Young Isabel, sister of the king, sits in her castle tower at Medina, and looks beyond Castile: looks south to the Moorish realm, Granada; looks east and north to the kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre; looks west to Portugal. “Let there be Spain,” says Isabel of Castile.
Her own land is riven in chaos. Ferdinand the Saint who won Córdoba and Seville from the Moslem was a strong monarch. But Alfonso the Learnèd was not wise in ruling. There have been two hundred years of banditry, of baronial insolence, of royal wavering. Castile is a quicksand upon which no will can march. Only the penniless submit to taxes. Nobles are outlaws. Rome parcels out appointments in the Church to alien lackeys. Prelates of Spain go their own way with their own crimson armies, or sulk in arrogant safety in their fortress-churches. Tolerance has begotten anarchy. Ideas annul each other in the too free sun. And God, with many faces, turns against Himself.
Isabel, looking from the bastioned windows of her tower out upon Castile is a luminous quiet heart in the storm. King Henry, the Impotent, is fertile of disaster. His favorites juggle with the scepter, scribble upon the royal parchment commands of idleness and of ambition. One of his favorites, Beltrán, has begotten on the Queen a daughter: and Joanna’s growth is the growth of fresh dynastic war. Alfonso, the king’s brother, claims the throne and writes his claim on the sparse wheatfields of Castile, making them desert. Portugal pushes: France plots and watches. Each fortune has its army. Each church is a castle. Each mountain is either an ambush or a throne. “Let there be Spain,” says Isabel of Castile.
She will be queen: but in her own way. And her way, like her will, is her rapt possession by the spirit of her land. Her brother, Alfonso, has died: his faction demand of her that she assume the Crown and drive out the impotent king. Isabel refuses. She bargains with Henry. While he lives, he is to rule. But his pseudo-daughter shall renounce: his adulterous wife shall return to Portugal: Isabel shall be acknowledged heiress of Castile. Henry gives his word, and breaks it. He is neither friend nor foe. He is a symbol of Spain’s brackish chaos. Isabel holds to her castle. She is almost penniless; but she has for confessor a couched eagle, Cisneros, who is to second her mysterious work. Isabel learns that her brother the king plots to imprison her for the sake of Joanna whom the heir of Portugal has married. Isabel summons Ferdinand, heir to Aragon, to come and wed her. She is thinking of Spain; and her articulate will has convinced the old King Juan of Aragon, Ferdinand’s father, that she is going to win—and that the union is good.
Disguised and penniless, Ferdinand crosses the hostile land and reaches the princess in Valladolid. He is seventeen: a lissom, romantic knight, the impact of whose bloods—Latin, Goth and Jew—has kindled a swift fire in his face. He sees this girl, tall and stately and one year his elder: her ruddy hair is a braided glow about her brow, the great blue eyes are a sky for the large rigor of her features. He enters the mansion of her love, to dwell forever within the sway of her will. For her will is Spain. He is brilliant, sharp, ubiquitous: but her will has place for him. Let him move from Italy to Peru: he will yet be within the will of Isabel.
The married boy and girl are fettered by penury in Castile; and like a breath to move them wait the death of Henry. He dies when Isabel is twenty-three. Portugal marches eastward for Joanna. His great army is a shadow in León. Isabel’s faction dwindles. Ferdinand, wise consort, proposes peace with Portugal at the price of Zamora and other bastions of the west. Isabel refuses. She is pregnant. She makes long night journeys on horse, to her recalcitrant towns. She pleads before rough communes and proud ricos hombres. She spends her woman’s strength—she and Spain will suffer for it—but she does not entail her still shadowy queen’s power. She makes recruits. She has a good field general in her husband. Portugal loses heart before this hearty mother of unborn Spain. The stubborn towns of Castile rally to her. In 1479 Juan of Aragon dies: Ferdinand becomes king: Castile and Aragon at last are wedded with their monarchs.
“Let there be Spain,” is the rhythm of Isabel’s thought.
“We have not yet won Castile,” she tells her husband on the march to the long, last war for the conquest of Granada.
From ages of invasion and dissent, Spain has become this throbbing swarm of aroused centrifugal impulse. Ideas, races, communities, men: a boiling tumult to be summed and stilled. Spain longs for peace: Spain longs to become Spain. From her multiverse of wills, she has willed a symbol: this person, fair and strong. She has willed Isabel who is the flesh of Spain’s will.
Isabel is one possessed. Her vision, thought and sense move in one cycle. To her, physical love is not this tenderness between herself and her man: it is a joining of Aragon and Castile. To her, physical fecundity is not her woman’s flower: it is the providing by a queen of counters for dynastic matches.