By Dr. Michael Dominic Taylor, Teaching Fellow and Dean of Students
Through the generosity of Don Francisco Javier Martínez Fernández, Archbishop Emeritus of Granada, Spain, the College has come into possession of an exact replica of the Last Testament of Queen Isabel “the Catholic” of Spain (1451–1504 AD). This remarkable document draws back the curtain on a life, and an entire civilization, in which the political and administrative were seamlessly interwoven with and crucially dependent on the monarch’s personal witness of faith. Isabel understood her reign as a responsibility entrusted to her by God, for which she would have to answer shortly after she put her hand to this document.
When Isabel was born in the small village of Madrigal de las Altas Torres, she was just one potential heir to the weak and fractured kingdom of Castilla. Her predecessor, half brother Henry IV (“The Impotent”), seemed ambivalent toward the 700-year struggle to complete the Reconquista. But after her marriage with Fernando of Aragon and coronation as queen, she became the dynamizing force for its termination, bringing the long war to an end with the conquest of Granada. Solicitous for the political unity of their kingdoms, which had been separate since the eleventh century, Fernando and Isabel assumed the motto “Tanto Monta” (“They amount to the same”), echoing Alexander the Great’s solution to the Gordian Knot: “It amounts to the same, cutting as untying.” In just over fifty years, the empire of their grandson—the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V—would be twice the size of Alexander’s.
[O]ur principal intention was . . . to convert [the peoples of the islands and continents of the Atlantic Ocean] to our holy Catholic faith, and to send to those same islands and continents prelates and religious and clergy, and other persons who are learned and fear God, to instruct the residents and inhabitants of those lands in the Catholic faith[.]
–Isabel I of Spain, Codicil, §11
The rule of Isabel and Fernando was marked by two unrivaled achievements, both culminating in 1492: the conclusion of the Reconquest and the discovery of America. The emirate of Granada was the last Moorish holdout in Spain. Continuous raids, the enslavement of Christians, and the growing threat of the Ottoman Empire in the East—which shocked Europe by destroying Otranto in 1480, giving 813 martyrs to the Church and selling the rest of its citizens into slavery—convinced Isabel and Fernando that the Reconquest must be completed. In The Spirit of Spain, Harold Raley describes the taking of Granada as “a reconquest of what the enemy had seized but which the Spanish had never surrendered” (49).
The fall of Granada enabled the Catholic Monarchs to finally authorize the journey that would lead to the discovery of the Americas, a voyage that was initiated in Santa Fe, on the outskirts of the former Moorish stronghold. A year earlier, the military camp from which the siege of Granada had been conducted had burned down; Isabel not only had it rebuilt in stone to signify her resolve, but had four chapels constructed above the gates of the camp that can still be seen today. It was there that the “Capitulations of Santa Fe” were signed, funding Columbus’s voyage and giving him authority in their name.
[W]ith much affection, I beg the King my Lord and instruct and order that . . . [King Ferdinand, Princess Juana, and Prince Philip I] do not consent to or cause the Indians . . . [to] receive any injury to their persons or their goods, and that they order that [the Indians] be well and fairly treated, and if they have received any injury, that they remedy it[.]”
–Isabel I of Spain, Codicil, §11
Although Columbus’s achievements were marked by controversy, Isabel’s intentions regarding her new subjects were made clear through her actions and in the codicil of her Testament. Therein, she states that her “principal intention” was their conversion “to our holy Catholic faith.” She would also “instruct and order” that her successors “not consent or cause the Indians…to receive any injury to their persons or their goods” and that they “be well and fairly treated.” Having no doubt that native peoples were children of God—a doctrine confirmed decades earlier by Pope Eugene IV’s 1435 bull Sicut Dudum—Isabel defended them through royal decree as subjects of the crown, sending missionaries for their spiritual benefit. Spanish nobility intermarried with native nobility (the descendants of Montezuma hold noble titles to this day) and a new civilization was born. Our Lady of Guadalupe presented herself as an image of this synthesis in 1531, sparking the conversion of over 9 million Mexicans in seven years’ time. Thus, for Raley, the Reconquest represented Spain’s unyielding will to be Catholic, and the Americas were its greatest invention (34).
Isabel was an indomitable force, causing opposing armies to lose hope when they saw her urging her soldiers on. It is a fitting testament that, in chess, the queen first became the most powerful piece on the board in Spain during Isabel’s reign. And yet, she also endured great sufferings throughout her life, never forgetting that she would answer to God for the power with which He had entrusted her. A Third Order Franciscan, she was buried in the habit of il Poverello. Today, she is a Servant of God.
For further reading:
Dr. Taylor Accepts Expanded Reason Award in Research Category
