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Isabella of Castile: life of the week
00:47:50
Giles Tremlett explores the life and history-altering reign of the woman who helped launch the Spanish Inquisition and financed Columbus' journey to the 'New World'
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Bob Dylan is the reason for it.
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Inspired by the true story if anyone.
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Is going to hold your attention on.
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Stage, you have to kind of be a freak. Are you a freak? Hope so. And starring Timothee Chalamet as Bob Dylan. He defied everyone.
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Turn it down.
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They lie to change everything.
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Make some noise.
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BD Timothee Chalamet Edward Norton El Fanny Monica Barbaro A complete unknown Only in theaters Christmas Day pretty DAR under 1790 minute without parenting this episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha ching. So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today. This episode is brought to you by aws. Amazon Q Business is the generative AI assistant that can securely understand your business data, summarize results and streamline tasks. Learn what Amazon Q Business can do for you@aws.com learnmore hello and welcome to Life of the Week from History Extra, where leading historians delve into the lives of history's most intriguing and significant figures. From the fall of Granada to the issuing of the Alhambra Decree, Isabella of Castile's reign was one that witnessed an extraordinary amount of history altering events and as such has earned her quite the complex legacy. Speaking to Me Emily Briffitz for today's Life of the Week episode, Giles Tremlett introduces the woman who helped launch the Spanish Inquisition and finance Columbus Journey to the New World. Hi Giles, thank you so much for joining me on the History Extra podcast.
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B
Good morning Emily. It's a pleasure to be here again.
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A
Today you're going to be introducing us to Isabella of Castile. So just so our listeners have a sense of what's coming up in our conversation, would you be able to give us a brief 60 second introduction biography.
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B
To Isabella okay, so Isabella of Castile is Europe's first great Queen regnant. The first woman who truly wields massive and long lasting power in Europe. She's late 15th century to early 16th century. People will know her especially because of some amazing events that happened during her reign that runs from the Spanish Inquisition, infamous as it is, to the discovery and I'm doing air quotes of the Americas with Christopher Columbus to the expulsion of Spain's Jews, the Sephardic diaspora which is provoked by her and her husband Ferdinand of Aragon, and the final stage of the reconquest of Spain which is this 8 century long process of fighting back against the Islamic invaders who arrived in 7 11.
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A
So plenty of events that we are going to be talking about here, but while we're getting to know Isabella, could you just tell us what do we know about what she actually looked like? If listeners are trying to picture her?
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B
Well, we have a few descriptions of her, we have a few, not very many portraits of her as a young woman. She becomes queen at the age of just 23. She has this sort of auburn hair and these light coloured, slightly greenish eyes which we think probably have something to do with her English great grandmother who is from the Lancaster family. That's how she is as a young woman. There are some fairly, I'm not going to say ghastly, but very austere portraits of her as a much older woman where she looks somewhat grim, I have to say a very serious person, a sort of a face that fits the Counter Reformation, which of course she's an important part of as well. But she's always, you know, a very strong character and I think that also transmits through the very few portraits that.
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A
We have of her speaking about her character. What do we actually know about this? Can we get any glimpses of her personality at all?
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B
Yes, there are plenty of glimpses of Isabella. I have to say A lot of it has to be mistrusted because she was very clever. She had her own sort of paid up propaganda corps, the chroniclers of the time, who had to present their work to the monarch for approval. What, what I take away from studying her above all is what I call the intensity of her character. She's very passionate about many things. She's passionate in her belief, about her own power and her own destiny, let's call it to make Spain or to make Castile great and to fight for Christendom, which is having a bad moment with the Ottomans. But she's also very intense in her personal relationships. We see it in her jealousy in over her husband, her husband's lovers, which was something fairly routine in those days. But this kind of shines through the chronicles. She's forever removing certain women from the court. But most of all, as I say, she's very intense. And that reflects not just in her personal life, but also in the way she rules. She's also a mother, of course, and one of the things she's very interested in doing is educating her children, especially her daughters. She herself, later in life sort of educates herself. She takes on tutors to teach her things because she was never educated to rule. And as a young girl, she wasn't expected to need any skills beyond marrying. So she then became a very determined educator of her own daughters, one of whom, of course, Catherine of Aragon went on to marry Henry VIII and played a very important part in the course of English British history.
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A
I think that gives us a fab picture of Isabella, her character and a little bit of what's to come. So we should probably go right back to the beginning. Where and when was Isabella born and to whom?
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B
Okay, so Isabella of Castile is born on the 22nd of April, 1451. So she's bang in the middle of the 15th century. And she's a child of Castile on one side, but also on the other side of Portugal, which is where her mother's family comes from. Isabella is the daughter of a king of Castile. Castile is, let's call it, half of Spain. It's probably more than half of Spain. But as you look at the map, Spain was basically divided into four bits at the time. On the right hand side, Barcelona, if you want, is the crown of Aragon. On the left hand side and to the north, bordering Portugal, is Castile. It's the most populous part of Spain. There's 4 million people. More importantly, there's 5 million sheep, which is where Castile gets its wealth from. And at the same time, at the time she's born, there are still Muslim kingdoms in the south, specifically the kingdom of Granada. And there's a tiny little bit up in the north, Navarre, which is still an independent kingdom as well.
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A
Perfect. And what do we know about her early life growing up? So I think for much of it, her half brother's on the throne. Is that correct?
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B
Indeed. So she grows up. Nobody thinks that Isabella is going to become a queen to begin with. Obviously, her father, who's Juan ii, John ii, is ruling in Castile. After that, her half brother, Enrique Cuarto. Henry Ivan takes over. And, you know, everybody expects Henrique to have his own children and that they will inherit and that she will sit it out as young princesses did, waiting to be Married to the most suitable person, or rather the most useful person, to either her father or her half brother. All that will change because Enrique eventually dies without having any children. But Isabella, who grows up with another brother who was also above her in the right to inherit the crown, obviously never thought that she was going to be queen.
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A
As you said, Isabella goes on to marry Ferdinand. Now, what was her route into this marriage, this alliance?
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B
Isabella's route into the marriage with Ferdinand basically follows a strange path, where her brother Alfonso dies and she becomes a power, basically because she represents the only threat to her half brother, Enrique. And they sort of do a deal where she says she will continue to support him, but as long as she has some say over who she can marry. In fact, the deal gives him a veto as well. But Isabella really begins to show her teeth very young. She's still 17, 18 at this stage. And they're talking about various candidates in France, in England, anywhere else that might be useful to Henrique, the king, but also might be useful as an alliance, but also might be useful basically for removing her from Spain so that she can't become a focus for any challenge to him. What actually happens is that she does a secret deal with Ferdinand. He's also very, very young. We're talking about two teenagers here. And Ferdinand, in the end, has to sneak his way into Castile. He joins a party of nobles, dresses up as if he's one of their servants, and is sneaked into Castile so that he can marry Isabella. And the two of them basically present this as a fait accompli to Enrique. It's a remarkable moment because it's a moment of rebellion, if you want, against the king. And in this sense, Isabella isn't operating alone. She's found allies amongst some of the great feudal barons, but it's also a remarkable link up between the two halves of Spain. So Aragon and Castile are sort of united in this marriage, but again, there's no guarantee that she's going to become queen because there is a king and that king is married, and that king, in theory, is going to have children, and in theory, those children are going to inherit the throne.
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A
So you've spoken about their power as an alliance between kingdoms there. But also, I think Isabella and Ferdinand are sometimes presented as a bit of a power couple, a dynamic duo. What do we actually know about their relationship? Can we get close to that at all?
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B
Yeah. So it's a fairly remarkable relationship, not just on the personal level, where they seem to build up a form of trust that allows them to be you know, if we were talking in contemporary terms, sort of co CEOs of a massive business, which eventually is Spain, but they do manage somehow to share power. There are not many organizations where people actually share. Two individuals share power right at the top. In this case, it helps that they actually represent two separate kingdoms. So Ferdinand is arrogant, which is smaller and weaker, and so he has a disadvantage in terms of the strength of what he brings to the table to begin with. And Isabella has the larger, more powerful kingdom, but is a woman, which is a weakness at the time. And so the arrangement basically is that they will power share in Castile and in Aragon, much less where he will have greater power. That power sharing in Castile really works. Decisions either need to be signed off by both of them, let's say, or they trust one another sufficiently to make decisions independently. And in fact they rush around the country. At one stage they're in different places and they have to make independent decisions. But basically they support one another and at the same time they're sort of bringing a quiet revolution to the way in which you rule a country. We're going from the period of the feudal barons to a more modern, slightly absolutist. It's very early to be using the term absolutist, but a slightly absolutist state where the state is being run for them by bureaucrats. So they're moving away from a dependency on the power of feudal barons to basically building a centralized state, at least in Castile. But again, it's very important to remember it's two kingdoms joined by marriage, not by law or by rules. And when one of them dies, those two kingdoms will split again. So we've sort of. We're having a first go, if you want, at what becomes eventually Spain. But formally, those two kingdoms are not welded together as one single entity.
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A
And we should just track back slightly here. So when and how did Isabella come to the throne?
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So Isabella comes to the throne after she's married to Ferdinand. Enrique dies. Her half brother, he was always very sickly. He was considered to be a weak king, as was in fact their father, Juan ii. Both of them depended on what were known as validos or privados, who was a powerful noble who basically ran the state for them and enriched themselves at the same time. So when Enrique dies, Enrique does actually have his own daughter, Isabella la beltraneja. There are lots of rumours about Embrique. He has a sort of strange illness and it seems he may or may not have been impotent. And so the question is, who is his daughter. And the rumours were that his daughter wasn't biologically his, but that didn't really matter because he formally accepted her as his heiress. And so when he died, really the crown should have gone to her. But because of the different factions amongst the nobles, some of whom were supporting Isabella, Isabella decides to basically usurp power. She grabs power and with the help of Ferdinand and with the help of various other nobles, she's able to install herself completely and basically expel her rival who has to go to a monastery in Portugal. You know, in Spanish history is very interesting because of course Isabella is this key personality in the history of Spain. She's much bigger than say Henry VIII in Britain. And so there's a certain unwillingness to accept the fact that she's a usurper. But I'm quite happy to state that's exactly what she was. But she's a very successful one and they have a short war against her rivals backers and they win that. And after that, well, she and Ferdinand are established as the co rulers of Castile. Ferdinand is still waiting to inherit his kingdom from his father who's still alive in Aragonso. To begin with, their area of power is Castile and Castile alone.
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B
Okay, so they are the first king and queen of a geographical area that today we recognize as Spain. In fact, in the formal sense, they are the queen of Castile and the king of Aragon ruling together, but ruling separate countries together. Okay, so it's a key difference. And even within Aragon, there's actually four different kingdoms which the king of Aragon rules over. And in fact, there's more than that's four kingdoms in Spain, but there are also some kingdoms over in Italy, in Naples and Southern Italy. So it's a complex map. Any Catalan who was listening to me would be, you know, very keen that I should point this out that Spain was not united as one country in the 15th century, that that took, you know, a lot longer. But also the answer is yes, this is the beginning of a process of bringing the disparate parts of what we now recognize as Spain together.
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A
Thank you. That's a really important side note to cover there. Indeed, when Isabella came to the throne, if we say what was the state of Castile at this time, when Isabella.
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B
Takes the throne of Castile. Castile is having a fairly rough period in its history. Several things are going on. First of all, there have been weak kings, her half brother and her father. And so there's been much feuding between the different feudal lords. And there's been effectively lots of sort of small civil wars as they fight one another or they fight the monarch. And so that's, you know, disturbed things for quite a while. Another thing that's going on is that Spain had gained a new category of full citizen sort of at the beginning of the 15th century, at the end of the 14th century, when there were lots of pogroms against Jews. Spain had the world's largest Jewish community at the end of the 14th century. And those pogroms resulted in a lot of conversion of Jewish families who became what became known as New Christians. And as New Christians, they were allowed into the state of Castile as equals with Old Christians. And as they were mostly city based, this had produced a sort of period of confrontation between Old Christians and New Christians in various cities. And so there was also a lot of conflict going on there. And occasionally you would have sort of mini civil wars within Spanish cities as these sort of two nuclei of power, the Old Christians and the New Christians, fought it out. And then on another level, there were always you know, frontier wars to fight with Aragon to the east, with Portugal to the west, with Navarre and with France to the north, and very importantly to the south with the last remaining Islamic Muslim kingdom of Spain, which is Granada. So all that is going on. But at the same time, Castile is wealthy. It has its 5 million sheep. Its wool exports are very important. Traders are coming down from all the way around northern Europe to buy wool and then taking that wool to Flanders and other places, which is where a lot of the, let's call the transformation of wool into cloth was going on. So it was, let's say, rich but chaotic.
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A
It seems that there's a lot for a ruler to deal with. Lots of pressures being placed on the kingdom. What policies or improvements or perhaps, maybe, maybe not improvements did Isabella put in place during her rule?
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B
So the most important thing that Isabella and Ferdinand are doing together right from the beginning is this idea of centralizing power in the royal court. So we don't get a repetition of the infighting between the different feudal lords. You know, they're very, very young, they're still in their early 20s, but they're very effective at this. One of the reasons is, apart from the fact that they win their own wars and they're good at building the alliances that allow them to do that internally, is that they very quickly turn their attention to Granada, which is as a Muslim kingdom, they feel they have the right to conquer and conquest brings prizes. And they were able to turn the attention of their nobles, those feudal lords, turn it south and towards the exterior, so that those lords were basically more interested in what then became a war in Granada and what they could get from there, because there was lots of land and lots of power to be won there. And that became an important part of what they were doing, so that they could sort of unite their nobles in this, basically a crusade to conquer the kingdom of Granada. Essentially the most important thing they're doing is transferring power from the nobles to the royal court. And the royal court is them. And then below them is a new bureaucracy which is very modern for the period where, you know, this is the transition to the early modern period. And they're really amongst the first to use this new system of government.
- [23:51]
A
Now, obviously, Granada then falls to their hands later in their reign. Why is this such a big moment?
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B
Okay, so the Reconquista, as it was called, I have to say, after it was carried out, this reconquering of Christian Spain is this eight century long process. So it's very gradual where the Muslims who crossed over the Strait of Gibraltar from what is today Morocco, and conquered Spain very quickly in 711. They are sort of slowly pushed back, or rather their kingdoms and their governance is pushed back, because Spain, even Christian Spain, has Muslims living inside it. And that's one of the extraordinary things about the Castile that Isabella inherits. And so this is a very, very long process. And basically what Isabella is doing and Ferdinand are doing is they're finishing it off. Granada is the very last kingdom. It's been in Muslim hands for 800 years, for eight centuries. Well, if we think the space that separates us now from 1492, which is the year when the kingdom of Granada is finally handed over to Isabella and Ferdinand, well, you'll see that Granada's Christian history, or most recent length of Christian history, is still shorter than its previous stretch of Muslim history. We have to wait another century or two before it catches up with that. So, you know, these are very major changes for Spain, but it's also part of reconfiguring Spain as this sort of new, pure Christian entity. This is something that Isabella especially feels very strongly. There's a character, Tomas de Torquemada. Torquemada, who's sort of infamous in the British version of Spanish history as the head of the Inquisition. And he's sort of an influential character, as are other people who then form part of the Inquisition, who are constantly counseling Isabella about what to do. I have to say, they're not the only voices. There are much more moderate voices in the Spanish church. So there's a sort of bit of a competition going on around her. But that quest for purity goes on to have other major impacts, with major decisions that are made by Isabella and by Ferdinand as king and queen.
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A
As you mentioned, the Spanish Inquisition, what was Isabella's role in and stance on the Spanish Inquisition?
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B
So the Spanish Inquisition is invented for and by Isabella and her husband Ferdinand. The original intention is that the Inquisition, which is a specifically Spanish thing, there had been other Inquisitions around Christendom before, but this was a special Inquisition set up with the approval of the Vatican, a royal Inquisition, because it was embedded within the royal court and it was all about purging the new Christians of suspected secret Jews. That was the aim. Isabella was very keen on this, which is surprising because her half brother and her father had both basically rejected the idea that these new Christians were fakes. And it's only in Isabella's time, with much pressure from the old Christians and a certain amount of suspicion within the more sort of reactionary elements of the Church, that this idea is finally accepted that there are fake Christians in this community, which is descended from Spanish Jews. The study suggests that that's probably wrong. But Isabella is persuaded and her decision and the decision of Ferdinand, of them together is very important. Without them, we don't get the Spanish Inquisition. It's founded by them and will have a very long life.
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A
Of course, Isabella and Ferdinand are also famous for the Alhambra Decree with the expulsion of the Jews. Could you tell us a little bit more about this?
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B
Yes. So the expulsion of the Jews, which happens via the Alhambra decree, happens in 1492. This is, you know, a remarkable year in Spanish history. It's a remarkable year in global history. You know, major, major things are happening. It starts off very early with the rendition of the Muslim kingdom of Granada. So that's literally the 2nd of January. There are no longer any Muslim kingdoms in Spain for the first time in eight centuries, which is the start of a kind of purification process, and is followed. We already had. The Inquisition has been active for a while. That's also part of this purification process. And then we get the Alhambra degree, the expulsion order, which is not for the new Christians, it's for the remaining Jews. And the logic behind it is that these, or the supposed logic behind it is that these remaining Jews are somehow tempting the new Christians to be fake Christians on trying to lure some of them back to Judaism. There's not much evidence for that either, but. And again, this decision is actually inspired by the Inquisition. Again, Torquemada, who's also a bishop at the time, actually does a sort of mini expulsion from his own bishopric first. And basically the expulsion of the Jews is an extension the Inquisition. They're given three months to leave Spain. If you were at the frontiers with Portugal or in one of the ports around Spain in, say, June, July 1492, then these would have been packed with Jewish families. Again, we're talking about people who were Spaniards. They had lived in Spain, their families had lived in Spain for centuries and centuries. And, you know, the idea that they can finally be expelled is obviously hugely traumatic on a personal level for all of them. They have to sell their goods. They're not allowed to take gold and silver with them. They have to swallow some of that. And also, they really don't know what's going to happen to them. A lot of them go to Portugal, A lot of them go to the Kingdom of Fez, which is, let's call it Morocco today. And the lucky ones get to the Ottoman Empire, where they're treated well in Portugal. They're treated appallingly and eventually expelled from there as well. In Fez, they're also treated very badly. So it's a very traumatic period. In fact, there's some evidence that over the following years and decades, there's a sort of slow and secret return of a proportion of the expelled Sephardic Jews who then return as Christian converts and go back to their towns and villages. But it's a huge event.
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A
Isabella seems to have been more inclined to be a bit more hardlined and judicious than maybe more merciful and forgiving. Would you say that that's a fair judgment of Isabella?
- [31:36]
B
It's a very fair judgment to say that Isabella is harsh. She's considered harsh at the time. She has to impose discipline on a somewhat chaotic kingdom. And, you know, she does this in various ways, including sort of sending special, what we would call judicial commissions to various cities. Seville, for example, famously chaotic and where people do not always obey the law. And the punishments she metes out are very harsh to the extent that the people of Seville, via their bishop, you know, have to make a special plea to her to soften her attitude. Machiavelli was an admirer of her and of Ferdinand. They did not blanch at the exercise of power, at the use of violence, which was their right as monarchs. Isabella, in that sense, you know, was very firm, very decisive, and yes, in some people's eyes, very harsh. Though, of course, for other people who had decried the chaotic state of Castile, a country where, you know, laws were flouted, were very glad to then live in a country which was much more ordered, where the laws were obeyed and you knew what the rules were.
- [33:03]
A
Before we move on to talk about Isabella's later years and her legacy in more recent years, there's one more point I want to talk to you about, and that is in 1492, because this seems to have been a huge year in her life, is about the supposed discovery. And again, I'll use the air quote, marks of the New World with Christopher Columbus, another big name comes into this story. How was he connected to Isabella?
- [33:28]
B
So with Christopher Columbus, we are back again at this hugely important year of 1492. So Columbus had been flogging his idea of sailing west across the what we now know as the Atlantic Ocean, straight to Asia. He'd had several attempts at, you know, persuading people in Castile that this was a viable thing to do. Committees had been set up to study his proposals, and they'd always rejected his ideas. So we have Columbus in 1492. Standing outside the gates to Granada, he's watching the Alhambra handover. He has again failed to persuade the Castilians and Isabella's court that they should fund his trip to Asia. As he thinks it is, he rides off. But actually, on the second day, as he's riding off, he's caught up by a messenger, and that messenger is from Isabella, basically saying, we've changed our minds. Let's do this. It's not a lot of money. It's three small boats and 90 men. They're going to sail west. They may come back, they might not come back. And if it pays off, it might pay off very handsomely. So in August, Columbus sets off. After a while, they start getting desperate because they still can't see any land. And then finally, in October, you know, they spot what seems to be a small light somewhere on the horizon, and they sail towards it. And this is the discovery of the Americas by Europe, or at least a part of Europe that has the wealth and the power and the means to colonize, not just to visit, which is probably what the Vikings had done much earlier. And so it's an immense moment of change. I mean, to start with, obviously, Columbus doesn't know where he is. He still thinks he's in Asia. The remarkable thing is that he's able to sail back, bringing with him some native Daino people, some indigenous people from the Caribbean, and obviously is then able to repeat his journey, which he does, you know, again, in fact, he does four times, and starts this whole process of sailing from Spain across the Atlantic to originally to the Caribbean, and eventually, over time, well, the conquistadores, you know, discover mainland South America, and, you know, 1492 represents this huge change for Spain because suddenly it's going to have an empire. And that empire will eventually be the first empire on which the sun never sets and will convert Spain into a superpower. But it's also hugely important for the history of the world because it's the beginning of a transfer, if you want, of power and wealth from the east and the Far East. This is a huge flip, if you want, in the current of world history, the Atlantic nations will, over the next centuries, grow in wealth, the trading of slaves directly from Africa or indirectly from Africa to the Americas, which also starts under Isabella's reign and on her patch, because what Columbus does is he discovers air quotes again, the Americas for Castile, he doesn't discover them for Aragon. So these are Castilian lands. So in the global sense, it's hugely important. It also starts what they call the Colombian exchange of animals and plants and diseases. Everything is traveling across the world and changes the face of agriculture around the globe as well. So it's hugely important. It's important to Isabella, it's important to Spain. It really is, you know, the moment in which her reign is transformed into something of immense global impact. It's highly important.
- [37:35]
A
There seem to be an extraordinary amount of significant events taking place in Isabella's reign. What do we know about Isabella's later years?
- [37:46]
B
So Isabella's later years in many ways are quite calm. By then, she and Ferdinand have conquered Granada, so they've sort of mostly completed the rechristianization of what becomes Spain. Castile itself is well run. It's a fairly peaceful, prosperous plays. There are actually Spanish popes. The Borgias are actually from Valencia. And so we're also getting a good degree of understanding between Isabella and the Vatican. And of course, at the same time, from Christendom's point of view, territories and souls are being won in the Americas, even if it is by imposition and violence. And so those final years are really quite peaceful. There are lots of, you know, family issues that make it not so wonderful personally for Isabella. Some of her children start dying. And so in the family sense, it becomes somewhat bleaker. But in the global and the political sense, her power is very much established. She will die eventually in 1504. And it's very interesting to see. Of course, she has an heiress, Juana. She has no sons left and the kingdom split again. Ferdinand has to go off and be the King of Aragon again. Juana will remain the queen of Castile for decades, but she will never really govern. And the fact that she who inherits all this power is unable to exercise it, whereas Isabella, who basically had to grab that power or conquer it for herself, was able to rule and exercise power, I think, shows just how remarkable Isabella was.
- [39:48]
A
With all that in mind, what would you say Isabella's legacy is today, both in Spain and across the rest of the world?
- [39:56]
B
Well, it becomes very interesting because Isabella has a comeback in Spain in the 20th century. Spain has a dictatorship under Franco. This is long after Spain has lost its empire. And when Franco grabs power through a military coup, that becomes a civil war in the 1930s. When he's looking for a symbol of this Spain that he wishes to make great again, he turns to Isabella. She becomes, you know, the symbol of Spanish greatness and several monuments erected to Isabella during the Francoist period. And there's no arguing with the fact that Spain got an empire because of the events that happened during her reign. So, you know, to that extent, there's no doubting that she is one of the great figures of Spanish history, always, it has to be said, shared with her husband, with Ferdinand. But anyway, there she is as a figure and a first figure for, you know, the Spain of the early modern and modern era. So in the rest of the world, she's a curious figure. Her problem, of course, is, especially if we look back in the 20th century and we say Inquisition, expulsion of Jews, forced conversion of Muslims as well, and the colonization of large parts of Latin America with subsequent eradication of different peoples of Latin America, mostly through disease, the diseases that were imported into Latin America by Europeans thanks to Columbus and the different fleets that Isabella and Ferdinand sent over to the Americas. You can imagine that as a result, her global standing isn't very high by 20th century terms. And for a long time, especially in the Protestant world in Britain and in the United States, she was sort of looked down upon as the sort of the mother of the Inquisition and the mother of this sort of Counter Reformation Spain, which challenged and fought against the Protestant nations. So in that sense, she doesn't have a great reputation in the rest of Europe. But if we suspend our sort of 20th century thoughts and just take a distant and cold view of her role in history and also look at her as a woman exercising power in the 15th century and the early 16th century, I don't think there's any doubt at all that she is one of the most remarkable people in European history.
- [42:48]
A
I think that's a really fascinating point to leave us on. Thank you so much for joining me today, Giles.
- [42:52]
B
That's right. It's been a pleasure.
- [42:57]
A
That was Giles Tremlett speaking to me. Emily Griffith Giles is a historian and author of numerous books on Spanish history, including Isabella of Castile, Europe's first great queen, published by Bloomsbury in 2017, and a brief history of Spain, published by Apollo in 2022. Giles also joined us on the podcast to answer your questions on the Spanish Inquisition. From the real history behind the sinister and bloodthirsty black legend to whether there was any hope of survival for people singled out by the inquisitors. You can find a link to that in the episode description.