scandal of all Europe and whose court was a stench in the nostrils of all decent people.

His Majesty’s most intimate friends, at this period, were Juan Pacheco, Marqués of Villena and his brother Don Pedro Giron, who were therefore, the two most powerful persons in the realm and who went about in such magnificent state that they made the King look insignificant by comparison. They wore fine silks, bordered with cloth of gold and splendid jewels cunningly ornamented y smiths in Córdoba. In a later age these gentlemen would have been described by journalists as self made men, for they had risen to high power from obscure origins. They were descended on both sides from a Jew named Ruy Capon but, like many others of the large Jewish population of Spain, outwardly professed themselves as Catholics.

The Marqués of Villena had once been a page in the household of Don Alvaro de Luna, who hand introduced him at court, where he had won the favor of Prince Enrique. He was a man who could be very charming when he chose to be. There was a likeable twinkle in his shrewd eyes, his beard and moustache had been curled mot ingeniously and he smelled fragrantly of ambergris.

There is a picture of him kneeling in prayer, with a most pious expression. His long, aquiline nose was quite hooked in the middle and pointed at the tip and somewhat too near the base of it a narrow mouth with full lips, gave a curiously cherubic expression to his whole face. His carefully waxed and twisted moustache drooped on either side and then of a sudden turned out and up in two jaunty points. He was the King’s most intimate companion and advisor.

His brother Don Pedro Giron, was a sleek, well fed man with a sensual nature and a very bad reputation. He was not considered by Catholics to be an ornament to their religion, which he professed. Yet he had capitalized it to the greatest advantage to himself, so that he had risen even to the illustrious post of Grand Master of the Order of Calatrave. His income, like that of his brother, was enormous. One of those men in whose presence women feel uncomfortable, he permitted his heavy eyes to rest upon the fair skin and silken hair of the little Princess Isabel with a sort of gloating anticipation.

If there was anyone in the world whom Isabel’s mother despised more than the King, it was this same Don Pedro Giron who, according to court gossip, had once made her an indecent proposal, at the instigation of no less a personage than the cynical Enrique himself. It is not strange that she felt that she would rather see her daughter in her coffin than married to this middle aged rake. However, the King had already begun making arrangements for Isabel’s future.

                                                                                   Chapter II

Even in her seclusion at Arévalo, the Princess Isabel was being used as a pawn on the political chess board of Europe by the Marqués of Villena, who was virtually ruler of the Castle.

Villena was skillful in arranging matters to suit his own interest. It was he who had sent a Jewish physician to Portugal to arrange a second marriage for King Enrique, after his accession to the throne in 1454. Enrique had already been married, at the age of fourteen to Blanche, the gentle daughter of King Juan of Aragon, but the marriage had been annulled on the grounds of importance. Villena was afraid that Enrique, who needed an heir, would contract another marriage with the house of Aragon.

This would never do, for Villena had persuaded Enrique to give him certain Castilian estates belonging to the King of Aragon and he had no intention of giving them up. A Portuguese alliance pleased him better. Consequently, in 1455 there arrived in Córdoba as Enrique’s second bride, the lovely princess Juana, a witty and vivacious girl of fifteen, sister of the fat and chivalrous King Alfonso V.

Juana, as might have been expected, had a most unhappy life with her dissolute husband. But she endured her lot patiently until he began to pay public attention to one of her ladies in waiting, Doña Guiomar de Castro. This was too much for the Queen’s pride. She slapped Guiomar’s face with her fan in the presence of the whole court. The King packed his favorite off to a country estate.

Enrique now posed as the lover of the corrupt and notorious Catalina de Sandoval. When he grew tired of her, he got rid of her by removing the pious Abbess of the Convent of San Pedro de las Dueñas in Toledo and bestowing the office on his former mistress, sardonically explaining that the convent needed to be reformed. Catalina proceeded to “reform” the nuns.

This expedient had the additional advantage of irritating the Archbishop of Toledo. As Primate of Spain, Don Alfonso Carrillo had already the King, first in private and then in public, for the evils of his personal life and the scandals of his court and government. Enrique had retorted by curtailing the Archbishop’s jurisdiction and by ridiculing him and the ceremonies of the Church. The Archbishop now threw the weight of his authority on the side of a group of noblemen who were uniting in an attempt to get rid of the tyranny of the hated Marqués of Villena. Chief among them was Don Fadrique Enriquez, the admiral of Castile. He was a small man physically but blunt, fearless and outspoken. He had lately increased his prestige as one of the great landowners of Castile, by marrying his daughter Juana Enriquez to King Juan of Aragon.

Villena now looked for help to the enemies of the King of Aragon who, as luck would have it, had quarreled with Carlos of the Viani, his own son by a former marriage. Villena made an alliance with Carlos of Viani, his own son by a former marriage. Villena made an alliance with Carlos and sealed it by the promise of the hand of the Princess Isabel.

This was by no means pleasing to Juana Enriquez, second wife of the King of Aragon, for it was her chief ambition to bring about the marriage of Doña Isabel to her son Fernando. She persuaded her aged husband to have his son Carlos cast into prison. Carlos, a scholar forty years old, was so much loved in Catalonia that the Catalans rebelled and forced the King to release him. Father and son were reconciled and signed a treaty. Soon after however, Carlos died and the people declared that he had been poisoned by command of his father and step-mother. The charge was probably unjust as Carlos had long been tubercular.

His death and the death soon after of his two sisters, left little Prince Fernando of Aragon with a clear field and his mother renewed her efforts to arrange a match for him with the royal house of Castile. The Catalans however, pursued her and Fernando to Gerona and besieged them in a tower there for several days. The old King of Aragon was unable to rescue them, but in his anxiety he obtains seven hundred French lances with archers, artillery and a loan of two hundred thousand crowns from Louis XI, King of France. Louis demanded, for security of the loan, the two provinces of Roussillon and Cerdagne, in northern Spain. He hoped that the King of Aragon would not be able to redeem them. Thus were sown the seeds of much later discord.

Meanwhile, in Castile the conspirators discouraged by the entanglements in which their ally the King of Aragon had become involved, gave up their schemes for the time being and king Enrique, who had been desperately frightened, sat more securely on his shaky throne. Moreover, about this time his beautiful young wife gave birth to a daughter under circumstances which provoked much unsavory gossip.

For some time past, the king’s favorite Don Beltran de la Cueva, has been appearing in public with both Their Majesties and he was generally believed to have won the affections of the Queen. He was tall, robust and florid of countenance, expert with sword and lance and quick to quarrel or to engage in a friendly joust. His influence over the weak King was astonishing even in that ill-regulated court. He would rage against His Majesty and as if he were master of the palace, would knock down porters and kick them if they did not open doors quickly enough. Other nobles envied the new favorite for his power and detested him for his arrogance and insolence. It goes without saying that Marqués of Villena, whose star was entering an eclipse, saw no virtue in him at all.

One day as the King and Queen were riding toward Madrid, they found the road barricaded. In an adjoining field there were tiers of scaffolding, crowded with spectators and in the open space, holding it against all comers was Don Beltran de la Cueva in silvered armor. He had been there since early morning, challenging each knight who went that way to tilt six rounds with him, or else to leave his left glove on the ground as token of his cowardice. This he did to vindicate the beauty of his lady over all the other women in the world.

The King, in commemoration of the day’s sport, commanded a monastery to be built on the spot and San Jerónimo del Paso (St. Jerome of the Passage of Arms) stands there to this day. Nevertheless he himself incurred a great deal of ridicule, for it was believed that Don Beltran’s lady, whose name he had discreetly kept to himself, was no less a personage than Her Majesty.

 In March 1462, after seven childless years, Queen Juana gave birth to her baby girl. The child was named after her mother Juana, but the courtiers called her La Beltraneja, meaning “the daughter of Beltran.”

Archbishop Carrillo of Toledo baptized the infant princess with great pomp and magnificence. The godfathers were the Marques of Villena and the French Ambassador. The godmother was the Princess Isabel, a grave determined child of eleven, who had come form Arévalo for the purpose. After a meeting of the Cortes, or Parliament a few days later, when representatives of seventeen cities took the oath of allegiance to Juana as heiress to the throne of Castile, Isabel was the first to kiss the baby princess’s hand. After the ceremony she returned to Arévalo.

For a little while she continued her education with Beatriz de Bobadilla. She learned the ride horseback and to hunt hares and wild boars with the governor. She received her first Holly Communion and became like her mother, a devout and very sincere Catholic. It seemed likely that her life would be spent in a fairly agreeable obscurity. But destiny had a more heroic task prepared for her.

During that same year, a courier came from Madrid with a message that fell like a bombshell on the ears of the Dowager Queen and her little court. King Enrique commanded her to send the Princess Isabel and Prince Alfonso to the court, that they might be more virtuously brought up under his personal care.

The Queen Dowager knew how virtuous Enrique’s court was. Even in sleepy Arévalo, she had heard something of the fantastic actions of the King and his intimates. Some of the ruffians of the Moorish guard had violated several young women and girls and when the fathers went to the King demanding vengeance, he had them whipped on the streets, declaring that they had evil minds and were insane. Unnatural vices of the Moors and of the King himself and some of his courtiers were matters of common report. No mother would wish her daughter to live among such unspeakable surroundings. Yet the King’s authority was absolute.

Isabel and her brother sadly took leave of their heartbroken mother and sadly rode in the midst of armed men along the King’s highway to Madrid.

                                                                                   Chapter III

The massive gate of the old Moorish Alcazar at Madrid swung slowly open with a groan and a church. From within came the sound of female voices, young and shrill, shrieking with laughter and the beating of many hoofs on pavement. A dozen small mules in gold and crimson trappings came galloping through the gate, each bearing a damsel in a low cut sleeveless gown, with skirts so short that when the wind flapped them back, the bare thighs of the riders were revealed. The hucksters and beggars who had fled fro the middle of the narrow street with hoarse cries and curses saw that the legs of all were painted with cosmetics, brilliantly white in the afternoon sunshine.

The girls wore costumes of the most varied character. One had a saucy bonnet, another went bare headed and let her bobbed, reddish hair stream in the wind. There was still another with a Moorish turban of silken gauze woven with threads of gold and yet another whose black hair was covered with a little kerchief in the Visayan manner. On was girded about the breast with leathern thongs taken from a crossbow. One had a dagger in her girdle, one carried a sword, several had knives of Vittoria hung around their necks.

Such were the young women of Enrique’s court, according to a contemporary chronicler and such were the companions among whom Isabel and her brother were to spend the most impressionable years of their lives. Madrid was in a fever of balls, tourneys, pageants, comedies, and bull-fights, intrigues, and scandals. The children could hardly have lived so long in the royal palace without hearing a great deal that they had never dreamed of at Arávelo and much that would have reduced their worried mother to the last degree of despair. They must have heard of the new blasphemy that Don Beltran invented every day and of the Queen’s indiscretions and the king’s follies. Yet it is generally agreed that both Isabel and Alfonso walked through the fetid atmosphere of that foul court without contamination and emerged from it with a lifelong hatred of the prevalent immorality and of its causes, among which they reckoned the influence of Moslems and Jews.

When Queen Juana urged Isabel, somewhat later (she was sixteen), to join in the debaucheries of the court, the little princess fled in tears to her brother. Alfonso, though only fourteen, strode to the Queen’s apartment and forbade her to mention any further evil to his sister, after which he visited certain of Her Majesty’s ladies-in-waiting and threatened them with death if they ever again attempted to corrupt her.

The King meanwhile, had not been wholly neglectful. Isabel was instructed in music, painting, poetry, sewing and grammar. Alfonso learned the accomplishments of a cavalier, which consisted chiefly of exercise on horseback with sword and lance. He also studied with a tutor, who is said to have made unsuccessful efforts to corrupt him.

All this time the royal children were playing an unconscious role in political intrigues. As the Catholic nobility and the common people grew more disgusted with the flabby King and the blasphemous Don Beltran, they began to see the possibility of playing off Isabel and Alfonso against La Beltraneja, whose legitimacy was now generally doubted. The King did not improve the situation when he removed Prince Alfonso from the Grand Mastership of the Order of St. James, an office of such power and wealth that it had always been reserved for one of the royal family and bestowed it upon Don Beltran. Villena was enraged, for he desired the honor for himself. He was even more highly incensed when he learned that the King, the Queen and Don Beltran had taken Dona Isabel to Gibraltar to meet King Alfonso V of Portugal, who welcomed them with great pomp and magnificence. Alfonso was a very fat, middle aged gentleman noted for his valor and his weak judgment. He was so pleased with the pink and white beauty and the placid wisdom of the twelve year old princess, that he invited her to become Queen of Portugal. Isabel, thanking him for the honor, informed him tactfully that according to the laws of Castile and the King her father, now with God, she could not marry without the consent of the three estates of Castile assembled in a Cortes.

On returning to Madrid Isabel was shocked to learn that her brother had been seized at the King’s orders and locked up in a secret chamber of the Alcazar. All his attempts to communicate with her had failed but, he had managed to get an appeal to the Archbishop of Toledo, who sent him a promise of help.

Carrillo, who was a product of his time and was more fitted perhaps, to be a warrior than a priest, kept his word. He appeared on a huge black war horse armed cap-a-pie in gleaming mail, wearing over his cuirass a crimson cloak with a great white cross emblazoned on it. He joined other discontented nobles at Burgos in drawing up a series of memorable representations publicly addressed to the King. They censured him in plain terms for his unchristian opinions and conduct and for his blasphemous and infidel associates, to whose influence they attributed “the abomination and corruption of sons so heinous that they are not fit to be named, for they corrupt the very atmosphere and are a foul blot upon human nature;” sins “so notorious that their not being punished makes one fear the ruin of the realms; and many other sins and injustices and tyrannies have increased in your reign, that did not exist in the past.”

They declared that the King’s Moorish guard and others to whom he had given power had “raped married women and corrupted and violated virgins, men and boys against nature. Good Christians who dared to complain were publicly whipped.” They accused him of allowing in his court open “gibes and blasphemies about holy places and the sacraments...especially the Sacrament of the body of our good and very mighty Lord...This is a heavy burden on your conscience, by whose example countless souls have gone and will go to perdition.”

They charged that the King had destroyed the property of the Christian laboring classes by allowing Moors and Jews to exploit them. He had caused prices to rise unreasonably by debasing the currency, that he had allowed his officials to practice bribery and extortion on a huge scale. He had made a mockery of the justice and government by vicious appointments and by allowing hideous crimes to go unpunished. He had corrupted the Church by casting good bishops out of their sees and replacing them by hypocrites and politicians. Moreover, they denounced the influence of Don Beltran and plainly told the King; Dona Juana, the one called the Princess, is not your daughter.

Finally, they made the grave charge that Don Beltran had used the King’s authority to gain possession of the Princess Isabel and her brother Alfonso and was plotting to have them put to death to ensure the succession to the throne for his daughter, Las Beltraneja.

The King, greatly frightened, called a council of his supporters and there were many who, though they despised him, remained loyal to the legitimate monarch. The aged Bishop of Cuenca, who had been a counselor of King Juan II, declared that a king could have no dealings with rebels who defied him, except to offer them battle. Enrique sneered. “Those who need not fight nor lay hands on their swords,” he declared,” are always free with the lives of others.”

The old Bishop arose, his voice trembling with anger. “Henceforth, you will be called the most unworthy King Spain has ever known and you will repent of it Señor, when it is too late!”

The pacifist King however, privately sent an appeal to his old favorite, the Marqués of Villena and that dexterous conspirator, quick to see his own advantage, offered to make peace between the two factions. In a treaty known as the Concord of Medina del Campo, Enrique virtually repudiated La Beltraneja by recognizing Alfonso as Prince of the Asturias and lawful heir to the throne of Castile; and he agreed to confess his sins and receive Holy Communion at least once a year.

Isabel’s brother had suddenly become a personage. The King, with amazing short sightedness, now delivered him into the custody of the Marqués. This gave Villena an enormous advantage. Together with Archbishop Carrillo and Admiral Enriquez, he had Alfonso proclaimed King of Castle at Valladolid.

Early in July the rebels rode to Avila with the little prince at their head. As the long cavalcade passed through the city and out into the plain, the populace followed crying “Long live King Alfonso!” They rode down through a bleak and arid country where all was grey. The shadows, the earth, the rocks, even the sunlight wherever it managed to penetrate, had a grayish tinge. On they went through the old river bed, past piles of granite boulders that had been polished by the floods of the centuries, out into a wide, treeless waste on which the shadows lie like great waves of greyness, that sometimes seemed to heave like the swelling of an infinite sea, stretching out to the dark, white capped mountains in the distance.

In the middle of the plain, or vega, there was a platform on which arose a throne, occupied by a stuffed effigy of King Enrique IV, wearing a mantle lined with miniver over a black mourning robe, bearing a crown, the scepter and the great sword of justice of the Kings of Castile. After the Archbishop of Toledo had said Mass, certain of the conspirators relieved the scarecrow of the crown, scepter and sword and then kicked the lamp body into the dust. Alfonso was then led to the empty throne and crowned the King of Castile.

When Enrique heard of the outrage, he quoted mournfully the words of Job: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb and naked shall I return thither!” He shut himself up, strummed his lute and sang some sad songs. He was sorry now that he had offended the Marques of Villena.

There was a considerable reaction in favor of the weak King however, because the people of Castile respected the idea of kingship and felt that the rebels had gone too far. Villena now offered to go over to the King’s side and furnish him money and soldiers, besides the custody of Prince Alfonso, if the King would banish Don Beltran from the court and give the Princess Isabel in marriage to the Marqués brother, Don Pedro Giron. THE KING COOLLY LISTENED TO THIS PROPOSAL OF A MARRANO (a so-called converted Jew) OF UNSAVORY REPUTATION TO ALLY HIMSELF WITH CASTILIAN ROYALTY AND GAVE HIS CONSENT.

Isabel was accustomed to playing the part of principal in royal matchmaking schemes. She had been promised at various times to Fernando of Aragon, Carlos of Vienna, Alfonso V of Portugal and there was talk at one time of marrying her to a brother of Edward IV of England, probably that Earl of Gloucester who became so notorious as King Richard III. But all these had royal blood, all had qualities she could respect. Don Pedro Giron had neither. The young princess was almost in despair. It was characteristic of her to turn to God for help in her difficulty. She locked herself in her room and fasted for three days. During the next three days and nights she knelt almost continually before a Crucifix, passionately begging God to give death either to her or Don Pedro Giron.

Beatriz de Bobadilla, to whom the Princess had confided her grief, decided to take the matter into her own hands. Brandishing a dagger, she declared that she would kill Don Pedro before she allowed him to marry the Princess. “God will never permit it,” she cried, ?and neither will I!”

Meanwhile a courier came from Don Pedro, saying that the King’s instructions pleased him well and that he was setting forth from his castle at Almagro.

                                                                                   Chapter IV

On the evening after his departure from Almagro with a gaudy retinue and flying pennons, Don Pedro Giron came to Villarubia, a hamlet near Villareal. Anxious though he was to press on, he was obliged to stop for the night, for it was growing dark and the roads were bad and dangerous. He promised himself however, that he would soon be master of a royal bride and through her of a greater destiny than any man could foresee.

But no man, even a Grand Master of Calatrava, is wholly of his own destiny. During that night Don Pedro became violently ill. Doctors diagnosed his illness as quinsy, but they could do nothing to stop its progress. Al night it seemed as if an invisible hand was slowly choking the sick man. When Don Pedro finally realized the hopelessness of his condition and was urged to see a priest, a wild frenzy seized him. He cast aside all pretense of being a Christian, refused to receive the Sacraments or to say any prayers and on the third day after his joyous departure he died, blaspheming God for refusing to add only forty more days to his forty-three years, that he might enjoy his royal bride. It was with silent worms that Don Pedro made his bed and all his treasures and titles passed into the hands of his three bastard sons.

Doña Isabel received the news of his death with tears of joy and gratitude then hastened to the Chapel to give thanks to God. But was otherwise with King Enrique and the Marqués of Villena. The death of Don Pedro had spoiled all their plans. Villena, feeling that he had nothing more to expect from the King, deserted him once more and hearing that the conspirators were again in the field, hastened to join them. Enrique had now to choose between fighting or giving up his throne. Finding that he had seventy thousand infantry and fourteen thousand calvary, he decided to fight.

Castile was in a pitiful state during that summer of 1467. Robberies, burnings and murders were daily occurrences. A church in which three hundred and fifth men, women, children and tenants of the Count of Benavente, had taken refuge, was burned by the Count’s enemies and all within perished. IN TOLEDO THERE WAS A STATE OF WARFARE BETWEEN THE JEWISH CHRISTIANS (Conversos, or Marranos, as they were called) AND THE “OLD” CHRISTIANS. THE CANONS OF THE CATHEDRAL THERE, SOME OF WHOM WERE CONVERSOS, CONTROLLED THE REVENUES OF THE NEIGHBORING TOWN OF MAQUEDA, INCLUDING A TAX ON BREAD. THIS PRIVILEGE, SO HATEFUL TO THE HALF-STARVING POOR, THEY SOLD AT AUCTION TO CERTAIN JEWS.

A CATHOLIC MAGISTRATE, OR ALCALDE, BEAT THE JEWS AND DROVE THEM OUT OF THE CITY. The canons had the alcalde arrested, but while they were deliberating as to his punishment, FERNANDO DE LA TORRE, A RICH LEADER OF THE “CONVERTED” JEWS, DECIDED TO TAKE THE LAW INTO HIS OWN HANDS. A RASH AND VIOLENT MAN, HE ANNOUNCED THAT HE AND HIS FRIENDS HAD SECRETLY ASSEMBLED FOUR THOUSAND WELL ARMED MEN, SIX TIMES AS MANY AS THE OLD CHRISTIANS COULD MUSTER. ON JULY 21 HE LED HIS FORCES TO ATTACK THE CATHEDRAL. THE CRYPTO JEWS BURST THROUGH THE GREAT DOORS OF THE CHURCH, CRYING “KILL THEM! KILL THEM! THIS IS NO CHURCH, BUT ONLY A CONGREGATION OF EVIL AND VILE MEN!” THE CATHOLICS IN THE CHURCH DREW SWORDS AND DEFENDED THEMSELVES A BLOODY BATTLE WAS FOUGHT BEFORE THE HIGH ALTAR.

REINFORCEMENTS OF CHRISTIANS NOW CAME GALLOPING FROM NEARBY TOWNS AND LAUNCHED A COUNTER ATTACK ON THE LUXURIOUS SECTION WHERE MOST OF THE CONVERSOS LIVED. THEY BURNED THE HOUSES ON EIGHT STREETS. THEY HANGED FERNANDO DE LA TORRE AND HIS BROTHER, THEN MASSACRED THE CONVERSOS INDISCRIMINATELY.

A few days later Isabel’s brother arrived at Toledo with Villena and the Archbishop. A delegation of Old Christians, still smarting from their recent conflict with the secret Jews, waited on the King if he would approve of the massacre and of further measures they planned against the now terrified and disarmed Conversos.

“God forbid that I should countenance such injustice!” cried Prince Alfonso. “Much as I love power, I am not willing to purchase it at such a price.”

On another occasion the Prince declared that the nobles ought to be shorn of their power to defy kings and to tyrannize over the people. This was not likely to please so turbulent a nobleman as Villena. However, the Marqués held a trump card in the person of the little Prince and he decided to make good use of him before he grew old enough to be troublesome. He and his friends marched to meet the King’s Army at a field near Olmed. Withe their defiance to Enrique they sent word to Don Beltran that forty cavaliers had sworn to kill him. Don Beltran sent them back a detailed description of the armour he intended to wear.

The battle was fought on Thursday, August 20. Don Beltran slew many of his sworn executioners and escaped unhurt. Little Prince Alfonso appeared in the thick of the battle, in full armour, accompanied by the fiery Archbishop Carrillo in his scarlet cloak emblazoned with a white cross. All day the conflict raged. The rebels finally retreated, but when Don Beltran and his companions looked for the King to congratulate him, he had disappeared, having run away from the battle. He was found hiding the next day several miles away. Both sides claimed the victory.

Isabel meanwhile was staying at Segovia with Queen Juana and La Beltraneja. During the following July she was hastily summoned to the village of Cardenosa, where her brother had suddenly become seriously ill. When she arrived, he was dead. Some said that a trout he had eaten on July fourth had been poisoned. But it is possible that he died of summer fever, which killed many in Castile that summer, or he may have had acute ptomain poisoning.

Isabel returned to Avila after the funeral and remained at the Cistercian Convent of St. Ann. There the Archbishop of Toledo sought her out, to offer her the allegiance of the rebels and their support of her claim to the throne of Castile against Enrique. The young Princess replied that her brother King Enrique, was the lawful King, having received the scepter from her father, King Juan II. Although she did not condemn her brother Don Alfonso, for anything he had done, she would never seek power by an unconstitutional means, lest in doing so she lose the grace and blessing of God. To all Carrillo’s pleadings she returned a quiet but adamant refusal.

The rebel barons, having no leader, were compelled to make peace with the King. However, the terms of the treaty of Tours de Guisando were very favorable to Isabel, for the fickle King acknowledge her as his heiress, agreed to summon a Cortes within forty days to ratify her title and promised never to compel her to marry against her wishes providing she would agree not to marry without his consent. Having signed the agreement, he embraced Isabel affectionately and all the nobles advanced to kiss her hand. It soon appeared, however, that the King, prompted by Villena, was playing a double game. He summoned the Cortes, as he had promised, but dissolved it without ratifying the treaty. He now decided to marry off the Princess as soon as possible to King Alfonso V or Portugal. Alfonso sent an embassy, under the Archbishop of Lisbon, to obtain Isabel’s consent.

The Princess now had two suitors, in addition to Alfonso V, the Duke of Guyenne, brother and heir apparent to King Louis XI of France and Prince Fernando of Aragon, to whom she had once before been promised in early childhood. She sent her chaplain secretly to Paris and to Saragossa to observe them at close range. He returned after many weeks, bringing word that the French duke was “a feeble, effeminate prince, with limbs so emaciated as to be almost deformed and eyes so weak and watery that he was unfit for all knightly pursuits.” Don Fernando, on the other hand, was “a very proper youth, comely in face and symmetrical in figure, with a spirit that is equal to anything he might desire to do.”

What girl of sixteen could hesitate between such alternatives? Isabel wished to marry Prince Fernando and in this design she received the strong encouragement of Archbishop Carrillo, who foresaw that a marriage with Fernando might unit unite the great kingdoms of Castile and Aragon into one of the powerful nations in Europe, it was such an alliance. Consequently Isabel temporized with the Portuguese embassy, telling the Archbishop of Lisbon that she might consider marrying King Alfonso, if they were not related within the degrees forbidden by the Church. Enrique therefore, had to send to Rome for a dispensation and this took time, which was exactly what Isabel needed. With the advice of the Archbishop and others, she sent two messengers to Aragon, secretly notifying Prince Fernando of her consent.

Villena somehow caught wind of the departure of Isabel’s emissaries and the king immediately ordered the arrest of the Princess. She was then at Ocañna. The people of the town seized arms and defied the royal troops to arrest her. Even the children waved the flags of Aragon and Castile in the streets, for the suit of Prince Fernando was papular, and sang;

“Flores de Aragon

 Dentro castilla son!

 Pendon de Aragon!

 Pendon de Aragon!”

Isabel fled from Ocañna to Madrigal, the place of her birth. There she remained until the return of her two envoys from Aragon. They brought word that conditions in Aragon were so disturbed that Prince Fernando could not come to marry her at present. His aged father had gone blind, his mother was ill with cancer and the Catalans, encouraged by Louis XI of France, were again in rebellion. Nevertheless, Fernando had signed the marriage agreement and sent Isabel, as a dowry a pledge of his sincerity, a necklace of pearls and balas rubies, worth forty thousand gold florins and eight thousand florins in gold coin. The necklace, belonging to his mother had been pawned, but Fernando had borrowed money from some of the rich Jews of Aragon to redeem it.

All this time the spies of Villena and the King had been watching Isabel at Madrigal and there too, the messengers of the King of Portugal found her again. Once more she gave them an evasive answer saying, “Before all things I shall beg God in all my affairs and especially this one which touches me so nearly, that he will show me His will and raise me up for whatever may be for His service and for the welfare of these kingdoms.”

About this time the spies of the Marqués sent him a description of the necklace Isabel had received fro Aragon. Villena was furious and he sent at once for the King. Enrique dispatched a troop of calvary to Madrigal to arrest the Princess.

Isabel waited in an agony of suspense. Where was the Archbishop? He had promised to protect her, yet he had gone away and she did not know where he was. Somewhere in the town she heard shouts, the sound of feet running, the clatter of horses’ hooves galloping over the cobblestone. She fell on her knees and prayed.

                                                                                   Chapter V

A few moments later Isabel looked up to see in her apartment an overshadowing form in gleaming Toledo armor, whose spurs rattled as he came. It was Carrillo, he had kept his word and had come to her rescue with three hundred horsemen just in the nick of time.

As they rode through the gates of Madrigal, only an hour or two before the arrival of the royal troops, the Archbishop explained with his slow, pompous gravity, why he had not come before and why he had brought so small a force instead of the army he ad planned to bring. He was having difficulty with some of his towns, rents were hard to collect, money was scarce and mercenary soldiers were greedy. As Carrillo talked on, the young Princess was calmly appraising him, as she was learning to do with all men. His weakness was vanity, which took the form of a childish love of glory. Like Villena, he was always looking for royal favors, but unlike Villena, he wanted them only to give away to his friends and flatterers. He was so generous that with all his titles and possession he was constantly without funds as he was especially good to the poor and to religious communities. He was a strange mixture of priest and soldier. Yet he had a sincere devotion to the church. He had reformed certain abuses among the priests of his diocese. He had built the monastery of St. Francis at Alcala de Henares and had founded a chair at the college there.

Isabel rode fifty miles with the stalwart Archbishop to the city of Valladolid, where the citizens came forth to meet and to acclaim her. Yet, as Carrillo shrewdly observed, the citizens of Valladolid would count little against Enrique’s army. The Princess was still in grave danger, without money and with few troops. The Archbishop saw no hope of her long escaping prison, unless Prince Fernando of Aragon might somehow be smuggled over the frontier through the estates of the Mendozas, who were faithful to Enrique, so he might marry the Princess, who would then have a stronger status as a wife. She could flee to Aragon or confront Enrique with a fait accompli. Isabel agreed. A swift messenger was sent to Aragon, bidding Fernando come at once in disguise.

The Prince replied that he would make the attempt. A few days later, while the King and Villena were on their way north from Estremadura, Prince Fernando set out from Tarazona in Aragon, disguised as a muleteer, with a small caravan of merchants. Aragon, disguised as a muleteer, with a small caravan of merchants. Going as rapidly as their mules and asses, laden with goods, could proceed, the travelers rode long after sundown by out of the way trails that went only through small villages. Whenever they stopped at an inn, the young muleteer, in his ragged garments with a soiled cap pulled over his eyes, waited on the rest at table. While the others were asleep, he tossed restlessly about, or arose to pace the courtyard of the inn and study the stars.

Working their way west along the river Duero to Soria, the “merchants” followed a rocky trail across the mountains and late on the second night of their journey came to Burgos de Osma. The castle there was the first they had come to that did not belong to the enemies of Princess Isabel. Its gates, however, were locked for the night. The merchants stopped at a little distance to deliberate, but the young muleteer more impatient, ran ahead and knocked loudly. From a window overhead came a shower of large stones, one of which grazed the ear of the Prince.

“Do you want to kill me, yo fools?” he cried. “It is Don Fernando! Let me in!”

The governor of the castle came down to open the gate with profuse apologies, he had mistaken the travelers for robbers.

Early next morning he conducted the Prince along the road to Valladolid, where Isabel was waiting for him at the palace of Juan de Vivero. She was then eighteen, eleven months older than Fernando and perhaps an inch taller and though no authentic portraits of her are extant, all who saw her agreed on the fine proportions of her athletic body, her graciousness and poise, the classic purity of her features, the beauty and harmony of her gestures, the music of her low and distinct voice, the copper and bronze lights in her hair and the delicate blonde coloring that would have been the despair of any painter. Like Fernando, who was her second cousin, she was descended on both sides from the English house of Lancaster, through John of Gaunt.

Early responsibility had made the Prince seem older than his seventeen years. He had a lofty brow, accentuated by premature baldness and bold, alert eyes under bushy eyebrows. He was simple in his dress, sober in his tastes, always master of himself in all circumstances, always the Prince. He had rather irregular teeth, which showed pleasantly when he smiled. His voice was usually hard and authoritative, but became agreeable with those whom he like or wished to please. Isabel appears to have loved him at once and to have remained in love with him for the rest of her life.

In was the eleventh of October. The next day the Princess wrote to King Enrique, announcing her intention to marry Fernando and begging for his royal blessing. She intended to marry the Prince in any event, but she preferred to do so with the King’s consent. A more serious obstacle, in her eyes, was the lack of dispensation. At this juncture Fernando’s grandfather the Admiral, produced a bull granted by the Pope to marry any person within the fourth degree of kinship.

It was found later that this document had been forged, as so many supposed Papal briefs were of the period. When Isabel discovered the deceit, she had no rest until an authentic dispensation came from Rome. But the false paper, devised by Fernando’s wily father, served its purpose at the time in overcoming her scruples and the wedding ceremony was performed by the Archbishop on October 18.

To protect her kingdom of Castile against the possibility of Aragonese aggression, she insisted upon Fernando’s signing an agreement under oath, to respect all the laws and customs of Castile. To reside there and never to leave without her approval, to leave all nominations to church benefices in her hands, to continue the holy war against the Moors of Granada, to provide for Isabel’s mother at Arevalo and to treat King Enrique with respect and devotion as the lawful ruler of Castile. All public ordinances were to be signed jointly Isabel and Fernando and if she succeeded Enrique, she was to be the undisputed sovereign of Castile, Fernando to be King only by courtesy. It was characteristic of Isabel’s direct and lucid mind to insist upon a thorough understanding at the start.

The lovers were not compatible in every way. Isabel was better educated than her husband and had a more lofty and magnanimous spirit. She was a person of strong and uncompromising convictions. She hated cards and all games of chance and according to the scholar Lucio Marineo, who lived at her court for some years, she classed professional gamesters with blasphemers. She gave great honor to grave, worthy and modest persons. She abhorred libertines, loquacious fellows, the importunate and the fickle; “and she did not wish to see nor hear liars, coxcombs, rascals, clairvoyants, magicians, swindlers, fortune-tellers, pal-readers, acrobats, climbers and other vulgar tricksters.”

It must have been a trial to Isabel to find that Fernando was very fond of cards. In his youth, he also played Pelota, though later he was more partial to chess and backgammon. His wife, on the other hand preferred poetry, music, riding, hunting and serious conversation on literature, philosophy and theology. Fernando ate sparingly and drank moderately, but Isabel never touched wine at all. One great bond which helped to bridge over their differences was that both were sincerely religious. Fernando never broke his fast until he heard Mass, even when traveling. Isabel not only heard Mass daily, but read the prayers in her breviary every day, like a priest or a un, besides many private and extraordinary devotions.

They remained at Valladolid throughout the winter of 1469, waiting for Enrique’s consent. But no word came from the court, except a brief letter from the King, saying that Isabel had disobeyed him and having broken the treaty of Toros de Guisando, must be treated like any other rebel. Although Isabel wrote him several times justifying her action, he would deign no other reply.

Later that summer she went to Duenas and there, on the first day of October 1470, her first child, a fair-haired girl also named Isabel, was born. A few days later the young mother sat up in bed and dictated a long letter to the King, in which she again offered him her allegiance, but declared that if he persisted in treating her as an enemy, she would take whatever steps seemed necessary and would appeal to the judgment of God.

Enrique decided to make war on the Princess and her husband. He summoned his eight year old daughter to Lozaya, where the Marqués of Villena and several others of the King’s followers took the oath of allegiance to her as heiress to Castile and Leon, after which she was solemnly betrothed to the Duke of Guyenne. It now became apparent that the powerful Louis XI of France was siding with King Enrique against Isabel. Pope Paul II also tended to favor Enrique as the legitimate sovereign. Isabel’s future looked dark and uncertain.

There was famine that winter in Castile. The roads were full of foot-pads and cutthroats. Money had almost disappeared and goods were exchanged by primitive barter. Corpses were found every morning on city streets, strangled or died from starvation. There was pestilence everywhere and everywhere the tolling of funeral bells and the digging of graves. It was a long, cruel winter.

Spring came at last and it brought a turn in the tide of Isabel’s fortunes. Two provinces declared for her against the King. The people of Aranda de Duero rejected the officers of Queen Juana and acclaimed Isabel their sovereign. Other towns joined her cause. The Duke of Guyenne died suddenly, removing a strong link between Enrique and France. In the summer of 1471 came news of the death of Pope Paul II. To his successor, Pope Sixtus IV, a devout and learned Franciscan monk, Isabel and her friends looked with renewed hope.

                                                                                   Chapter VI

Isabel had heard stories from Rome that made her hope that Pope Sixtus would commence his reign by reforming the Church. It was well known that abuses ad crept into the ecclesiastical organization. One of the causes of the condition was the Black Death. In 1347 and 1348 this mysterious and dreadful disease from Asia spread to every corner of Europe, killing at least twenty-five million people. Some cities perished utterly. Most of the lost from a third to half their population. Whole masses went insane. Some in despair plunged into orgies of vice, other rushed to the monasteries to throw over the walls pest tainted gold, from which the monks shrank in horror. Ghostly ships with flapping sails were washed on the shores of France and Spain and the curious fishermen who boarded them found only black, rotting corpses on the decks and themselves went ashore to die.

The church suffered more than the general population, for her priests were constantly exposed to contagion by the necessity of administering the sacraments to the sick and dying. As a result her priesthood was almost annihilated. To fill the places of the dead even partially she had to lower her standard and accept men ignorant of Latin. In this way many wolves crept into the fold and morale and discipline were everywhere weakened. To make matters worse, the authority of the Popes suffered terribly from their enforced exile at Avignon, as virtual prisoners of the French Kings, for seventy years.

It was not until 1337 that Gregory XI returned to Rome, to find moral corruption widespread both in Church and State and many abuses prevalent. One of the worst results of the exile at Avignon was the Great Schism. Christians were bewildered by the spectacle of two and even three claimants to the chair of St. Peter. Yet through all her trials the Church continued to hand down, century after century, the treasury of faith committed to her y Christ; to promote education and to foster the arts and sciences; to repress the evil impulses of tyrannical kings and to give all men a divine standard of truth and justice by which to measure and regulate their lives. The Church gave to all Europe a common civilization and culture which, in the Thirteenth Century at least, attained a height never surpassed before or since. The Pope alone could speak with more than human authority. He ruled as a Prince over Rome and other papal estates in Italy, but his moral authority went to the ends of the civilized world. When he spoke on matters of faith or morals, men felt that they could rely upon him, as the representative of Christ on earth, for wisdom and leadership. He was usually an old man, weighted down with terrific problems. Ambitious kings sought to use him to further their own designs. He was constantly struggling against them to preserve the spiritual independence of the Church.

All this time, while Europe was in danger of being conquered by successive onslaught of Mohammedan invaders, only the great voice of St. Peter thundered above the follies and passions of selfish men, calling upon princes to lay aside their petty quarrels and unite in the defense of their common civilization. Meanwhile the Turks broke into Servia, overran Hungary and in 1453 took Constantinople by storm. The Spanish Pope Calixtus III sold his art treasures and table service to obtain money for the crusade to regain the great gateway to the West. But although his fleet drove the enemy from Lemnos and other places, he failed in the end, because the European princes were too stupid and/or too selfish to perceive the common danger. Pope Pius II in his old age declared that if the European Kings would not lead a crusade to save Europe, he would lead it himself and the saintly old man, who had been so gay a scholar in his youth, placed himself at the head of a fleet and died on his way to meet the Turks.

When Isabel was nineteen years old, all Italy and Spain were in a panic as news came that the Grand Turk Mohammed II had launched a fleet of four hundred ships against Negroponte, a supposedly impregnable Venetian outpost on the island of Euboea. Pope Paul II succeeded in uniting the princes for the moment. But, when he died the following summer, he left Christendom in a critical state, bequeathing to his successor two mighty problems, the growing corruption in the Church and the Turkish invasion. Each of these evils contributed to perpetuate the other. The weakening of ecclesiastical discipline and the scandalous lives of many political prelates made it more difficult for the Pope to organize Europe against the enemy Yet the enormous demands of the crusade left him neither time nor energy for the thorough house cleaning that was needed. To break the vicious circle, the times called for a Pope of holy and irreproachable life, who at the same time would be a statesman of masterful genius.

When Sixtus IV, a devout Franciscan monk, was crowned on August 25, 1471, it was believed that he would immediately commence the reform of the Church. But the defense of Christendom seemed even more urgent than its reform and the Turkish victories in the East made quick action necessary. The Pope sent five cardinals to various parts of Europe to reorganize the crusade. He sent the Spanish Cardinal Roderigo Borgia, to his native country.

Wen Borgia (destined to rule later as Pope Alexander VI) sailed from Ostia in May, 1472, he was just forty-two years of age, tall and powerfully built, a commanding and majestic figure with penetrating black eyes. He was a gentleman of courtly manners, a charming conversationalist and an administrator of great capacity. He was a nephew of Pope Calixtus III, who had made him a cardinal at the age of twenty-three.

Borgia achieved a very considerable success in his Spanish mission. He found the country on the verge of starvation after failure of the crops and on the brink of civil war. After diplomatic conferences with Archbishop Carrillo, the Marqués of Villena and others, he succeeded in arranging for a reconciliation between the Princess Isabel and King Enrique. Beatriz de Bobadilla went to Segovia in disguise to win the King’s consent to the Cardinal’s program. Enrique invited his half-sister Isabel to Segovia to receive his blessing and to kiss his brotherly hand. He received her graciously and entertained her royally. When, after a great public banquet, he had a sharp pain in his side, there were the usual rumors of poisoning, but all the rest of his life the King suffered from what was believed to be a disease of the liver. Possibly he had what we would now call appendicitis.

Isabel and Cardinal Borgia were then entertained by Archbishop Carrillo at Alcalá. While she was there, she learned with horror of a dreadful massacre of the Conversos, or secret Jews, at Cordoba. Such occurrences had long been a disgrace to her country and she resolved that if she ever had the power, she would put an end to them.

It seems that one Sunday in Lent the Christians of Córdoba had held a solemn procession to the Cathedral. The converted Jews (New Christians, or Conversos) were excluded, possibly because they had become so secure in Córdoba that they were openly attending the Jewish synagogues and mocking the Christian religion. However this may be, as the procession passed the house of one of the richest Conversos, a girl threw a bucket full of filthy liquid from one of the upper windows. It splashed upon a statue on the Blessed Virgin Mary, which was being borne at the head of the procession. This was the signal for a bloody massacre of the secret Jews.

In Córdoba however, they found a powerful champion, Don Alonzo de Aguilar, who had married a woman of Jewish descent, a daughter of the Marqués of Villena. He and his brother, Gonsalvo de Cordoba, who was later to win fame in Italy as “the Great Captain,” defended the Conversos. The Old Christians (bona fide Christians) led by the Count of Cabra, besieged them in the Alcazar. The result was a state of war which lasted for nearly four years. Unhappily too, the periodical frenzy against the “New Christians” or Jewish converts (also Marranos), flamed up in a dozen other places. One of the most brutal of the massacres occurred at Segovia on May 16, 1474. THE MAN MOST RESPONSIBLE FOR IT WAS THE MARQUÉS OF VILLENA, HIMSELF OF JEWISH DESCENT.

HATRED BETWEEN JEWS AND CHRISTIANS HAD ALWAYS BEEN INTENSE IN SEGOVIA. IN 1405 A PHYSICIAN NAMED MAYR ALQUADES AND OTHER PROMINENT JEWS HAD BEEN ACCUSED OF STEALING A CONSECRATED HOST FROM THE CATHEDRAL AND HAD BEEN EXECUTED, WHILE OTHER JEWS, SAID TO HAVE ATTEMPTED TO HAVE THE BISHOP POISONED IN REVENGE, WERE DRAWN AND QUARTERED. WHEN ISABEL WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD SIXTEEN JEWS, INCLUDING A RABBI, WERE ACCUSED OF HAVING STOLEN A CHRISTIAN BOY DURING HOLY WEEK AND OF HAVING CRUCIFIED HIM AS AN INSULT TO THE MEMORY OF JESUS. Whether or not the Jews actually had committed a crime, or were innocent victims of prejudice and we know that Jews have been falsely accused in other places of what is called “ritual murder,” (here the author obviously does not know anything about the fact that the Jews do, in deed, murder young innocent Christian boys and girls and use their blood in their filthy Jewish religious rites) no one say with certainty at this late date. Colmenares records in his History of Segovia that the Jews were sentenced to death by the Bishop of Segovia, Don Juan Arias de Avila, himself the son of converted Jews, and were drawn and hanged.

In 1468. Sepulveda, Segovia, Spain: The Jews sacrificed a Christian child on a cross. The Bishop of Segovia investigated the crime, and ordered the culprits to Segovia, where they were executed. It is important to know that this Bishop was himself a son of a converted Jew; Jean d'Avila was his name. Colmenares's History of Segovia records the facts of the case, which was juridically decided by a man of Jewish blood. That may be the reason that one finds no mention of it in Strack's book in defense of the Jews, The Jew and Human Sacrifice.

In 1474 the governor of Segovia was Cabrera, a Conversos of great ability, who had married Beatriz de Bobadilla, girlhood friend of the Princess Isabel. Villena had a grudge against this man and knowing that the Old Christians of Segovia hated him, he sent troops to stir up a massacre against all Conversos, under cover of which he hoped to get rid of his enemy.

On Sunday May 16, the Conversos awoke to find a city full of armed men, crying for their blood. Hooves rang, swords rattled, bullets pelted the walls and the flames lapped greedily over the hillside, devouring house after house. Corpses lay in tangled piles on the streets.

Fortunately news of the dastardly plot had reached Cardinal Borgia at Guadalajara. He sent a hasty warning to the King, who notified Governor Cabrera. The governor had barely time to assemble some of his troops and dash to the rescue of the Conversos. He and his men swept the streets clear of Villena’s men. The Marques and his hirelings fled from the city.

When Isabel and Fernando arrived at Segovia, the place still stank of charred timbers, rotting flesh, carnage and pestilence. She commended Cabrera for his valor, affectionately welcomed his wife Beatriz and denounced all the misguided or fanatical tools of Villena who had shared in the massacre. Only recently she had prevented a massacre of the Conversos at Villadolid, even though it meant the loss of many of her adherents and the necessity of fleeing from the city with her husband and Archbishop. NOW SHE HAD AN OPPORTUNITY OF SEEING AT CLOSE RANGE THE FRIGHTFUL RESULTS OF THE HATRED BETWEEN THE CHRISTIANS AND JEWS. WHAT COULD SAVE THE LAND FROM UTTER RUIN AND FROM A SECOND CONQUEST BY THE MOHAMMEDANS, APPLAUDED BY JEWS AND CONVERSOS? WHAT COULD MAKE THE JEWS STOP EXPLOITING THE CHRISTIANS AND PROSELYTIZING, EVEN AS CHRISTIANS, TO DESTROY CHRISTIANITY? WHAT COULD MAKE CHRISTIANS, OR NOMINAL CHRISTIANS, STOP MASSACRING THE MARRANOS ON EVERY PROVOCATION? Isabel and Fernando came to the conclusion that the great need of Castile was a government strong enough to be feared and respected by all classes.

Events now conspired to give them the opportunity that they desired. The Marques of Villena, their relentless enemy, died on October 4, 1474. King Enriques, left forlorn and friendless, failed rapidly in health and on the twelfth of December, after confessing his sins for along hour to the prior of the monastery he had built to commemorate the prowess of Don Beltran, he too expired, stubbornly refusing to the end to state whether or not “La Beltraneja” was his daughter.

Isabel heard the news in Segovia. Her first act was to put on mourning garments and go to the church of St. Michael to pray for the repose of the King’s soul. When she returned to the castle, she was notified by Cabrera and the chief men of Segovia that she would be crowned Queen of Castile on the morrow, St. Lucy’s Day. Destiny had strangely put into the hands of a girl the power she had dreamed of using. The Middle Ages were past and modern Spain was about to be born.

                                                                                  Chapter VII

Isabel looked down from the Alcazar of Segovia on the frosty morning of December thirteenth upon a town full of people. Into the four gates of the stern city built upon a cliff, were coming noblemen and commoners from all the countryside, with much flourishing of pennons and much music of trumpets, flageolets and kettledrums, for ho ceremony in Spain was complete without music.

There was a mighty shout as the gate of the castle opened and Dona Isabel came forth on a white palfrey, with the Governor Cabrera on one side of her and Archbishop Carrillo on the other. She was then twenty-three years old, a beautiful and stately figure, clad from head to foot in white brocade and ermine. Gems sparkled at her throat, at her bridle, the arch of her foot and her mount were caparisoned with cloth of gold. Slowly she advanced along the narrow, stony street near the head of a gorgeous procession. Just in front of her on a great horse rode a herald, holding point upward the Castilian sword of justice naked, menacingly brighter in the sunlight, symbol that the young woman in the white jennet had the power of life and death over all who beheld her. After him came two pages, bearing on a pillow the gold crown of her ancestor, King Fernando the Saint. After the Princess came prelates and priests in chasubles worked in gold threads over purple silks, velours, glistening with gold chains and precious stones, councilmen of Segovia in ancient heraldic costumes, spear men, cross-bowmen, men at arms, flag-bearers, musicians, with a great rabble following.

“Viva la Reinal! Castile for the Queen Lady Isabel!” cried the people.

Arriving at the plaza, she dismounted and ascended a high platform, draped with stuffs of rich colors and seated herself on a throne where, amid shouts and trumpet blasts, the great crown of her ancestors was placed on her light auburn hair. The bells of all the churches and convents of the city began to ring joyously. Muskets and arquebusses were fired from the keep of the Alcazar and heavy lombards thundered from the city walls.

Isabel was a queen at last.

After all the nobles present had kissed her hand and sworn allegiance to her, she walked to the Cathedral, where she humbly prostrated herself before the high altar, giving thanks to God for bringing her safely through so many perils and asking the grace to rule according to His will.

A few days later she learned that her husband was riding from the north as fast as his horses could carry him. The news of Enrique’s death and of his wife’s coronation had reached him in Perpignan, where he had gone early in the autumn to save his father from capture by his enemies. Having rescued the aged King, Fernando had commenced to restore order in Aragon in the way that he and Isabel agreed was necessary in those abnormal times. HE HAD FOUND THE CITY OF SARAGOSSA IN A STATE OF ANARCHY, COWED AND EXPLOITED BY XIMENES GORDO, A RICH CONVERSOS (a supposed converted Jew), WHO HAD TAKEN COMMAND OF THE CITY TROOPS AND IMPOSED HIS TURBULENT WILL ON THE PEOPLE. The young Prince on his arrival, invited the tyrant to visit him and when Gordo came, had him seized and delivered to the ministrations of a priest and a hangman. The body was exposed in the market place that noon.

When Fernando learned from a letter of Carrillo of his wife’s coronation, he was indignant because the sword of justice had been carried before her. It was not customary in Aragon or Castile to carry the sword before queens. In Aragon too there was a Salic law, excluding women from the throne. Fernando evidently thought, notwithstanding the terms of his marriage agreement with Isabel, that he would be the real King of Castile after Enrique’s death and it was a great shock to him to find that the gentle lady he had married intended to take the burden of government into her own hands. Gossip, controversies and intrigues among the nobles made the matter worse and when Fernando arrived at Segovia, the court was divided into two factions, bitterly disputing the merits of husband and wife.

A reconciliation was effected however, by the efforts of Don Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza Cardinal of Spain, representing the Queen and Archbishop Carrillo, speaking for King Fernando. But it was Isabel herself who, with her tact and dignity, maneuvered her husband into a position where he could only acquiesce as gracefully as possible. According to her secretary Pulgar, she spoke to him in these words:

“This subject Señor, need never have been discussed, because where there is such union as by the grace of God exists between us, there can be no difference. Already, as my husband, you are King of Castile and your commands have to be obeyed here. These realms, please God, will remain after our days for your sons and mine. But since it has pleased these cavaliers to open up this discussion, perhaps it is just as well that any doubts they have be clarified, as the law of these our kingdoms provides. This Senor I say, because as you perceive, it has not pleased God thus far to give us any heir but the princess Doña Isabel, our daughter, it could happen that after our days someone might come who, being descended from the royal house of Castile, might allege that these realms belonged to him even by the collateral line and not to your daughter the Princess, on account of her being a woman...Hence you will see Senor, what great embarrassment would ensue for our descendants. We ought to consider that God willing, the Princess our daughter has to marry a foreign prince, to whom will belong the government of these realms and who may desire to place in command of our fortresses and royal patrimony other people of his nation, who will not be Castilians. Whence it may follow, that the kingdom may pass into the hands of a foreign race. That would be a great burden on our consciences and a disservice to God and a great loss to our successors and subjects. It is well that this declaration be made now, to avoid any misunderstandings in the future.”

Fernando evidently could think of no reply. “The King, knowing this to be true, was much pleased,” says the chronicler, “and gave orders that nothing further be said on the subject.”

Fernando had disappointed Isabel more than once since their marriage. She had suffered keenly on learning the truth about the forged dispensation his father had sent from Aragon. She was even more deeply wounded when she learned that he had an illegitimate child, born about the time of his marriage. Henceforth she was to know the torment of a jealousy for which Fernando only too often provided the occasion, for he had four children born out of wedlock. Nevertheless she continued to love him to the day of her death. Never again, with one notable exception, would they have any serious difference of opinion. Henceforth in most public affairs, they were to act as one person, both signatures on all documents, both faces on all coins. “Even if necessity parted them, love held their wills in unison...Many persons tired to divide them, but they were resolved not to disagree.”

They could not afford to have differences if they wished to accomplish the gigantic task that awaited them. To bring order out of anarchy, to restore the prestige of the crown, to recover from robber barons the crown lands illegally granted by Enrique. To deflate the currency and restore prosperity to the farms and industries, to settle the Jewish problem, the Moorish problem, the Conversos problem, this was a task that seemed impossible for a young woman and young man with neither troops nor money. Castile was in a state of Chaos.

The young Queen commenced her reign resolutely however, by sweeping out of sight the worst of the parasites who had made her brother’s court so infamous. She appointed able and trustworthy men to the chief offices. Mendoza, the Cardinal of Spain, as Chancellor; Count Haro as Constable of Castile; Fernando’s uncle Fadrique as Admiral of Castile; Gutierre de Cardenas as Treasurer and Bursar. She and Fernando began to have thieves and murderers executed right and left, until “the men and citizens and laborers and all the people in general who longed for peace were joyful and gave thanks to God, because they had lived to see a time in which it pleased Him to have mercy on these kingdoms...The King and Queen, with this justice which they administered, gained the hearts of all in such a manner that the good had love for them and the evil had fear.”

The great barons who had looted the country under the weak Enrique were not willing however, to lose their power without a struggle. The young Márques of Villena threatened to proclaim Juana, La Beltraneja, Queen of Castile if Isabel did not grant him the Grand Mastership of the order of Santiago and several cities. Archbishop Carrillo, angered because Fernando had offered him certain lands different from those he had promised, left the court in a huff and remained at his home at Alcala de Henares, performing alchemistic experiments with a friend of his, Doctor Alarcon. Both the Archbishop and young Villena were said to be in correspondence with Alfonso V of Portugal.

Cardinal Mendoza, whose elevation to the Primacy and growing influence with Isabel and Fernando had aroused the jealousy of the old Archbishop, now rode to Alcala and attempted to conciliate the old warrior by offering to efface himself and to let Carrillo play the first part in a reform Cortes to be assembled at Segovia in the spring.

The Archbishop gave an evasive answer, which was somewhat too ceremonious to be reassuring. Mendoza disappointed, returned to the young sovereigns to report that he feared something was brewing between Carrillo, Villena and Alfonso V of Portugal. To make matters worse, several miniature wars had broken out among the nobles. Three of them were quarreling over the Grand Mastership of Santiago. Two of them were conducting a war for the possession of Seville. Two others were fighting at Córdoba.

At this juncture Isabel and Fernando, then at Valladolid, received a letter from King Alfonso of Portugal, announcing that he was about to marry La Beltraneja and therefore, was entitled to call himself King of Castile and Leon. He added that many of the great Castilian nobles, including the Archbishop of Toledo, were ready to join him.

Isabel could not believe that her old friend Carrillo had gone over to her enemies. She had her secretary write a passionate letter of appeal to him. The Archbishop made no reply. People were saying all over Castile, “Whoever gets the Archbishop will win.”

The Queen decided, in spite of the advice of her councilors, to ride to Alcalá and make a personal appeal to him. She sent Count Haro ahead to make arrangements for her visit.

Carrillo received the count with gloomy courtesy and was obviously moved by the nobleman’s appeal to his generosity and his loyalty. However, his attitude changed after he had consulted certain friends, who may have been emissaries of Villena and of Portugal. He now declared that if Queen Isabel came in at one gate of Alcalá, he would go out the other. “I took her from the distaff and gave her a scepter and I will send her back to the distaff!” he said.

Haro rode back to Colmenar, where the Queen was in a church praying and waiting for his return. She did not receive her envoy until Mass was over. When she heard his report, she turned pale and put her hands to her hair, says Pulgar, as if to hold her wits together. Closing her eyes, she remained silent till she had regained control of herself. Then, looking up, she said, “My Lord Jesus Christ, in your hands I place all my affairs and I implore your protection and aid!” and mounting her horse, rode on toward Toledo.

There she learned that Alfonso V, with 20,000 men, had crossed the border from Portugal into Estremadura on May 25, and marching to Plasencia, where his Castilian allies joined him, had publicly married La Beltraneja and had himself and his fifteen year old bride proclaimed King and Queen of Castile and Leon.

Fernando rode frantically through the north, seeking to raise an army. He had become unpopular in Castile however, since his attempt to usurp the crown and it was evident that any successful appeal to the country must come from Isabel herself. It appeared only too likely however, that Alfonso would soon have both her and the kingdom in his power.

Queen Isabel, wearing a breastplate of steel over her pain brocade dress, pressed her lips silently together as she mounted her horse and took the road to the north.

                                                                                  Chapter VIII

Instead of marching to seize Isabel, Alfonso V proceeded to Arévalo, in the heart of Castile, and camped there. By so doing he hoped to prevent her from assembling an army. He failed to reckon upon her awakening genius, a genius quite as remarkable in its way as that of Saint Joan of Arc and he gave her the one thing she needed, time.

She proceeded to make the most of her advantage. Sickness, foul weather and rough dangerous country were no obstacles to her. For months she lived almost constantly on horseback, going from one end of the kingdom to the other, making speeches, holding conferences, sitting up all night dictating letters to her secretaries, holding court all morning to sentence a few thieves and murderers to be hanged and riding a hundred miles or two over cold mountain passes to plead with some lukewarm nobleman for five hundred soldiers. Wherever she went, she stirred into flame the ancient hatred of the Castilians for the Portuguese, who had defeated their ancestors so decisively at Aljubarrota in 1385. She concluded every appeal with a passionate prayer:

“Thou O Lord, who knowest the secrets of the heart, of me Thou knowest that not by an unjust way, not by cunning or by tyranny, but by believing truly that these realms of the King my father, belong to me rightfully, have Endeavored to obtain them, that what the kings my forebears won with so much bloodshed may not fall into the hands of an alien race. Lord, in whose hands lies the sway of kingdoms, I humbly beseech Thee to hear the prayer of Thy servant and show forth the truth and manifest Thy will with Thy marvelous works, so that if my cause is not just, I may not be allowed to sin through ignorance and if it is just, Thou give me wisdom and courage to sustain it with the aid of Thine arm, that through Thy grace we may have peace in these kingdoms, which till now have endured so many evils and destructions.”

While Fernando collected troops from the northern provinces, Isabel assembled several thousand men at Toledo and rode at their head, in full armour like Saint Joan, to meet her husband at Valladolid. By the end of June they had assembled a motley host of forty-two thousand men, poorly equipped and badly disciplined, many of them farm hands and released convicts. Whipping them hastily into thirty-five battalions, Fernando left Valladolid in July and struck south-west to the river Duero. Isabel, who was ill, remained at Tordesillas to keep the line of communications open and to watch developments.

Alfonso marched to Toro, which yielded to him. There the impulsive Fernando besieged him, hoping to crush him quickly and ten march north against the French, who were invading Guipúzcoa. But the governor of Castro Nuño, who had treacherously gone over to the Portugese. His army threatened with starvation, Fernando had no choice but to retreat to Medina del Campo. Many of his men deserted on the way and it was only a remnant of the great army that he brought back to the disappointed Queen.

A disaster that would have been crushing to ordinary persons only stimulated Isabel to greater efforts. From this time on she was fortunate in having almost constantly with her, as friend and adviser one of the ablest men of his time, Don Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, Cardinal of Spain. Son of a distinguished soldier and poet, the Marques of Santillana, he was learned, acute, charming, a devout churchman, a skillful soldier and a profound statesman. It was he who now made a suggestion that saved the day for Isabel. He appealed to the clergy to melt down the silver plate accumulated as gifts and heirlooms in various churches for centuries. In this way a sum of thirty million maravedis was realized. The help of the church enabled Isabel to pay her troops, to enlist new recruits, to bring gunpowder and heavy lombards from Italy and Germany and to buy food and clothing. By December first, less than five months after the retreat from Toro, a new army was ready for the field. It comprised only fifteen thousand men, ut they were well armed and well trained.

Fernando marched again toward Toro. Alfonso offered to retire on condition he receive Toro and Zamora, the kingdom of Galicia, and a sum of money. But Isabel declared that she would never give away a single battlement of her father’s kingdom.

Fernando was obliged to leave his army before Toro and ride to Burgos in the north, to aid his supporters there. Meanwhile Isabel, after posting guards on all the roads, galloped to Toledo, 130 miles south, to bring back reinforcements of new levies. She then made a wide and rapid swing to Leon, more than two hundred miles north, to rescue the province from a treacherous governor.

Returning, she sent the Count of Benavente to make a night attack on the Portugese. Alfonso and his army withdrew twenty miles to Zamora, a fort built on a lofty rock, inaccessible except by a powerful fortified bridge across the Douro.

One night Isabel, learned that the governor of the bridge was willing to deliver it to her, if she would send troops to take it. She sent word to Fernando to leave Burgos in disguise and come at once. Fernando, pretending illness, left his quarters alone, rode sixty miles by night through an enemy country and arrived at Valladolid just before dawn. There Isabel had a picked force of cavalry ready for him. Zamora was fifty miles away. The next night he reached the Bridge and took possession of it. He had only to hold until Isabel brought up reinforcements and artillery. She had her big guns on the road before dawn.

Alfonso awoke to find his position commanded by the Castilian guns. He withdrew his army into the open country and Fernando occupied the town. Next day Alfonso was reinforced by his son, Dom Joao with 20,000 troops. He was now in a position to besiege Fernando and he did so. For two Fernando and his army were cooped up in Zamora.

Isabel, threatened with defeat, was spurred on to almost superhuman activity. Like all great soldiers, she saw the advantage of attack. If the enemy’s force outnumbered hers, it must be divided. She sent troops to assail Alfonso’s base at Toro. She hurled others against his right flank. Finally she discovered that a town at his rear, commanding his line of communications, was poorly guarded. She sent two thousand calvary to seize it.

Alfonso in his turn was not compelled to retreat. One cold night, while his men grumbled at the scarcity of food, he broke camp and started along the river bank to Toro.

When Fernando discovered that the enemy had vanished, he rapidly pursued and overtook him in the middle of the afternoon. Cardinal Mendoza, riding ahead to reconnoiter, returned to the King to tell him that the Portugese were drawn up in battle order, just beyond a small hill. Fernando gave the word to advance. Slowly the Castilian host went over the piece of rising ground and defiled into the plain. The sun, far down the western sky, was at their backs, shining murkily from under a heavy curtain of grey clouds, into the eyes of the Portugese. Presently a fine, cold, drizzly rain began to fall.

There was a long splintering rash as the hosts came together and were interlocked...the splitting of lances, the rattle of armor, the thumping of horses; riders catapulted to the ground to lie still or rise and draw swords, footmen running out among them with daggers and axes...the melee grimly settled down to a business like hacking and thrusting. “Fernando!” cried the Castilians. “Alfonso!” shouted the Portugese.

Where the standards of the rival kings fluttered back and forth on the waves of steel, there was the fiercest fighting, shouting, letting of blood and piling up of the slain. On the left the Cardinal of Spin, his bishop’s crochet torn and spattered with blood that looked almost black in that leaden dusk, fought with the fury of a tiger, laying men flat to right and left of him as he pressed forward through the ranks of the Portugese. On the right, Dom Joeo’s artillery thundered; the echoes rumbled from the river to the crags, followed by the brisk rattle of his musketry. The six squadrons of Fernando’s Galician and Austrian cavalry broke and fled, pursued by the yelling Portugese.

Entangled with their foes, neither Fernando nor the Cardinal could go to help of their right wing and to make matters worse, Dom Joao doubled back after a brief pursuit of the scared mountaineers and fell upon their flank. The fighting was desperate, to the death. Back and forth, up and down they swayed in the cold crepuscular rain, while the shouts became hoarser and the moanings of the wounded more frequently under foot and the darkness came swiftly down from the slaty sky and still neither side had the victory. Thus for three hours the fortune of the battle hung in the balance. They fought silently now, panting for breath.

Mendoza had hacked his way through the Portugese right to where he could barely see in the thick gloom the standard of King Alfonzo, rising and falling. Duarte de Almeida was making a heroic struggle to keep Alfonso’s standard flying. Wounded in the right arm, he held the flag in his left. When a Castilian arrow transfixed his left arm, he held the staff between his teeth until he fell, pierced through the body, while the Cardinal of Spain seized the Portugese flag and bore it off. The fat Alfonso, puffing valiantly gave ground. Their flag down, their king beaten back, a great hesitation like some slow fog began to drift over the mass of the tired Portugese, who had eaten nothing since they left Zamor at daybreak. They gave way here, they drew in there. It was now quite dark.

Suddenly, with a mighty shout, the six battalions of mountain horsemen who had fled from Dom Joao’s guns at the outset, but had slowly reassembled in shame on the hillside, fell upon the disordered Portugese. The whole line began to retreat. At the same time the Cardinal of Spain and the Duke of Alba drove them from the flank toward the river. In vain Alfonso and Dom Joao shouted their battle cries. In vain the stout-hearted Carrillo, blood from head to foot, the red cloak torn from his back, stormed and pleaded with them while he smote about him like some Homeric hero in the opaque night.

The flight became a panic. “Santiago!” cried the victors. “Castile! Castile for King Fernando and Queen Isabel!” The miserable Portugese slew each other by mistake. They ran up the hills, they leaped into the swift river and were sucked under the cold waters by the weight of their armor. Bands of them rushed wildly about seeking their king and crying “Fernando! Fernando!” to avoid slaughter.

During the night Fernando ordered the men to cease slaying the vanquished and to make prisoners of them. The fury of the Castilians was such that even after some days, they wished to kill the Portugese prisoners and might have done so but for the indignant opposition of Cardinal Mendoza, who said, “Never, please God, may such a thing be said, or such an example of us remain in the memory of living men. Let us arrive to conquer and not think of vengeance, for to conquer is for strong men and to avenge is for weak women.”

At dawn Fernando sent a briefly affectionate message to Isabel, announcing his victory. She received the news with great joy at Tordesillas. She ordered all the clergy of the town to assemble and to march through the streets singing the “Te Deum.” Amid the acclamations of the people, the young Queen came out of her palace barefoot and thus she walked over the rough stones of the streets to the monastery of Saint Paul, where she went on silent feet through the murmuring crowd to the high altar and prostrated herself with great devotion and humility, giving thanks to the God of Battles.

                                                                                   Chapter IX

The victory over Portugal had left Isabel mistress of Castile, but it was a Castle ridden with famine, pestilence and economically almost beyond repair. “No one paid his debts if he didn’t want to,” wrote her secretary in her chronicle. “The people were accustomed to all disorders...and the citizens, laborers and peaceful men were not masters of their own property and had no recourse to anybody for the robberies and acts of violence they endured... Each man would willingly have given half his goods, if he could purchase security for himself and his family.”

The chief task that confronted Isabel and Fernando was to restore respect for law. This they proceeded to do with a rigor which they felt was justified by the prevailing anarchy. At a Cortes assembled at Madrigal in 1476, they took steps to revive the Santa Hermandad or Holy Brotherhood, a voluntary police force, which in the fourteenth century had been organized to defend the local rights of the people against the crown, but in the end had become a tool of the nobles. Isabel proceeded to convert this nearly useless weapon of the privileged classes into an instrument of royal discipline. A force of two thousand horsemen was organized under a captain-general, the Duke of Villahermosa, bastard brother of King Fernando, with eight captains under him. Every hundred householders maintained a horseman, well armed and equipped, ready at any moment to start in pursuit of a criminal. For every community of thirty families there were two alcades (Magistrates), whose powers were absolute, unless appeals were taken to the bishop of Cartagena, or as a last resort to the King and Queen.

But unless a lawbreaker had good grounds for an appeal, he had short shrift and the mildest penalty he could expect was the loss of an ear or hand. A petty thief was relieved of one of his feet, to make sure that he did not repeat his offence. More often, the penalty was death. As soon as the sentence was pronounced, a priest was fetched to hear the prisoner’s confession and give him the last sacraments. Tied to the nearest tree, the convict was dispatched with arrows by the Hermandad. Evidently the authors of the ordinances of the Brotherhood were skeptical about the permanency of any moral reforms effected by force among criminals, for they commanded that the shooting follow the absolution “as speedily as possible, that his soul may pass from his body with the greatest safety.”

This stern and speedy justice seemed a matter of course to Isabel and Fernando and their contemporaries. The sympathy that Enrique El Impotente had lavished on the criminal they reserved for the murdered man and his widow and children, the ravished woman, the family burned to death kin in the middle of the night by bandits or robber barons. It was not that the Spanish were any more cruel than other western people. For example, life was incredibly cheap in England at that period. Even a century later we find an English chronicler reporting the hanging every year of form three hundred to four hundred “rogues” including petty thieves and during the reign of King Henry VIII seventy-two thousand died on the gallows for thefts alone.

Isabel and her husband rode from town to town, sometimes together, sometimes separately, administering justice without delay and without cost to the people. The young Queen would hear complaints, order reconciliations and restitutions, condemn the guilty to death and ride on to the next place. Within a short time her justice had filled the country with consternation. It was the more terrifying because it was felt to be impartial and incorruptible.

Although she was desperately in need of money, she frequently refused to accept bribes from rich criminals. A wealthy noble named Alvar Yañez, who had murdered a notary, had offered the Queen the enormous sum of forty thousand ducats if she would spare his life. Some of her council, knowing how bare the royal treasury was, advised her to accept. But the Queen “preferred justice to money.” She had the head of Yañez, struck off the same day and to avoid any suspicion of mercenary motives, had the property distributed among his sons, although there were plenty of precedents to justify her confiscating it.

One day while she was resting at Tordésillas, after driving the remaining Portugese out of Toro, she heard that a revolt had begun at Segovia and that the insurgents were storming the tower of the Alcazar, in which her baby Isabel, was guarded by a mere handful of loyalists.

Beatriz de Bobdilla, who had been left in charge of the child, had come to Tordesillas to confer with Her majesty. Cabrera, the governor, had left the city and during his absence, some of his enemies, with weapons concealed under their laborer’s clothes, had entered the Alcazar, killed the guard at the gate and taken possession of the castle. The men assigned to guard the Infanta retreated to the tower where the child and her nurse were furiously resisted. Men all over the city took arms and joined one side or the other. The majority however, joined the rebels out of hatred for the Conversos Cabrera. Even the bishop of Segovia, Don Juan Arias de Avila joined them, though he himself was a Conversos.

Queen Isabel had with her at the time only Cardinal Mendoza, her friend Beatriz, and the count of Benavente. There was no time to assemble troops and she could travel more rapidly without them. She mounted a horse and followed by her three friends, rode madly for Segovia, sixty miles away.

The sun glared on the white road, as hot as on the sands of the Sahara. The dust, six inches deep, arose in clouds about her and her horse; it whitened them with powder; it blinded her eyes and rubbed the skin off her lips. The Queen lost her way trying to cut through a pine forest, retraced her steps to the road, let her horses rest awhile at Coca and during the night, when a cold wind came up with the August moon, pressed on to Segovia. At dawn she saw the tower of the Alcazar, rising above the rocky spur that projects over the grey plain like the prow of a galley. All around them barren and treeless, stretched the desolate waste of a cruel, inscrutable country. Was the Princess still in the tower? Were they too late?

When the Queen approached the gate of St. John, the Bishop and several of the chief citizens came forth and begged her not to enter, for there was sharp fighting nearby. Furthermore the Bishop requested that she leave outside the walls Cabrera’s wife and his friend the Count of Benavente, since the sight of them would infuriate the mob. The young queen with cold anger, cut short their ceremonious speeches, saying:

“Tell those cavaliers and citizens of Segovia that I am Queen of Castile and this city is mine, for the king my father left it to me. To enter what is mine I do not need any laws or conditions that they may lay down for me. I shall enter the city by the gate I choose and the Count of Benavente shall enter with me and all others that I think proper for my service. Say to them further, that they shall all come to me and do what I shall command like loyal subjects and cease making tumults and scandals in my city, lest they suffer hurt in their persons and their property.”

So saying, Isabel clapped the spurs into her jaded horse and followed by her three friends, galloped through the gate of St. john into the midst of the howling mob. Fearless of the swords and spears that flashed about her in the morning sun, she pressed on to the small courtyard near the tower. The Bishop followed, vainly trying to quiet the people. The mob surged around the little group.

“Kill them all!” they cried. “To the sword with the friends of Mayordomo! Down with Cabrera! Storm the tower and kill them all!” The Queen silent, haggard and dusty on her white horse, faced them. The Cardinal leaned toward her. Urgently he begged her to have the gate of the Alcazar closed, that no more of the mob might enter the court. The Queen shook her head.

“Open the gates wider,” she said, “and bid them all come in.” The gates creaked. “Friends,” shouted a cavalier, “the Queen commands that all come in, as many as can.” A murmur went over the crowd. The Queen! After a hesitation there was a forward seething of the human sea and an overflowing into the court. The Queen waited for silence. The Cardinal, indifferent to his own safety, watched her with a mixture of admiration and fear. Her words, clear and resonant, sped like arrows over the heads of the shoving and grumbling people:

“My vassals and servants, say now what you desire, for what suits you is agreeable with me, since it is for the common good of the city.” A leader of the mob, motioning for quiet, stood forth as spokesman to relate their grievances at length. “Senora,” he began, “we have several supplications to make. The first is, that the Mayordomo Andres de Cabrera no longer have the keeping of the Alcazar! The second...”

“What you wish, I wish. He is removed. I shall take possession of these towers and walls and commit them to a loyal companion of mine, who will guard them with loyalty to me and honour to you.” A howl broke from the crowd, a howl of triumph and approbation. “Viva la Reina!” The people outside the gate took up the cry. It was the same motley swarthy multitude that had screamed those words to her that winter morning three years ago, when she rode out of this very court to be crowned. In a trice the men who had been cursing Cabrera were clamoring for the blood of his enemies. The rebel leaders fled for their lives. By noon the towers and walls had been cleared of them and Isabel was in complete possession of the Alcazar. Her first thought was to embrace the Princess, from whom she had so long been separated. Then she rode in weary triumph through the streets to the palace near the Church of St. Martin, followed by a mob that all but smothered her in their joy and admiration. From the steps of the palace she made a brief speech, bidding them go peacefully to their homes, promising that if they would send a committee to her to explain all their grievances, she would have justice done. The multitude melted away. The Queen entered the palace, threw herself on a bed and slept.

Subsequently, when she considered the complaints laid before her by the committee and sifted them to the bottom, she reinstated Cabrera, finding him innocent of the charges against him, though some of his subordinates had committed minor tyrannies. The Queen believed on the part of men who wanted his post, or the strong Old Christian Kon Juan Arias, repented of his part in the day’s work, bethinking him that the Queen might have a long. memory and a long arm. The time was coming, though he little suspected it, when he would have a particular need of her friendship.

                                                                                   Chapter X

Late in September, when Queen Isabel went to Valladolid to meet her husband on his return from his estates in the north. She was vexed to learn of a conflict that had arisen over the Grand Mastership of the Order of Santiago. The Count of Paredes, chief claimant to the honor had died and his rival Don Alonso de Cardenas, had marched at the head of an army to Ucles, where the treces and comendadores of the Order had assembled at his bidding to elect him Grand Master.

Isabel had no personal objection to Cardenas. On the contrary, she found him an exceptionally able officer in a private “war” he had waged against the Duke of Medina Sidonia in the conflict against the Portugese. She hoped to make use of him in the crusade she planned to begin against the Moors as soon as she had restored peace and prosperity in Castile. On the other hand she had vivid and painful memories of past civil wars fought for the Mastership of Santiago under King Enrique. Besides, she had a plan of her own making the famous military order useful to the Crown.

Three great military orders had grown up in Spain during the Middle Ages. The Order of Calatrava had been founded by two Cistercian monks, who with their companions defended a strategic pass between Castile and Anadalusia saving Christian Spain from being reconquered by the Moors. As time went on the Order grew in numbers and wealth, until it included fifty-six commanderies, sixteen priories, sixty-four villages and enjoyed an annual income of fifty thousand ducats.

The Order of Alcantara was organized to hold the town of that name, an important outpost, when it was taken from the Moors by the Christians in 1214. To defend it, a group of knights banded together, wearing over their armor the White Cistercian Mantle embroidered with a scarlet overcross. They too in time accumulated numbers and wealth.

But the most noted of the three orders was that of Santiago, founded in the twelfth century to protect pilgrims coming from all parts of Europe to the shrine of St. James the Apostle at Compostela in Galicia, where his body, found intact after eight centuries, was reserved and honored. But after the Moors withdrew into Granada and no longer menaced the northern kingdoms, the knight grew indifferent and warred with each other instead of with the Infidel. The election of a Grand Master was so important that it often led to a civil war. That dignitary ruled over eightey-three commanderies, two cities, one hundred and seventy-eight boroughs and villages, two hundred parishes, five hospitals, five convents, and a college at Salamanca. He virtually presided over the kingdom and enjoyed more in come than many kings. In time of war he could lead into the field, four hundred knights and a thousand lances.

Isabel saw that if the Crown was to be supreme, it must do away with such powerful organizations, particularly when they were no longer of any great use in the new warfare that scientific discovery was making possible. Gunpowder was putting an end to the tactics of chivalry, simply because two or three plebeians with a canon could blow up any number of men in armor, be their blood ever so blue and their hearts ever so stout. She decided to annex the powers of the orders by asking the Pope to appoint King Fernando to each Mastership, when the present incumbent died. The death of the Count of Paredes was her first opportunity. She dispatched a messenger to Rome, asking that Fernando be appointed Grand Master of Santiago. But Cardenas with his usual promptness and boldness jeopardized her plan.

Ucles, where the delegates were meeting, was two hundred miles away, across the mountains and the rains had set in, but that made no difference to Isabel. Taking a small retinue, she mounted her horse and started on the dangerous journey in a heavy downpour. At the end of the third day she came to Ocana, fifty miles from her destination. She was urged to spend the night in the palace there, the palace she had fled from with Carrillo eight years before, but fearing that the election might be held the next morning, she pressed on all night under the beating rain. Next morning, as the knights of Santiago were about to vote on the Mastership, they were astonished to see the weary and drenched Queen walk silently into their midst.

As usual Isabel went to the heart of the problem and told them plainly why she had come. The Mastership of Santiago she said, was too important an office not to be kept in the royal family, hence she had decided that it must belong to King Fernando. She commanded them, as her subjects, to postpone their election.

The Queen’s self possession carried the day and Cardenas submitted with good grace. Later, when Isabel had in her hands the Pope’s bull, giving the administration of the Order to Fernando, she appointed Cardenas Grand Master for life, on condition that the order pay three million maravedis a year to maintain its forts along the Moorish frontier. When Cardenas died in 1499, Fernando assumed the Mastership. Similarly he took over the administration of Calatrava in 1487 and that of Clcantata in 1492. His wife’s foresight was ultimately to increase the royal revenue by a million dollars a year.

Isabel now returned to Ocana to meet Fernando, who had been strengthening their defenses on the Portugese frontier, for peace had not yet been formally made and together they proceeded to Toledo. There, at the Queen’s orders, a great preparation had been made for a triumph in honor of Fernando’s victory at Toro. She had promised, after the battle, that as soon as possible she would give public thanks to God and would build a church in honor of St. John the Evangelist, to whom she had prayed during the perilous days of the Portugese war. They entered the city one afternoon, to find waiting for them a gorgeous procession of prelates, canons and priests, together with noblemen and townspeople who marched with a raised crucifix before them to the great cathedral. There, in the vast grove of marble and granite, the rich colors of the late sunlight filtered through the stained glass to mingle with the shadows about the young King and the splendid Queen who knelt in silence before the high altar, giving thanks to God.

On the next day there was a second and even more magnificent procession to the cathedral. This time the King and Queen entered by the gate of their ancestor St. Fernando, who had freed Andalusia from the Moorish yoke by capturing Cordoba in 1235. Isabel wore his golden crown, blazing with precious stones, while a long mantle of ermine fell over her gown of white brocade, flowered with castles and lions of gold. Around her neck gleamed the famous necklace of pearls and the collar of balas rubies, the largest of which was supposed to have belonged to King Solomon when he sent to Spain the ancient Tashish of Jews, for his gold and silver, his ivory and apes and peacocks. ("...bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks." (1 Kings 10:22) Silver and brass were not considered of great value in the days of Solomon. And every three years the navy of Tarshish came bringing with them gold and silver. They also brought ivory, "apes" and "peacocks." These last two do not refer to animals or birds, but rather, they are the Commercial Names of Lead and Copper brought in the ships. From America! In modern language we refer to animals or birds, but rather, they are the commercial names of Lead and Copper brought in the ships. In modern language we refer to iron as "pigs" so, too, in ancient times Lead was called "Apes" because of its peculiar formation and color, while Copper Ore, with its rich and changeable coloring, was called "Peacocks.")

After hearing High Mass, they walked to the tomb of their other ancestor, Juan I of Castile, who had been defeated by the Portugese at Aljubarrota nearly a hundred years before and over his resting place Isabel draped the torn and bloody standard taken from Alfonso V at Toro.

Before leaving Toledo, Isabel bought several houses between two of the gates, had them destroyed and there had ground broken for the Franciscan monastery of Saint-John-of-the-Kings, on whose construction she was to spend several years. Its four vaults, carved with the most delicate lace work in stone, in infinite variety, still remain as a monument to her lifelong love for Fernando. She never tired of sending gold chalices, jewels, trophies, tapestries and paintings to the church and in all parts of it may be found the arms of Castile and Aragon, and the cyphers of Isabel and Fernando, interlaced.

From Toledo the sovereigns proceeded to Madrid. There they found waiting for them several pieces of disquieting news. The new King of Granada, Muley Abou’l Hassan, had refused to send them the customary tribute which they had demanded and it was believed that he was preparing for war. This would have suited Isabel and Fernando well at a later time, for one of their chief ambitions was to drive the Moorish power out of Spain. But the hour had not yet come when they could afford to undertake so costly a struggle. Meanwhile, fresh Portugese armies had invaded Castile in the west and it was said that Alfonson V had gone to Paris, seeking aid from France and had been received with great honor by Louis XI. In the cities of the south the wildest anarchy still reigned.

Isabel proposed that while Fernando crushed the remaining Castilian rebels in the west and Cardenas went to meet the Portugese, she herself would ride to Southern Estremadura and pacify the country. To this the King and the council strenuously objected. They said there was no city or town that she could use as a base of operations, for every fortress was in the hands of some petty tyrant whose crimes were so notorious that he dare not surrender for fear of being hanged. They suggest that she remain in some safe place, such as Toledo, until the King and Cardenas returned.

The Queen listened to their advice and as usual, calmly announced her own decision:

“I have always heard it said that the blood, like a good schoolmistress, always goes to repair the part of the body that receives some hurt. Now, to hear continually of the war that the Portugese make as foes and the Castilians as tyrants and to endure it with complacency, would not be the office of a good king; for kings who wish to reign have to labor. It seems to me that my Lord ought to go to those places beyond the mountain pass and I to the other parts of Estremadura...It is true that there are certain obstacles to my going, such as you have mentioned. But in all human affairs there are things both certain and doubtful and both are equally in the hands of God, who is accustomed to guide a good end the causes that are just and are sought with diligence.”

The King and the council acquiesced, knowing well that when the Queen spoke in that vein, further argument was useless. While Fernando took the field in the west, therefore Isabel donned her armor again and rode south into the country of her foes the robber barons.

                                                                                   Chapter XI

Dismounting at Guadalupe, Queen Isabel sent one of her secretaries ahead to demand the keys of the fortress of Trujillo. The governor sent back word that he would deliver the keys to no one but his master the young Marques of Villena, one of several noblemen who still defied her. Queen cried angrily, “Do I have to remain out of my own city/ Surely no good king would do it and no more will I.”

Summoned heavy artillery and troops from Sevilla and Cordoba and planned to blow down the walls of Trujillo. Meanwhile, she took Madrilego, a notorious robber’s den and when the garrison had marched out, commanded her gunners to fire upon the walls and towers until not one stone was left upon another. This example frightened the petty tyrants of the vicinity and many of them submitted to the determined Queen.

The young Marques of Villena now appeared and offered to give her Trujillo on certain conditions. “There can be no discussion,” she said, “until I have the keys of Trujillo.”           Villena then ordered his alcalde to surrender and Isabel entered the city in triumph. She rode to Caceres, settled a bloody feud there over an election, posted garrisons in Badajoz and other frontier towns and proceeded to Sevilla.

Sevilla was one of the largest and most beautiful cities of Andalusia. Taken from the Moors by St. Fernando, it was still principally Moorish in character, a bewildering labyrinth of narrow winding streets and lanes, lined with one-story white houses enclosing gay flowers and cool fountains in patios where the people virtually lived most of the year.

There were to causes of this discord. The weakness of Enrique’s government had emboldened the nobles to take the law into their own hands and for three years two of the most powerful nobles of the south, the Duke of Medina Sidonia and young Don Rodrigo Ponce de Leon, Marques of Cadiz, had been fighting pitched battles in and about the city, regardless of the damage to the lives and property of the citizens.

The other cause was racial, or perhaps more accurately religious. There was in Sevilla a large Jewish quarter, or Juderia, though the old law compelling the Jews to reside in it was no longer enforced. Far more numerous however, were the Jews who lived as Conversos among the Christians, intermarried with them, held most influential and lucrative office, owned the most valuable property in the city and derived great incomes, as did some of the Jews of the synagogue, from money lending and from the busy slave market in which Moors and blacks from Africa