Secondly, Castilians were biased in favour of Isabella and against her Aragonese husband. 'It was certainly a marvellous thing’ declared Pulgar in 1485 ‘that what many men and great lords could not agree to effect in many years, one lone woman carried out in a little time.’ Ferdinand was portrayed as indecisive and weak, an accessory to a dominant Queen. This is a historical travesty. Within weeks of her accession, many nobles and towns declared their support for Joanna, Henry’s daughter, and Portugal invaded Castile. Ferdinand assumed command of Isabella’s army, defeated rebel forces and repelled the invasion. There can be little doubt that if the King of Portugal had not been stopped in his tracks, resistance to Isabella would have been far greater and more prolonged. Ferdinand played an equally important role in the conquest of Granada (1482-92). He commanded a combined Aragonese and Castilian army, was present at several sieges and masterminded the defeat of the Moors. He was also responsible for managing Castilian and Aragonese foreign relations. His skill lay in his balancing different yet connected objectives, in harmonising resources and this he did most successfully. He concluded marriage alliances in Naples and Milan acquired Navarre and recovered Roussillon to secure the sea routes between Sicily, Sardinia and Tunisia. Well might he declare in 1514: ‘For over 700 years the Crown of Spain has not been as great or as resplendent as it is now, both in the west and the east, and all, after God by my work and labour.’
Finally, Isabella was not so successful in solving her most serious political problems: insubordinate nobles and a disputed succession. In her will written shortly before her death, she recognised her failings and expressed grave concern for the future. She believed that the Castilian nobility had not been politically suppressed and she was right. In 1470 she had recovered much property lost in the recent civil wars but in so doing, she struck a deal with the nobility. She allowed many of her supporters to keep former Crown lands, she confirmed existing grants of nobility and their right to collect financial annuities and she exempted them from paying direct taxation. In effect, these measures guaranteed their economic and social supremacy and went a long way towards securing their political independence. The condition of the Crown’s finances also suffered. Difficulties were already evident in 1489 when the Crown could only balance its budget by borrowing from the aristocracy and offering them high interest bonds known as juros. Already the foundations of royal indebtedness were being laid and possible solutions compromised.
The Queen took an active part in upholding law and order. In her early years she attended public hearings every Friday in the alcazar and twice a week the royal council acted as a Supreme Court of justice. By visiting every town in Castile the Catholic Monarchs confirmed their resolve to restore justice and impart effective government but by the 1490s the nobility were again threatening the liberty of towns and villages and terrorising their inhabitants. Most nobles kept retainers whereas the Crown had no standing army, only a small number of Hermandad troops which was never sufficient to counter a disobedient noble. Any misgivings Isabella may have had were borne out after her death. Between 1506 and 1508 political riots occurred in Andaluca, Galicia and Len, and further disturbances accompanied news of Ferdinand’s death in 1516.
How best to secure the throne proved an intractable problem. Isabella and Ferdinand had only one son and he predeceased them in 1497. Since he had no heirs the Castilian succession passed to Isabella’s eldest surviving daughter, Joanna and to her husband Philip of Burgundy, but Joanna’s mental condition was very unstable and Isabella had no wish to let either Philip or Ferdinand rule Castile. She therefore declared that if Joanna was ‘unwilling or unable to govern’, Ferdinand would become regent until his grandson, Charles came of age. Ferdinand, however, had to give up his honorific title of King of Castile. Though these instructions made sense to Isabella, they led to confusion and civil war when factions gathered round Joanna, Philip and Ferdinand and the crisis only ended when Philip died and Ferdinand intervened with an army. He accepted that Charles would succeed to both Castile and Aragon but since the prince was a minor, arguments soon broke out over who should head the administration. All these tensions re-surfaced at the death of Ferdinand in 1516.
I have suggested the reign of Henry IV was not an unmitigated failure that Ferdinand played a vital part in laying the foundations of Castile’s ‘golden age’ and that Isabella bequeathed serious political and dynastic problems not dissimilar to those that she had inherited. The political achievements of the Catholic Monarchs in general, and Isabella in particular, have been exaggerated by court propagandists and by historians - propagandists by a desire to look at the past nostalgically and historians by a readiness to accept such accounts all too uncritically.
