Day 19

I don’t want to spoil all the drama for you, but you folks should really get to know Isabella of Castile, aka Queen Isabella, aka Mrs Ferdinand of Aragon. She’s FASCINATING. For example, did you know...

...that her half sister was supposed to rule instead of her but she (gracefully) engineered a polite little coup?

...that she was the one with the most political power in her marriage, and Ferdinand just ruled as “Consort”? (If his name was on documents, it was because Isabella thought it helped is ego to be asked to sign things.)

...that she is the reason the Queen piece in chess is the most powerful? (Chess had been around a while when she came to power but had been gradually changing; the rule change of the queen has been determined to be an homage to her)

...that she outplayed a guy who Machiavelli (Yes that Machiavelli, they were contemporaries) called a genius

...that she successfully negotiated the “rights” to most of South America, and then engineered that her daughter(s) would marry the king of Portugal, thus making her grandkids heir to the rest of it

(The particular biography I read went on to make arguments that she could be found responsible for making Christianity spread at a critical time in its history, thus “saving” it. The biography also credited her for the spread of Castilian aka Spanish, today the world’s 2, 3, or 4th most popular language, depending on who you ask.)

I could do this all day. This lady was busy. Her relentlessly determined and devoted nature didn’t leave much room for gray area though, and that got her into problems...she sewed the seeds for the Spanish Inquisition, didn’t watch Columbus and others closely enough to prevent injustice to indigenous peoples in the Americas, got her kids into a bad marriage or two, etc. A really interesting biography to pick up if you’re interested in history (religion, war, medieval European politics) or Spain.