Of Don Ferdinand, Shakespeare says, “The wisest monarch that ever ruled in Spain”; but the question is, how much of this “wisdom” was due to the far-seeing policy of his adoring wife and to the illustrious servants who so loyally carried out his will?
CHAPTER XXIV
Los Reyes Catolicos
HE union of Ferdinand and Isabel (Los Reyes Catolicos) knits mediæval with modern times.
The whole round of royal actors in the dramatic epoch move before us as living characters on the stage of life. Their daughter Juana, la Folle, her handsome husband Philippe le Bel, Duke of Burgundy, the parents of Charles V., Katharine, her younger sister, married to King Henry VIII., Philip II., his son Don Carlos, and Elizabeth of Spain, bring us on to modern wars with Alva and Orange, the Armada, and our own Queen Elizabeth.
At once the royal spouses were involved in anarchy and war.
Alfonso, King of Portugal, brother to the bad queen, actually espoused his niece, Juana la Beltraneja, then thirteen, to gain the throne. But he was defeated by Ferdinand, and the standard of Portugal—borne by the gallant De Almeyda first with his right hand, then with his left, when, losing both arms, he held it in his teeth—was torn to shreds. Alfonso retreated, and the Beltraneja, the innocent cause of so much strife and bloodshed, disgusted with a world in which she had found nothing but sorrow, took the black veil at the convent of Santa Chiara at Coimbra.
Ferdinand was, before everything, a soldier. He lived on the battle-field, and the queen, who followed him in all things with devoted love, rode with him in his campaigns, mounted on a war-horse, encased in mail, at the head of her Castilians.
When not engaged in war, she went to and fro in her own kingdom, reforming abuses, founding convents and churches, and enforcing the laws, fallen into much disuse during the riotous reign of her brother; in all assisted by her great minister, Cardinal Ximenes, her friend and secretary, Peter Martyr, Cardinal Mendoza, Garcilaso de la Vega, and, alas! be it added, by her fanatic confessor, Cardinal Torquemada, whose influence brought about the creation of the tribunal of the Inquisition, “To unite more firmly,” it was said, “Church and State, and to discover and extirpate all heresies, Jews, and unbelievers from the kingdom” (1480).
Two such sovereigns could not long leave the Moors in undisturbed possession of the third of Spain. The north of Africa (Barbary) was theirs, with Sicily and, afterwards, Naples. Ferdinand loved conquest for itself, and, to the pious mind of Isabel, the conversion of the Moslem was a duty direct from God. But as they, with a dogmatism equal to her own, despised the Castilians as unlettered boors, and ridiculed their religion, nothing could solve the difficulty but a cruel war.