← Not Just the Tudors
Not Just the Tudors
Isabel and Ferdinand: Renaissance Power Couple
00:48:25
How did this legendeary double monarchy give rise to Spain’s golden era and a global empire?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe. You can make a difference in someone's life, including your own, with a job in home care.
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- [00:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Retirement options and free training. They also provide paid time off and opportunities for overtime. Visit oregonhomecarejobs.com to learn more and apply. That's oregonhomecarejobs.com.
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- [01:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the tudors. In late 15th century Spain, Isabelle of Castile and Fernando of Aragon established a formidable double monarchy uniting the two Spanish kingdoms in themselves and by their marriage they ran Castile and Aragon as co rulers. Like joint CEOs, their itinerant court was often on the move from one battlefield to the next, Fernando in the field, Isabelle as quartermaster in charge of logistics. Together they centralized power in Spain, suppressing the rebellions of over mighty nobles and even imposing a kind of police force. Isabelle had arguably usurped her throne, but she set a model for the powerful queen's regnant of the 16th century. Their court was a glittering example of dazzling wealth, lavish ostentation, but it also espoused what we might see as a profoundly, brutally intolerant attitude towards faith, but which they saw as a noble and vital quest for religious unity. This I covered in my Last episode with my guest Giles Tremlett, author of Isabella of Castile, Europe's first great queen. Today we pick up with the second half of Isabel and Ferdinand's reign and especially with the events of 1492, the expulsion of the Jews, the conquest of the last remaining Muslim territory in Spain, Granada, and the funding of Christopher Columbus. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb and you're listening to not just the Tudors from History Hit. Charles, thank you for joining me again to talk more about the formidable partnership of Isabel and Fernando, we were talking last time about the Inquisition and the way in which Isabel particularly seems to have driven this need to impose religious uniformity across her country. And we saw this in the establishing of the Inquisition, which was to deal with the so called new Christians, the converso. But we also see this in the ambition to reconquer Granada, the final Muslim state in the Iberian Peninsula. So tell me about the history of the Reconquista. What is the rationale? What is the goal?
- [04:38]
Giles Tremlett
The Reconquista is in many ways what it says on the label. It's, you know, reconquering Spain from the Muslims who took it over in 7 11. But if we stop a moment and think about the dates 711 to 1492, that's a very long time. We're seven and a half centuries of Muslim kingdoms in Spain. In fact, if you want to do the maths on Granada and ask how long it has been Christian compared to how long it was Muslim, well, it's got a long way to go before it kind of catches up as a Christian city to the centuries that it spent as a Muslim city. And again, the Reconquest as a label comes much later. Historians will provide that label. What it is to Castilians, and not just to Castilians to Christendom is it is part of the wider battle which is being lost elsewhere against Muslim encroachment. Again, air quotes on Christendom. So in the 15th century, Spain has already recovered, if you want, or recaptured much of the land that was originally conquered by the Muslims. The creation of Castile and the creation of Aragon are basically, they're both parallel stories of southern conquest, of building out states that start up towards the French border if you want, and slowly push south. And you can say, you know, Portugal is a similar story as well. And so by the time we get to 1492, we have, it's not small, but in terms of the whole of the Iberian Peninsula, the kingdom of Granada, which is the southern coastline of, of Spain or most of the southern coastline of Spain and the stretch of land going inland is all that's left of this centuries and centuries old history of the Spanish Muslim era. But at the same time, as I say, the big fear in Christendom, which is this shrinking entity, is of this expansive Muslim empires, particularly the Ottomans. And so this is a crusade in that sense, to push back the frontiers.
- [07:20]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, for those who will be racking their brains about this, of course, we've got Constantinople being conquered by the ottoman Turks in 1453. And a couple of years before Isabella and Fernando embark on this, the Turks had captured Otranto in the Kingdom of Naples in 1480. So from the Christian perspective, it looks exactly like there's a sort of expansionist agenda here by the Muslims.
- [07:47]
Giles Tremlett
Absolutely. And they will eventually get to the gates of Vienna, I believe. So, you know, it's a real thing. And Christendom is on the back foot and is sort of looking for some great leader, some great prince who will turn this around. In this case, it's really. It's more slightly more Ferdinand's business than Isabella's because he's more. When it comes to foreign policy, he seems to have a louder voice than she does. And I say foreign policy in the sense that when he's talking to Rome, Rome is saying, help, we need to beat off the Ottomans. He's going, well, hang on, we've got our own job to do here, which is to finish this job of pushing out the Muslims. This is. It's a religious war, it's a crusade. We can do it. And Europe itself needs the kind of propaganda factory, if you want. Christendom needs something to make it feel better about itself at a moment when it's on the back foot. So as a project, it's national, but it's international as well. And in fact, various people, you know, English aristocrats will turn up as volunteers as well in the war against Granada. There's someone known as Lord Scales who turns up and I think loses a few teeth when I don't know what it is that hits him. A bit of shrapnel or something. But anyway, so this is a kind of project that everybody's watching and has this international dimension. But obviously for Spain, it's about making Iberia completely Christian. It's about pushing the Muslims back across the sea. And it's about. And for Isabella especially, it's about purifying Castile itself, more so for her than for Ferdinand, partly because Aragon especially, which again, is a collection of kingdoms, especially in Valencia and various areas the agricultural labor is mostly Muslim. If you expel them, you're in real trouble. You haven't got anybody to work the fields. So Aragon is more tolerant because it has a greater dependency on Muslims. And so what happens? Well, we get back to the Reconquista. Reconquista basically had been sort of on stop for. I mean, you could argue effectively for a century and a half or even more if you wanted, in terms of large advances. And this is also a unifying project. Everybody can join in. People come from Aragon, people can come from Castile, they keep the grandees busy. And so it ticks all the boxes. And we end up with this extraordinary scene at the beginning of this extraordinary year, which is 1492. It's an extraordinary year for what happens in Spain and what Spain does to the world in that year. And it starts off literally, it's the 2nd of January, the king or the leader of Granada, Boadil, surrendering, leaving the Alhambra, handing over to Isabella and Ferdinand, who are waiting all dressed up outside the gates to the Alhambra palace or to the Alhambra complex, because it's a very large complex of palaces. And there is a kind of stylized ceremony which obviously has a sort of pre written script which is followed, where the key is handed over and passed around. And Boabdil makes as though he's going to get off his splendid mule to sort of to bow to the. The Catholic monarchs, to Isabella and Ferdinand. But they say, no, we don't want to humiliate you don't. It's enough just to have taken your foot out of the stirrup. Anyway, it's very stylized and it's very scripted, but it's also very descriptive of the power balances and what's going on. And it's a remarkable moment in Spanish history. Boadil is allowed to go to an area known as El Cojarras and live there. But mostly he and his people will end up moving over, sailing across to Morocco. There will again be a large Muslim population left in Granada, especially in the city of Granada, which is a large and very sophisticated city. It's a Muslim city with, you know, it's got plumbing, it's way beyond the level of many Christian cities. And so it's this remarkable moment and obviously deeply satisfying to both Ferdinand and Isabella. The rest of the world is watching. There's Te Deum in London. You know, the whole world is celebrating this victory of Christendom over not the whole world, but the whole of Christendom is celebrating this victory over the Muslims at such a difficult time. And of course, we have an eyewitness to all this who is none other than Christopher Columbus, who just happens to be there trying to flog again his crazy idea of setting sail across what wasn't known as the Atlantic, it was the ocean sea, to go to Asia. And he's there because he's been trying to convince once more, he's failed at least once to convince the court and the experts in the court that this is a viable thing to do. And so he watches all this sort of amazing display of Castilian Spanish power, and then he sets off, he's going south. And after two days, a rider catches up with him and says, turn around. We changed our mind. We think this might work. Come on back, let's talk about it. And so we kind of join together these two events that are going to happen in 1492. But of course, 1492 is also the expulsion of the Jews.
- [14:12]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I think it's worth saying that 1492 is the culminating year of that war. It's the final moment in a battle that had lasted for a decade. I mean, we can so easily forget the cost at which this was bought and the sort of grand scale of the ambition and some of the remarkable sieges that happened during that time, which demonstrate how Isabel and Fernando have really mastered running the military, as you were explaining to me last time. But as you say, this is also the year of the Alhambra Decree, which is that terrible choice given to Jewish people. Can you explain exactly what was the proposition?
- [15:01]
Giles Tremlett
The proposition is, if you want to be Jewish, leave. In very simple terms, leave, and almost don't take anything with you. There are huge restrictions on what can be taken. So it's really a moment of absolute crisis and terror for Spain's Jewish population. If you go back a century, Spain appears to have nation states in the 15th century or in the 14th century. But the world's largest Jewish population, Seville and Cordoa and cities like that, have very large, very old Jewish populations. And within a century, we find that the Jews are being expelled. So in that sense, it's a remarkable change in terms of the history of Spain, in terms of the idea of tolerance of minorities. But obviously, it's far worse for the Jews who have to leave. Some of them, you know, they can sell off their goods, but it's a fire sale, and people are picking up things for no price at all because all the Jews are having to sell at the same time. And they can take, you know, some money with Them, but where can they go? And the obvious answer is they can go to Portugal. But they go to Portugal and immediately the Portuguese king turns around and says, if they can do that, I can do that and more. And is effectively even sort of meaner, nastier to the Jews, if that's possible, than Isabella and Ferdinand were. So this is the beginning of the story of the Sephardic Jews who will then fan out across especially the north of Africa and into the Ottoman Empire, which is actually where the safest place for them to end up. And they take with them a language, ladino, which is sort of 15th century Spanish. It still exists, not spoken by a huge number of people. In my previous existence as a war reporter, I managed once to have a conversation in the synagogue in Sarajevo with someone who was talking ladino to me and I was answering in Spanish. So there's obviously a whole other story there. But in Spanish terms, what's happened is the end of centuries and centuries of tolerance of religious minorities and this new project to be pure, not only to be pure, but to be in the vanguard of Christian purity, which will eventually turn Spain into the most, into the vanguard of the Roman Catholic world as it has to deal with the Protestant heresy, which never really gets a grip on Spain, in part because Isabella herself is also very concerned about the purity within the church and how well it is doing things she doesn't want. A corrupt church. A corrupt church is partly what, you know, drives the whole Protestant idea anyway, you know, that we need to do things better if you want, than the Catholic Church is doing, selling balls. And so that purity in a way has also turned inward on the Spanish church, which is obliged to up its game at the same time.
- [18:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So we have this year of extraordinary things, terrible things. And I just wanted to ask before we think about some of the other things that happen at this time, whether you think that in some of the ways that Isabelle and Ferdinand are remembered. Do you think there has been an over celebration in their role in unifying Spain, even though, as you explained to me last time, this is really done in themselves as opposed to creating a unified Spain. And do we over celebrate that role and underplay the brutality involved in achieving it?
- [19:21]
Giles Tremlett
Well, interestingly, one of the only institutions that goes across Aragon and Castile is the Inquisition. They're separate kingdoms or they're separate collections of kingdoms, but that is the one institution that runs across both entities. Should we pay more attention to the violence that was inflicted? Spaniards would say no. Spaniards would tell you that their history has been told under the cloud of what they call a black legend. And that for years and centuries they have had to live with this idea that they are the meanest, cruelest, nastiest people in Europe, that there's some kind of natural bloodlust. And I think if you went to certain Victorian historians, you might even find that word somewhere in the descriptions and, and you can find it in some poetry that comes out of Britain in the 19th century. And so this idea that the Inquisition sort of defines Spain, it's an exaggeration. And again, I go back to Protestant witch hunt and say, well, hang on, let's do the comparison. And actually, the Inquisition doesn't look nearly so bad when you compare it with that. Except, of course, what it does have is a racial and religious component. But again, if you were in defense of Spain, one would have to say, yes, but Spain got there much later than everybody else. Everybody else had already expelled their Jews in various ways. So in many ways, Spain is playing catch up. And you see again in the travel literature, let's call it of the late 15th century, that people arriving from Bavaria are appalled by what they see in Spain, by this mix of cultures. So in that sense, no, I don't think we've forgotten the violence. Quite possibly we've over emphasized it only in the sense that in comparative terms, maybe everyone else doesn't actually look that sort of shiningly good. And what we're talking about is a period of time where kind of, you know, this stuff happened that's a very limp kind of, you know, an excuse in today's, kind of, in today's terms. But, you know, if we want to look at it in terms of history and what was going on and what the different ways people are acting, well, you know, it's not that exceptional.
- [22:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So the other extraordinary thing this year, which you've alluded to already, is the funding of Christopher Columbus. And we see him return in April 1493 and meet the King and Queen or meet the most Catholic monarchs at Barcelona. Can we talk about what you understand to be their priorities when they decided to sponsor Columbus's voyage? And in deciding to continue to do so after his return, when they're working on much more evidence, is it competition with Portugal, is it desire to spread Christianity, or is it economic incentives trying to get to Asian trade routes? Can we kind of have a hierarchy of motive here?
- [22:50]
Giles Tremlett
A hierarchy of motive, I think would put. I would actually put at the top the fact that this was a very easy, cheap bet to take. It wasn't expensive. The port of Palos in southern Spain owed money, and it could pay it off by producing boats and sailors. It owed the monarchy money. It was three boats. And I can't remember the exact number of sailors, but not a huge number. And there's another element to it which I like particularly, which is that it fits into sort of something that Isabella is very much into, which is this concept of knights errant. She loves the kind of the pulp fiction of the moment, which are these kind of romance chivalry novels. They're read widely in her court, they're read widely by her ladies, and she seems to be a fan. But this isn't just a sort of literary thrill. There's also this kind of deeper idea that there's a kind of a mystical night, if you want, can go off on a grand adventure inspired by God, inspired by Christianity, and can go and do great things. And this is the story that Columbus is selling. And Columbus sells this very well and actually believes it himself. He fits within the more slightly older medieval chivalric mindset, if you want, in that sense, certainly in the adventurous sense. And so that's another reason for it happening. There is this mindset of adventurous men, because they're men setting off and doing great things for the benefit of Christendom. In real terms, yes. The obvious win is to get to Asia, which is what Columbus thinks is on the other side of the Atlantic. Frankly, my feeling is they feel. And if he doesn't come back, it doesn't matter. He's gone off on his great mission, it will be a noble death, and we won't have lost much money trying. So to that extent, it's sort of. There's several elements of luck have all kind of clicked together at the same time. But the huge, biggest part of it is the impetus that Columbus himself provides, because he's been wanting to do this for many years. He's been trying to sell the idea to the monarchies in Portugal, in England, in France and in Castile. And so, you know, it's his own tenacity that makes this happen. And of course, in global historical terms, it's a remarkable event. It's a real change. It's a massive shift towards the Atlantic as the center of wealth and power and impetus and change and technology and all sorts of things that begin to happen. And it's also, in a way, it also provides that thing that everybody's been looking for, which is to rescue Christendom. This is the massive expansion of Christendom, of what we'll later call Western civilization. If we want across the ocean at a time again, when it's being pushed back in Europe.
- [26:44]
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- [26:44]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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- [27:13]
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- [27:44]
Giles Tremlett
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- [28:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, because when Columbus comes back and everybody can see this man who has discovered another world, he brings back some of the treasures that he has found, including things like parrots and turkeys, but also gold and also people like he brings with him 6 Taino people he's abducted. And the reaction from Isabel and Fernando is very much that these are people that God is giving to them. So do you have a feeling that we perhaps could see these monarchs as proto imperialists? Are they conscious of shaping a global Catholic empire, do you think?
- [29:26]
Giles Tremlett
I don't think Isabella is, because she will die in 1504. So there's 12 years, and the enterprise itself has probably not got big enough to really be able to conceptualize the sort of the massive empire that would come out of it. Fernando will live 12 years longer, and so I think, yes, in his lifetime, they're beginning to get there. Now, I think for Isabella, who's very good at sort of having strong, clear, but simple ideas. It's quite easy. There are people over there who we can convert to the true faith. It's our duty to do that. And that is one of the great impulses for what we're doing. We would also like to become rich. And that's another possible outcome from this and a good reason for putting money towards it. So those are the sort of. It's golden souls, if you want. Those are the two impulses. And Columbus is also promising gold. He's promising both things. He's continually promising gold and souls. When he can't find gold, he's still trying to promise that there's just around the corner. And then we get into the whole question of souls, of slavery, of, you know, what can we do do with and to these people, which is a genuine quandary. You know, Christendom is just really beginning to kind of have real debates about, you know, what slavery is. Okay. Or rather it's not just beginning to, but it's getting into a new period of debating this. And, you know, and to simplify the argument, infidels, someone who believes in a different religion. Yes, you can enslave them. Innocents, people who don't have a religion. No, you can't enslave them. And so the sort of the debate, and you can just see it beginning to take shape in Isabel's time and it becomes very important in Spain later in the 16th century is, you know, what rights do we have over these people? And, you know, we can go later into the 16th century and actually look at, you know, what Spanish intellectuals and theologians are saying. And we are actually beginning to get some of the most interesting early human rights debates are appearing precisely because of what's happening in Latin America and in the new Spanish empire in Isabel's time. It's still something exotic and exciting and almost fits within that concept of sort of, you know, amazing adventures that are in the chivalric novels. This amazing trip that Columbus takes when he gets back to Spain. And he sort of deliberately takes a long, slow overland trip, displaying his prizes, which include people, but also, as you said, parrots and plants and animals that people have never seen in colors. Castile, especially in the summer. It's not a very colorful place. It's burnt to a sort of parchment yellow. And so you have this. The Caribbean is arriving in Spain. And so I think in that sense it's still exotic and strange. Isabella is really just dealing with the first parts of it, and so she's not able to shape things Particularly beyond being the kind of the sponsor and then the very enthusiastic responder, if you want, when Columbus comes back, okay, we are now into a kind of arms race against the Portuguese about who can discover what. And we have to decide and we have to go to Rome and, you know, debate which bits of the world we can both explore. The Portuguese have a lead on Spain. They've already gone south, all the way down to the southern point of Africa. They've won exploration rights that the Castilians can't compete against around Africa. And that's one of the reasons why they have to sail west to find something that they can legally explore. Then you get this incredible treaty at Torre de Sillas where a line is drawn on the map and Spain can explore to the west and Portugal can explore to the right. It's a line that's drawn on a map that hasn't even been mapped yet, in the sense that they say, okay. The line is however many leagues distant from this point and we don't know what it goes through. In the end, we discover that it actually lops off Brazil from the rest of South America, which is why the Portuguese can claim Brazil as being, you know, their zone of exploration.
- [34:47]
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- [35:17]
Giles Tremlett
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- [35:58]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It seems to me that Isabel and Fernando are very good at reading into things. So there's this impression I get that when Columbus comes back and presents them with this new challenge, they feel like, well, God has got them to conquer Granada. They've taken that, and now there's the new mission. And they've already just gone through the awful experience of Fernando being stabbed in Barcelona and sort of narrowly surviving. But as we get later into the 1590s, as you alluded to in our Last episode There are a number of terrible things that happen, real blows when it comes to their children and their dynasty. Can you give me a sense of what happened and what that seemed to say as far as they were concerned?
- [36:51]
Giles Tremlett
Okay, so we're talking about the 1490s, the end. So let's say in 1492, Isabell is. She's just 40, 41, and some terrible personal things are going to happen to her. Her son and heir, Juan will die. Her daughter Isabella, who's gone off to marry Portugal, The King of Portugal, the Princes of Portugal, will also die. There's no male heir, but there's a grandson who is brought over from Portugal to live at the court. He will live in the Alhambra with them and with the younger daughters. A Catherine of Aragon, for example, spends a lot of her youth living in the Alhambra. And little Miguel is the sort of apple of everybody's eye, this adored little boy who will then also die. And at the same time, her daughters have to be sent away. They have to fulfill their role as bargaining chips in the game of international relations, international power. So Catherine is going to head off to England, and Juana will also head off to northwest Europe. And then we also get the attack on Ferdinand, this sort of crazed Catalan farmer, who tries to stab him, and he actually survives because of his bling. He's wearing some very thick chains, which mean that the blow is not mortal. It's bad, but it's not mortal. For Isabella, who is a very pious person and who thinks and interprets the world in religious, Christian, Catholic, Roman Catholic terms, these are signs that God is not pleased. And she's not really sure what to make of that or why he might not be pleased. But it's all part of tipping her into a period towards the end of her life where I think it's safe to say that she becomes increasingly troubled and unhappy. I think one contemporary talks of the three thrusts to her heart. So it's Isabelle, Juan and Amiga. Those three deaths, these three thrusts to. And, you know, this has an impact on her personally, on her attitude to life, on her sense of optimism or pessimism, on her perhaps latent depressive part of her, which, you know, she's had a very difficult childhood, watching her mother sink into a deep depression. And I think that's something that's probably haunted her. She's certainly worried that Juana, her daughter, has inherited this part of the family's, let's call it, mental health problems. And so the last years are not terribly happy, and you know, she will live them out with an increasingly poor health, and in many ways, there's not much more to say. By 1504, it's all over. She will die well before Ferdinand, not yet aware, I don't think, of the huge impact that everything that has happened during her reign, everything that Castile has done during her reign, because the American adventure, Columbus's trip, the lands that are claimed in the Americas are claimed for Castile, and she's not and can't be aware what all this is going to mean for centuries after her death. She's probably more interested in what's happened to Castile itself. And I think, you know, there are signs that she's quite content in that sense with the purification. I think that's, you know, a big. A big thing for her. Interestingly, she does sort of write some advice to her daughter, because now her heir is a daughter, Juana. And so we're going to get this extraordinary situation where a woman will inherit the throne from a woman. In terms of the unification of Spain, that's gone because these are personal kingdoms and Ferdinand is still the king of Aragon, but he's not the king of Castile anymore. And so in that sense, the separation becomes much clearer. And it won't be until after his death, when the later generations can say, okay, we have inherited it all, that you really start getting a Spanish, what you could call a Spanish state. But even then, it's actually a collection of kingdoms. And even in Aragon's case, those kingdoms include Naples, for example, because Aragon is a player in the Mediterranean. And Sardinia, Sicily, at one stage, Corsica, it's a big power in the Mediterranean. So I think in terms of what she thinks she's done, I think by the time of Isabella's death, she thinks she's done a splendid job of purifying Spain, of imposing order and discipline, this kind of slightly Wild west atmosphere that she inherits, or that she usurps, shall we say, because she is a usurper when she comes to the throne. You know, much of that has been sorted out. Castile has become an efficient, in relative terms, an efficient centralized state which will then be able to go on and run an empire. And also it's very admired abroad. So, you know, Henry VIII is delighted to marry Catherine of Aragon, in part because she is the daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand, and they are the great crusading heroes of Europe. You know, they have a big reputation outside of their own country as well. So, you know, in that sense, she's a very powerful figure for the time for us. Looking back, she's even more powerful because of the things that happened during her reign, but she wasn't going to know how those were going to play out.
- [43:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what does her death in 1504 mean for Fernando? And what should we say about the dozen years that he has to live? He's not king of Castile, but he has political ambitions. What do you make of the way he handles his daughter Juana?
- [44:14]
Giles Tremlett
When Isabella dies? Ferdinand, in many ways, is losing half of his power. He's losing the Castilian side of his kingdom, because that is going to go to Juana. And Juana herself is married to Philip el Hermoso, we call him in Spain, Philip the Beautiful Duke of Burgundy. He's part of a powerful family. He's the son of Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor. He comes from a powerful family himself. And Juana is not made of the same metal as Isabella. And I think partly this is proof of how extraordinary Isabella is, because Juana is going to inherit a throne. She doesn't even have to usurp it, but she's not going to be able to govern and rule in the way that her mother did. We are going to go back to a period where it's the men who rule for the titular queens. And so to begin with, it's Philip who comes with her to Spain and becomes the effective monarch of Castile. But just a few years later, he will die. And then Fernando basically makes a kind of power grab and says, okay, I'm going to be the man who is going to govern for you. And so he is back in charge. I mean, he's very capable. So in that sense, you know, it's quite a good thing to happen to Castile. And so from then on, the story of Isabella and Ferdinand is Ferdinand's story. Ferdinand has a sort of historical problem in the sense that simply in the sense of the biographies that have been written about him. One of the best Spanish historians was sort of halfway through a great biography and died in the 20th century. And so we have this magnificent biography of the early parts of his life. And I think, you know, I personally would like to see a really good new biography of Ferdinand, who is a very intelligent, very capable, very clever personality, very influential. Obviously, historically, there have been. There was a tendency to think, actually it was Ferdinand who called the shots all the way through. I think that's a misreading, but he was immensely, I think, clever and quite sensitive in his relationship with Isabella. Sensibly sensitive, cleverly sensitive in that sense, you know, that things work better because of the way they work together, but also on his own. He was a very, very capable, capable monarch. And so we have another period where especially what happens in the kind of global sense, apart from the fact that Ferdinand is also, because of Aragon, is always involved in Italian politics. We haven't even talked about Rodrigo Borgia. Borgia is the Pope in Rome. He's actually a Valencian or comes from a Valencian family. So we've actually got part of the sort of the Aragonese kingdoms or someone who comes from those family comes from. There is the Pope in Rome and Ferdinand is doing a lot of fighting and a lot of politics in Italy. This sort of long term battle that's brewing between Spain and France on a sort of wider field beyond just the Spanish French frontier, which has always been a cause of tension, is sort of beginning to shape up, shall we say. And so Ferdinand becomes very important in the history of Italy as well, especially through the Kingdom of Naples. And then he's very important to what happens to the American enterprise from then on, which simply picks up steam is the easiest way to, to describe it. You know, there are more and more vessels sailing across the ocean, more and more lands are being discovered and, you know, what is going to be an empire is just beginning perhaps to take shape. Though maybe we're still jumping the gun a bit. But certainly, you know, the seed has been planted.
- [48:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So that is the question I would like to ask you as we come to an end, which is precisely how much the seed has been planted. When we think about somebody like Charles V, who he becomes, you know, this great emperor, this defender of the faith, this warrior, how much is that rooted in the legacy of what Isabel and Fernando had achieved together?
- [49:19]
Giles Tremlett
Well, Charles V, who of course is Juana's son and their grandson, could not exist, obviously couldn't exist without them. But what he's going to do, especially in terms of growing an empire, is unthinkable without the first steps that are taken under Isabella and Ferdinand. How easy it would have been for the Portuguese, say, to get there first. They were sailing into the middle of the Atlantic anyway, especially as a way to, to get back from the trip south, you know, along Africa. And the whole idea of, of this sort of Atlantic turn you could do picking up winds that would then push you back to Europe, but by sort of almost sailing in the wrong direction to pick them up, I think they inevitably would have bumped into America in a different spot, almost certainly. So things could have worked out very, very differently. You can even look at Columbus and say, what if someone else had said yes, that offer was on the table all over Europe and it was, for whatever reasons it was Isabella and Ferdinand in the end, who gave the yes. So in that sense, absolutely. There is no Spanish empire without the events that happen in Isabella and Ferdinand's life. There might have been one, we can't say. But in terms of the timeline of what happened, it's very obvious that there's an empire that's going to survive all the way through to the early 19th century and Spain is going to have the first empire on which the sun never sets because it will claim the Philippines eventually as well. And you know, this is remarkable. They're a superpower, like all empires, the fall is terrible. But that's sort of 19th century history in Spain. There is a long period in European history, at least where, you know, Spain is riding high and is the power to be reckoned with.
- [51:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, thank you for introducing us so thoroughly over the course of these two episodes to these two remarkable people who achieved much, not necessarily without cruelty and with many casualties on the side, but who certainly established many of the bases of modern society in various ways, for better or worse. Giles Tremlett, thank you so much for your time. And interesting if people want to know more, Isabella of Castile, Europe's first great queen, is still in bookshops, if they're good ones. Thank you so much for your time.
- [52:18]
Giles Tremlett
Certainly is. Thank you very much indeed.
- [52:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History hit. Thank you also to my researcher Max Wintle, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History.
- [52:50]
Giles Tremlett
Hit.
- [53:01]
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