Before her time, in Spain, war had been waged by the great nobles and their retainers in attendance upon the king. There was no such thing as uniformity of action or preparation, no central organization of any kind. Each man went into battle to fight and to forage as opportunity offered. Each commander vied with his fellow nobles in deeds of bravery, and accorded to them such support as he chose. The sovereign exercised a general authority, and assumed the active command of the united multitude of soldiers, on rare and important occasions. If victory followed, as at the Navas de Tolosa, the soldiers were rewarded with the plunder, and took possession of the property of the enemy. If the Christians were defeated, the army melted away; and the king betook himself to the nearest shelter.
But Isabella had no sooner assumed the title of Queen of Castile, than she was called upon to maintain her pretensions in the field. With no experience but that of a country palace, with no training but that of a country cloister, she set herself to work to organize an army. On the 1st of May, 1474, five hundred horsemen represented the entire forces of the fair usurper. By the 19th of July she had collected over forty thousand men, had armed and equipped them ready for the field, and had sent them forward under the command of Ferdinand to the frontier. Although she was at the time in delicate health, she was constantly in the saddle, riding long distances from fortress to fortress, hurrying up recruits all day, dictating letters all night, giving her zealous personal attention to every detail of armory and equipment, showing from the first that quiet energy and that natural aptitude for command that ever so constantly distinguished her. That her levies were not victorious in no way daunted her determination. A second army was raised by her, within a few weeks after the first had melted away under Ferdinand; nor would she listen to any offers of negotiation, until the enemy had been driven out of Castile.
In the conduct of the war of Granada, with time and money at her command, her preparations were upon a very different scale. The most skillful artificers were summoned from every part of Europe to assist in the work of supplying the army with the necessary material of war. Artillery, then almost unknown to the military art, was manufactured in Spain according to the best designs. Model cannon were imported, and the necessary ammunition collected from abroad. Sword-blades were forged at home. Not only a commissariat, but a field hospital—institutions till then unheard of in Spanish warfare—were organized and maintained under the personal supervision of the queen. The presence of a lady on the day of battle would, as a rule, as she rightly judged, have been rather a hinderance than a help; but she was very far from being a mere commissioner of supply. A first-rate horsewoman, she was constantly seen riding about the camp, encouraging, inspecting, directing; and in the last days of the siege of Granada, when the spirits of the troops had begun to flag, she appeared daily in complete armor, and showed herself upon more than one occasion in a post of danger on the field. The armies with which Gonsalvo de Cordova overran Calabria, and annihilated the French at Cerignola, were prepared and dispatched by Isabella; and if, in a subsequent campaign, the Great Captain was left without supplies or re-enforcements, it was that the queen was already sickening to her death, broken down and worn out by her constant and enormous exertions.
But with all her aptitude for military organization, Isabella had no love for war. Her first campaign was undertaken to make good her pretensions to the crown. The extermination of the Moslems was a matter of religious feeling and patriotic pride, rather than an object of military glory; but she refused to pursue her conquest across the Straits of Gibraltar. The expeditions to Italy were a part of Ferdinand’s diplomacy, though the honor of victory must be shared between Isabella and her Great Captain. But the queen’s ambition lay not in conquest abroad. On the contrary, as soon as the last province in Spain had been delivered from the foreign yoke of the Moor, she turned her attention to the peaceful development of the kingdom; and, unlettered warrior as she was, she bestowed her royal patronage upon students and studies, rather than upon the knights and nobles who had fought her battles before Granada.
The old foundations of the Universities, the new art of printing, scholarship, music, architecture found in her a generous patron, not so much from predilection as from policy. Men of letters and men of learning were welcomed at her court, not only from every part of Spain, but from every part of Europe. For herself she had little appreciation of literature. She neither knew nor cared what influence her beloved Inquisition would have upon science. But as long as the queen lived, learning was honored in Spain.
In this, as in all other things, her judgment of men was unerring. The queen who made Gonsalvo the commander-in-chief of her armies, and Ximenez the president of her council, who selected Torquemada as her grand inquisitor, and Talavera as her archbishop of Granada, made no mistake when she invited Peter Martyr to instruct her son in polite letters, and commissioned Lebrija to compose the first Castilian Grammar for the use of her court.
Her beauty of face and form are familiar. Yet vanity was unknown to her nature. Simple and abstemious in her daily life, and despising pomp for its own sake, no one could make a braver show on fitting occasions; and the richness of her apparel, the glory of her jewels, and the noble dignity of her presence, have been celebrated by subjects and strangers.
At the death of Isabella, Ferdinand, in accordance with the provisions of her will, caused his daughter, Joanna, to be proclaimed queen and himself regent. Philip, archduke of Austria, the husband of Joanna, having disputed the rights of his father-in-law and threatened an appeal to arms, the latter in disgust, with the view of again separating the crowns of Aragon and Castile, entered into negotiations with Louis XII., married Germaine de Foix, the niece of Louis (1505), and shortly afterward resigned the regency of Castile. On the death of Philip, in 1506, he resumed the administration, though not without opposition, and retained it till his death. In 1508 he joined the League of Cambray for the partition of Venice, and thus without any trouble became master of five important Neapolitan cities.
In the following year (1509) the African expedition of Cardinal Ximenez was undertaken, which resulted in the conquest of Oran. In 1511 Ferdinand joined Venice and Pope Julius II. in a “holy league” for the expulsion of the French from Italy. This gave a pretext for invading Navarre, which had entered into alliance with France, and been laid under Papal interdict in consequence. Aided by his son-in-law Henry VIII. of England, who sent a squadron under the Marquis of Dorset to co-operate in the descent on Guienne, Ferdinand became master of Navarre in 1513; and on June 15, 1515, by a solemn act in Cortes held at Burgos, he incorporated it with the kingdom of Castile.
The League of Cambray, which was signed on the 10th of December, 1508, between Louis XII., the Emperor Maximilian, and Ferdinand of Aragon, at the instance of the warlike Pope Julius II., was nominally directed against the Turks, but was in reality a coalition for the destruction and partition among the confiscators of the rich State of Venice. If anything was wanted to make this league of public plunderers more corrupt and more odious than it would under any circumstances have been, it was that the kings of France and of Aragon, in order to secure the adhesion of the Medicis, sacrificed their faithful allies, the Pisans, after solemn assurances of protection and support, and actually sold that ancient city to the Florentines, their hereditary enemies, for a hundred thousand ducats.