Isabella
Isabella

Author: Kirstin Downey

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2015-11-10

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 0307742164

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An engrossing and revolutionary biography of Isabella of Castile, the controversial Queen of Spain who sponsored Christopher Columbus's journey to the New World, established the Spanish Inquisition, and became one of the most influential female rulers in history. In 1474, when most women were almost powerless, twenty-three-year-old Isabella defied a hostile brother and a mercurial husband to seize control of Castile and León. Her subsequent feats were legendary. She ended a twenty-four-generation struggle between Muslims and Christians, forcing North African invaders back over the Mediterranean Sea. She laid the foundation for a unified Spain. She sponsored Columbus’s trip to the Indies and negotiated Spanish control over much of the New World. She also annihilated all who stood against her by establishing a bloody religious Inquisition that would darken Spain’s reputation for centuries. Whether saintly or satanic, no female leader has done more to shape our modern world. Yet history has all but forgotten Isabella’s influence. Using new scholarship, Downey’s luminous biography tells the story of this brilliant, fervent, forgotten woman, the faith that propelled her through life, and the land of ancient conflicts and intrigue she brought under her command.

Isabella of Castile
Isabella of Castile

Author: Giles Tremlett

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 625

ISBN-13: 163286522X

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A major biography of the queen who transformed Spain into a principal global power, and sponsored the voyage that would open the New World. In 1474, when Castile was the largest, strongest, and most populous kingdom in Hispania (present day Spain and Portugal), a twenty-three-year-old woman named Isabella ascended the throne. At a time when successful queens regnant were few and far between, Isabella faced not only the considerable challenge of being a young, female ruler in an overwhelmingly male-dominated world, but also of reforming a major European kingdom riddled with crime, debt, corruption, and religious factionism. Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon united two kingdoms, a royal partnership in which Isabella more than held her own. Their pivotal reign was long and transformative, uniting Spain and setting the stage for its golden era of global dominance. Acclaimed historian Giles Tremlett chronicles the life of Isabella of Castile as she led her country out of the murky Middle Ages and harnessed the newest ideas and tools of the early Renaissance to turn her ill-disciplined, quarrelsome nation into a sharper, truly modern state with a powerful, clear-minded, and ambitious monarch at its center. With authority and insight he relates the story of this legendary, if controversial, first initiate in a small club of great European queens that includes Elizabeth I of England, Russia's Catherine the Great, and Britain's Queen Victoria.

Ferdinand and Isabella
Ferdinand and Isabella

Author: J. Edwards

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-06-11

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 131789345X

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This book is about a couple, not a single, dominant ruler. Thus it raises issues of gender, and the dynamics of a marriage over thirty-five years, as well as the practice of monarchical power. The reader sees Ferdinand and Isabella struggle to establish their regime, and then work out an elaborate reform programme in Church and State. It sees them fight a ‘total war’, by fifteenth-century standards, against Muslim Granada, leading to that kingdom’s conquest, and an equally ‘total’ war, through the Inquisition and the Church in general, to convert Spanish Jews and Muslims to Christianity, and to reform and purify the religious and social lives of the established Christians themselves. For readers interested in Early European History.

The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs 1474-1520
The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs 1474-1520

Author: John Edwards

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 2001-03-16

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780631221432

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This book provides a comprehensive and compelling history of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella form the origins and upbringing of the two rulers, through the events and circumstances of their rule, to the consequences for the following generations.