Isabella: The Warrior Queenby Kirstin DowneyNan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2014When writing his great biography of Catherine of Aragon back in 1941, Garrett Mattingly spared a moment to talk about her illustrious mother, Isabella of Castile, who'd joined with Ferdinand of Aragon to drive the Moors out of Spain and “reconquer” it for the Catholic faith. “Isabella,” Mattingly wrote, “though she did work for the future, belonged, like Castile, to the past. She was more curious than Ferdinand about the new learning, but she sought it not to surrender to its magic but to use it in the work she had to do … unlike Ferdinand, she was restless, not out of simple itch for power, but because God's work is never done and it is laid upon the king to do God's work.”“Castile,” he added, “was not a prize but a sword.”It's an evocative but not particularly attractive picture, and Kirstin Downey, in her very engaging new book Isabella: The Warrior Queen, seems only sketchily tempted to quarrel with it. “Queen Isabella's life is a Rorschach test for her biographers,” she spiritedly but of course incorrectly writes,Everyone brings a point of view, an internal bias, to the subject of her life. Catholics see her one way; Protestants, Muslims, and Jews see her very differently. Some false information about her has circulated widely. Spanish history has been systematically distorted by propagandists, in a process that is known as the Black Legend, and the era of Muslim control has been painted in an inaccurately rosy hue. Moreover, the conquest of the New World is seen differently by Europeans and Native Americans, and by their descendants. Consequently, Isabella is one of the world's most historically controversial rulers, both adored and demonized.The demonizing part is fairly easy. Isabella schemed and plotted until she'd succeeded in taking the crown of Castile from its rightful heir, her own niece; she kept her various vassals and castellans in the iron grip of her will; she repaid the Muslim occupiers of Spain twice over in the savage barbarities they'd practiced on the Christians in her kingdom; she first ruthlessly persecuted and then entirely expelled the Jews from Spain and was a remorseless enemy of their books and holy places; she far more than her husband instituted the Inquisition and shaped it into an evil that would be synonymous with Catholicism for the rest of time; she far more than Christopher Columbus instantly and minutely monetized the discovery of the New World and its riches (and its inhabitants); her body lived in the 15th century at the dawn of the Renaissance, but her hot heart and bright metal mind lived in a 10th century of bleeding visions, ridiculed graybeards, razor-hoofed warhorses, and battlefield prayers shouted over the screams of the dying.Downey is a skilled and seasoned writer, but Boccaccio couldn't bring much adoration to such a creature. It's true that the people of Castile adored their fierce queen, and it's true that she donned armor and marched to battle with her troops, dispatching business from a camp tent never far from the front lines. And, one of the keys to Downey's enterprise, it's true that she was a watchful and devoted mother to her brood of children, giving them in equal measure formidable educations, wry sarcasms, and as much responsibility as their slender shoulders could bear. Her main concern was always her eldest son, the gorgeous and sensitive Prince Juan (when he died tragically young, she remarked, “God gave him to me, and He has taken him away”; Downey reports the words and refrains from commenting on the towering bleak anger informing them), but we see often in these pages the warmth and care she still had in abundance for her other children (including the youngest, little Catalina, who would, in the crucible of her life, display a whole clutch of intangibles she could only have learned from her mother).Downey chronicles that family life in greater extent and with greater sympathy than any previous biographer, and she's equally readable on Isabella's uneasy dealings with the Papacy (especially the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, a Spaniard like Isabella herself and a figure who quite clearly delights our author whenever she has occasion to write about him). She fills her book with rich atmospheric asides and perfectly-chosen quotes, as when he get a glimpse of the show Columbus made upon his return in 1493:
Columbus was creating paroxysms of enthusiasm for overseas exploration, parading through the streets with beautiful green parrots, Indians in exotic regalia, chunks of gold, and face masks made of precious stones and fishbones. “The news spread over Castile like fire,” [future explorer Bartolome de] Las Casas later recalled, “that a land called the Indies had been discovered, that it was full of people and things so diverse and new, and that the discoverer himself was to take such and such a route accompanied by some of the Indians. They flocked from all direction to see him; the roads swelled with throngs come to welcome him in the towns through which he passed.”
By the time Downey is winding up her sprawling story, her readers will be hard-pressed to remember that King Ferdinand even existed, and yet Isabella will always be the second part of “Ferdinand and.” This accident of nomenclature clearly irritates her biographer, who rightly points out that the surest way to estimate his significance is to look at what he did with his life for the twelve years of it lived after Isabella's death. “When he ruled with Isabella,” Downey writes, “he could rank among the great kinds of Europe and be viewed as a man of consequence. Without Isabella, he produced almost nothing of significance and frittered his time away in pointless international intrigues.” Downey elegantly points out that when it came to a test of wills, Isabella always won – and she leaves her readers in little doubt about whether or not this applied to her husband:
In the centuries ahead, Ferdinand became a famous man, credited for many of Isabella's achievements. The fact that his name appeared first on official documents – sometimes because she requested that he be added – meant that future historians, sometimes blinded by their own sexism, would cit him as the primary architect of events, even when he played only a minor role in them.
Isabella: The Warrior Queen ends up being an almost involuntarily mesmerizing reading experience, an exuberant re-affirmation of just how remarkable this queen was in a world of kings. And in the supple, understated grace of her prose, Downey, bless her, has had sense enough to learn from the best. Outmoded and forgotten as he is, she credits the Boston Atheneum's William Hickling Prescott. He's a powerful familiar spirit, and she does him proud.
