Ferdinand II and Isabella I

King of Sicily (r. 1468-1516), Castile (r. 1474-1504), Aragon (r. 1479-1516), and Naples (r. 1504-1516); and Queen of Spain (r. 1474-1504)

• Ferdinand II
• Born: March 10, 1452
• Birthplace: Sos, Aragon (now in Spain)
• Died: January 23, 1516
• Place of death: Madrigalejo, Spain

• Isabella I
• Born: April 22, 1451
• Birthplace: Madrigal de las Altas Torres, Castile (now in Spain)
• Died: November 26, 1504
• Place of death: Medina del Campo, Spain

The Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella directed Spain’s transition from medieval diversity to national unity. They achieved governmental and ecclesiastical reform and established a continuing Spanish presence in Italy, the Americas, and northern Africa.

Early Lives

Ferdinand (FEHRD-ehn-and) and Isabella (ihz-ah-BEHL-ah) were each born to the second, much younger wives of kings. A much older half brother of Isabella, King Henry IV, stood between each of them and the throne, and their siblings both died with considerable suspicion of poisoning. Thus the young prince and princess grew up the focus of intrigue. Their marriage represented an alliance between Ferdinand’s father, John II of Navarre (from 1458 of Aragon), and a faction of Castilian nobles, including his mother’s kinsmen, the Enríquez family, and Isabella’s protector, archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso Carrillo.

John II of Castile, Isabella’s father, died when she was three and her brother Alfonso less than a year old. Their mother, Isabella of Portugal, withdrew to her cities of Arevalo and Madrigal to maintain her independence. This dowager queen, a woman of exemplary piety, became increasingly unstable, and Henry IV, young Isabella’s half brother, brought the children to his court in 1461. In 1462, young Isabella stood sponsor at the baptism of the king’s daughter Joan. Henry had married Joan of Portugal, mother of Princess Joan, within a year after his divorce from his first, childless wife, Blanche of Navarre, on the grounds of his own impotence. Princess Isabella and her younger brother Alfonso, who died in 1465, became involved in several political plots, including plans to challenge the legitimacy of Princess Joan, depose Henry, and find the most advantageous marriage for Isabella. The latter plot ultimately led to Isabella’s union with Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469.

Isabella’s isolated childhood and her preferred semi-isolation at Henry’s court caused her to grow up pious and rather bookish. Gonzalo Chacón, chosen by their mother to supervise Isabella and Alfonso, proved a guiding influence in both her early and adult life. He had been a confidant of Álvaro de Luna, John II’s great Constable of Castile. A description of the princess at the time of her marriage tells of golden red hair, gray eyes with long lashes and arched brows, and a red-and-white complexion. A long neck and slim, erect posture set off her face and gave an effect of dignity and majesty.

Ferdinand early became the focus of a quarrel between his father and his own half brother, Prince Charles of Viana, who was supported by the city of Barcelona. Almost from birth, the boy participated in Barcelona’s elaborate ceremonies, and at the age of ten, he and his mother, Queen Juana Enríquez, were besieged in Gerona by the Barcelona army and rescued by his father. Though Ferdinand had tutors and attendants to teach him to read and ride, his father was his great teacher. John II of Aragon involved his son in war and government as much as the boy’s years allowed. Aragonese politics involved the same kind of intrigue as Castile’s but were complicated by the complex nature of the Crown, which included Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca, Sardinia, and Sicily. In 1468, John II entitled Ferdinand king of Sicily, a position that gave him superior rank to his bride and that gave them both status in their struggle against Princess Joan and her uncle-fiancé, King Afonso V of Portugal, to win Castile.

Ferdinand’s portraits show a red-and-white complexion with dark eyes and a full mouth. He wore his dark brown hair rather long, in the style of the day; his hairline began early to recede noticeably. In riding, warfare, athletics, and dancing, he performed with perfect skill and ease.

Lives’ Work

During the first decade of their marriage, Ferdinand and Isabella struggled to establish themselves in Castile, first to gain the good graces of Henry IV and, after his death, to dominate the barons. Men like Carrillo changed sides as it suited their interests: Having supported Isabella, Carrillo turned to Princess Joan when it became clear that the newlyweds would not take direction from him. An incident in the early stages of the war against Portugal shows the characters of the young couple. When cautious, shrewd, self-confident Ferdinand withdrew, avoiding a confrontation at Toro in July, 1475, rather than risk defeat, his insecure, impetuous, chivalric wife gave him a very chilly homecoming. His subsequent victory on March 1, 1476, near Toro (at Peleagonzalo) was more a victory of maneuver than a battle, and historians dispute the question of who actually won.

In this period, Isabella played a role of great importance. For example, when the master of the Crusading Order of Santiago died in 1475, she pressured its members into accepting her husband as their leader. That same year, the monarchs put under royal control the militia and treasury of the Holy Brotherhood, the medieval alliance of Castilian cities. With these forces and loyal barons, they subdued the others. Nobles who would not accept royal authority had their castles destroyed. By 1481, Ferdinand and Isabella stood masters of Castile. The longevity of Ferdinand’s father, who died in 1479, preserved control in Aragon, while Ferdinand and Isabella won Castile.

The next decade brought the glorious conquest of the Kingdom of Granada. In the medieval tradition, King Abū al-ḤasanՙAlī had adopted an aggressive attitude during the Castilian disorders; now his son Muḥammad XI (or Boabdil to the Spanish) faced a united Aragon and Castile. In the period 1482-1492, the Catholic monarchs, as Pope Alexander VI called Ferdinand and Isabella, waged continuing warfare against the Muslims. Ferdinand headed Castilian forces in this great adventure and so consolidated his personal leadership. Isabella’s role in providing funds, men, and supplies confirmed the essential importance of their partnership.

Muḥammad’s surrender ended the 780-year Christian reconquest of Iberia and brought Spain’s Middle Ages to an end. That same year, sponsorship of the first Christopher Columbus voyage and a decree expelling Jews from Castile signaled the beginning of Spain’s modern age.

The years from the victory in Granada to Isabella’s death brought signal triumph and personal disappointment. In 1495, Ferdinand and Isabella launched a war commanded by a Castilian nobleman, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, against Aragon’s traditional enemy, France, for control of the Kingdom of Naples. Continued by their successors, this struggle brought Spain’s domination of Italy. A series of marriage alliances further strengthened them against France.

The Portuguese alliance always remained paramount. Their eldest daughter, Isabella, first married Prince John, son of John II of Portugal, and, after his death, King Manuel I . When this Isabella died, Manuel married her sister Maria. Typical of the new era of peaceful relations with Portugal, the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas amicably adjusted the 1493 papal line of demarcation that, consequent to the Columbus voyage, had divided the non-European world into Spanish and Portuguese hemispheres. Ferdinand and Isabella’s only son, John (d. 1497), married a Habsburg, and their second daughter, Joan, married Philip of Burgundy, who was also a Habsburg. Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Catherine of Aragon embarked on a tragic career in Tudor England as wife of Prince Arthur and later of King Henry VIII.

After Isabella’s death, her husband continued their life’s work, his course shaped by a series of accidents. Castile passed to the control of Joan and her Habsburg husband, and Ferdinand married a second wife, Germaine de Foix. Ferdinand and Germaine’s son died soon after his birth. Joan’s mental instability and her husband’s death in 1506 restored Ferdinand’s position as regent, now for Joan’s son Charles (later King Charles I of Spain and Emperor Charles V ). Yet only Ferdinand’s military defeat of the Andalusian nobles made the regency effective. A series of ventures in North Africa culminated in the 1509 conquest of Oran, financed by archbishop of Toledo Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros . A final triumph came in the conquest of Spanish Navarre in 1512, realizing the claim of Queen Germaine to that region. This conquest rounded out Spain’s national boundaries; for the rest of his life, Ferdinand devoted himself to aligning Spanish policy with that of the Habsburgs.

Significance

In many ways, Ferdinand II and Isabella I superintended a transition to the national and cultural unity that provided the base for Spain’s modern world influence. Though they left local affairs largely in the hands of barons and city oligarchies, the Royal Council provided a protobureaucratic center. This council took charge of the Holy Brotherhood, and one of its members became president of the Mesta, Castile’s great shepherds’ guild. Through meetings of the Cortes and the junta of the Holy Brotherhood, the monarchs maintained contact with representatives of the cities, and corregidores acted as their agents in the cities. If Spain’s laws remained as diverse as the multiplicity of its political units, Ferdinand and Isabella compiled Castile’s medieval laws together with their own proclamations to serve as a guiding framework. They themselves traveled constantly through their kingdoms, providing personal justice.

Their strengthening of the Catholic culture and fostering of a Spanish national type made Spain a leader in the Catholic Reformation in Europe and the world. A papal decree in 1478 established the Spanish Inquisition under royal control to ferret out crypto-Jews. Combined with edicts in 1492 and 1502 obliging Jews and Muslims respectively either to convert or to leave Castile, the Inquisition largely established a Christian norm in place of medieval cultural diversity. Later it repressed Protestantism in Spain.

In Aragon, Ferdinand reactivated the older Papal Inquisition, but the appointment of Tomás de Torquemada as grand inquisitor for both kingdoms and the establishment of a Council of the Inquisition made it a national institution. Appointment in 1495 of Isabella’s confessor, the ascetic, selfless Jiménez de Cisneros, as archbishop of Toledo, in contrast to the lusty and ambitious Carrillo, acted to reform and control the Church. (Jiménez became grand inquisitor in 1507.) Jiménez de Cisneros’s reform of the Spanish Franciscans and his founding of the University of Alcalá de Henares show a more positive dimension. The university adopted the Erasmian approach of using Renaissance scholarship for religious purposes.

Certainly no act of the reign had greater long-range impact than sponsorship of Columbus. Though Castile had engaged in conquest of the Canary Islands since 1479, the American voyages looked beyond Africa to world empire. Hampered by very limited revenues, Ferdinand and Isabella continued their sponsorship of this enterprise when significant monetary returns seemed problematical. The new American empire posed unprecedented problems of distance and dimension involving treatment of the American Indians and control of Columbus’s enormous claims as discoverer. Their development of viceregal authority went beyond anything in the tradition of Aragon, the conquest of the Canaries, or the feudalism of the Reconquest.

Bibliography

Boruchoff, David A., ed. Isabel la Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Anthology of essays that seek to penetrate the carefully crafted public self-image of Isabella to gain insight into the actual woman. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Hillgarth, J. N. 1410-1516, Castilian Hegemony. Vol. 2 in The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250-1516. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1978. A work of solid scholarship, with special emphasis on the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. The great advantage of the book lies in its consideration of events in Aragon and the other Spanish kingdoms.

Kamen, Henry. Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Surveys the roles played by Ferdinand and Isabella in the fashioning of Spain’s global empire. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, index.

Lunenfeld, Marvin. Keepers of the City: The Corregidores of Isabella I of Castile. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Based on archival research, this book is the sort of institutional history that has made possible newer interpretations of the subject. Lunenfeld has also written a similar book on the Council of the Holy Brotherhood.

Merriman, R. B. The Catholic Kings. Vol. 2 in The Rise of the Spanish Empire in the Old World and the New. New York: Macmillan, 1918. Reprint. New York: Cooper Square, 1962. A monumental work with narrative detail not found elsewhere in English, but for this reign, the book is otherwise superseded by the books of Hillgarth and the others cited earlier. Its interpretations are outmoded, and its facts not always reliable. Its long reign as the standard English work on Ferdinand and Isabella partly explains the even longer reign of William H. Prescott’s biography.

Miller, Townsend. The Castles and the Crown: Spain, 1451-1555. New York: Coward & McCann, 1963. Although written with a lively style and based on chronicles, this book does not take account of modern scholarship. Its interpretations are of the Prescott school.

Nader, Helen. The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 1350-1550. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1979. A work of solid scholarship with a very important focus on a great baronial family. The Mendozas were as important in this reign as the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.

Prescott, William H. History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic. 3d ed. 3 vols. New York: Hooper, Clark, 1841. Reprint. Abridged by C. Harvey Gardiner. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. The pioneering work in English that is also the longest. Many of Prescott’s interpretations and his scholarship are completely outdated. The book, for example, overemphasizes Isabella’s importance by denigrating Ferdinand. Like Miller’s book, it can still be read for pleasure.

Thomas, Hugh. Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003. Decidedly conservative and Eurocentric history of Spanish colonialism during Ferdinand and Isabella’s rule. Includes photographic plates, illustrations, maps, bibliographic references, and index.

Walsh, William Thomas. Isabella of Spain, the Last Crusader. New York: Robert M. McBride, 1930. Deserves attention as a long, detailed work that is a biography of the queen, not a history of the reign or a study of Spain in her times.

Woodward, Geoffrey. Spain in the Reigns of Isabella and Ferdinand, 1474-1516. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997. Comprehensive analysis of the social, political, religious, and economic aspects of Ferdinand and Isabella’s reign, as well as their foreign policies and relations. Includes illustrations, map, genealogical table, bibliographic references, and index.