"Isabella: The Warrior Queen"

马亲王 is right of course, the part before Isabella came to the throne is much more gripping than what happens afterwards. Her life connects a lot of dots in my scant store of historical knowledge, for instance, the movie I never got around to watch, "Mad Love". Kirstin Downey tries to restore credit where it's due, which is nice.

• Álvaro was furious when he learned she was there and hastened over to the palace, where he pounded on the bedroom door. “Were you not told that you were not supposed to come?” he shouted angrily at her in front of a circle of court observers, who were astonished by the ferocity of the exchange.8 On another occasion, he made an explicit threat to the queen: “I married you, and I’ll unmarry you,” he said.
• Isabella and her family believed themselves to be descended from Hercules, the legendary warrior, half-God and half-mortal. They believed the hero had personally founded the cities of Arévalo, Segovia, Ávila, and Salamanca,... Some of the most famous Roman writers hailed from Iberia, including Martial, Lucan, and Seneca the Elder; the emperors Hadrian and Trajan are believed to have been born near Seville.
• When the Visigoths, people of a Germanic stock, surged down from the Pyrenees into the Iberian peninsula in the fifth century, they quickly asserted dominance in the new power vacuum. Coming from the north, they tended to be blonder and taller than the dark-haired peoples of the Mediterranean. They crafted beautiful jewelry and created their own signature architectural styles. They made their capital in Toledo,
• The Muslims’ conquest of Spain came with blinding swiftness in 711, just twelve years after they vanquished North Africa.
• The heirs of the Visigoths spent the next twenty-four generations recovering the peninsula, inch by inch, mile by mile, mostly in fits and starts, until by Isabella’s birth the remaining Muslim stronghold in Spain was in the South, in the Kingdom of Granada.
• The landscape was so dotted with these stone or wood fortifications, many planted atop steep precipices, that the central kingdom was named Castile, or Land of Castles. The Spanish people lived indoors, crouched behind thick walls made of stone, peering out through tiny windows that served as arrow slits, scanning the horizon for signs of danger, existing in a state of perpetual readiness for conflict.
• Through much of the Middle Ages, there was tolerance and even romanticizing of same-sex relationships, but as economic times grew tougher and financial conditions more competitive, cultural attitudes began changing. The hedonism and cultural flowering of the early Renaissance was also causing a conservative backlash.
• Part of the pleasure of the enterprise was permitting people to undertake activities that would never be tolerated in peaceful times. Young men in particular relished the chance to display their machismo through daring acts of vandalism that took them into contact with the enemy. But Enrique commanded that they were not to burn down olive groves, because they took too long to grow and bear fruit.
• In his typical double-dealing manner, Juan Pacheco suggested that King Louis XI of France, a man who was living up to his new nickname “The Universal Spider,” be permitted to mediate the succession dispute, giving the French king a valuable commission for which Pacheco would be generously rewarded. At Pacheco’s urging, Enrique foolishly agreed. Then King Louis accepted a generous bribe from Aragon as well and threw his weight to Carlos’s father rather than to Enrique, making Enrique feel both stupid and angry.
• Unbeknown to the king’s councilors, who were negotiating Edward’s marriage prospects in both France and Spain, King Edward had already impulsively married a comely widow, Elizabeth Woodville.
• This was an unfortunate period in Alfonso’s life, for there were reports that he was badly treated, and perhaps sexually molested, while he was in Pacheco’s care. The chronicler Palencia said that Pacheco attempted a pedophilic seduction of the boy, in hopes of making him more malleable, something that was widely believed to have been done to Enrique in his youth. In fact, by this time, similar allegations had been raised regarding three generations of Trastámara men—their father Juan, Enrique, and now Alfonso.
• After King Juan grew up, married, and had a son, Enrique, Álvaro de Luna similarly introduced Juan Pacheco, six years older than Enrique, to the young prince and placed him in the prince’s household. Soon Juan Pacheco held Enrique in thrall as Álvaro had done with his father.
• Sensibly recognizing that her claim to the throne was weaker than Alfonso’s because she was a woman, and also realizing that the nation had been undecided even about Alfonso’s right to rule, Isabella made her announcement. “Return the kingdom to Don Enrique my brother, and thus you will restore peace to Castile,
• William Shakespeare, who curried favor with the Tudor dynasty by painting a grotesque portrait of Richard III as a dark and hunchbacked villain who had murdered his brother’s two young sons. “It was quite remarkable how the views of men of letters changed almost overnight after Henry’s usurpation,” one historian said acidly.23 Isabella had thus avoided association with that dismal page of history.
• she wrote back, in a letter that any seventeen-year-old boy would have found pleasing in its feminine submissiveness and its promise of sexual pleasure ahead: “Now you should inform me what you wish to be done, for that I must do.…From the hand that will do as you may order, La Princesa.”1
• Five days later, on October 19, 1469, Isabella and Ferdinand were formally wed, in the great hall, or sala rica, of the Vivero home. The marriage ceremony was followed by a nuptial mass. The couple were so poor that they were compelled to borrow to meet the wedding expenses.
• As he entered his sixties, he had developed cataracts in both eyes and had become blind, in an era without antibiotics, anesthesia, or modern surgical skills. In the summer of 1466, when he was sixty-eight, he had decided to put himself into the hands of a skilled Jewish physician trained in the ancient Hindu and Roman techniques of removing cataracts by inserting a sharp, red-hot needle into the eyeball.
• It was King Juan of Aragon who had stalked the halls outside Enrique’s first bridal chamber on his nuptial night thirty years earlier, when he had been unable to perform. Now Ferdinand’s marriage to Isabella gave King Juan a second chance at achieving his goal. Getting control of the princess who was heiress to the throne would be another path to controlling Castile,
• Isabella’s later preoccupation with papal dispensations would have long-lasting and cataclysmic consequences. {Didn't seem that bad really...}
• Ferdinand’s letter, one of only a few surviving pieces of correspondence between the husband and wife, is a masterpiece of artful duplicity, threat, and menace, masked as romantic yearning: I do not know why Our Lord has given me so much good with so little pleasure in it, since in three years I have not been with you seven months. Now I must tell you that I have to go to induce these people to do their duty. But all this cannot happen before Christmas, and if in this time you can arrange it so that the King calls me for the oath, within the hour I could be on my way [to you], but otherwise I would have no excuse for my lord the King. Although I do my best, this unfortunate predicament puts me in such a mood that I do not know whether I am coming or going. I beg you to work at this, or at least to write to the Archbishop and Cardinal. I do not mean to imply that this is your task, or that I do not think that for me there is no higher
• Powerful in body, overtly sensual, elegant, and magnetically attractive to women, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia was a Spaniard by birth. He was the nephew of Pope Calixtus III, whose papacy had resembled the founding years of a dynasty more than a spiritual mission.
• Christianity found itself with two rival pontiffs, one based in Rome and the other in Avignon. Italy and northern Europe sided with the Roman pope, Urban VI; France and Spain aligned themselves with the Avignon alternative, Clement VII. Church hierarchies everywhere had to choose sides, forcing kings, bishops, monasteries, charitable institutions, and universities to align themselves with one or another of the camps. Even after Urban and Clement both died and replacements moved into their posts, the schism continued until 1418.
• Rodrigo’s sexual vices soon stirred scandal. An infant’s baptismal feast in May 1460 somehow sparked a two-week sexual bacchanalia.... Rodrigo, who would go down in history as the infamous and spectacularly corrupt Pope Alexander VI,
• One possibility is that princes—and princesses—are not always notable for their gratitude. Carrillo had been helpful to Isabella and Ferdinand in the past, but Mendoza was essential for their future, and that consideration may have ultimately prevailed.
• Andrés de Cabrera, Enrique’s mayordomo mayor, or chief of staff, who supervised both the fortress of Segovia and the royal treasury; he was also the mayor of Segovia. He was a leader of Segovia’s conversos and an examplar of the shifting allegiances of the day. Cabrera had been with Juan Pacheco at the farce of Ávila when King Enrique was ritually dethroned, but then had repented and returned to Enrique’s good graces. Now married to Isabella’s childhood friend Beatriz de Bobadilla, Andrés de Cabrera was moving into Isabella’s camp.
• Isabella remained “proprietary queen” of Castile, and her children, but not Ferdinand’s children by other women, would inherit the throne. They agreed, however, that Ferdinand’s name would be joined to Isabella’s in documents, in proclamations, and on coins, and that his name would always go first. But sovereignty in Castile and León, as well as the right to appoint officials and decide how to spend money from the treasury, would belong solely to Isabella.
• Isabella’s role in Castile as reigning queen was so rare in world history that observers and commentators seemed unable to comprehend that a woman could be sovereign, and they persisted in identifying Ferdinand as the ruler regardless of the facts.... In time he began to receive the credit for her accomplishments.
• Management of the perception of the battle rather than the event itself ended up influencing people’s opinions, and ultimately their belief about what had occurred. “Not a military victory, but a political victory, the battle of Toro is in itself, a decisive event, because it [resolved] the civil war in favour of the Catholic Monarchs,
• in this building she began to develop her own style and taste, melding the style that came to be known as Isabelline with the style known as Plateresque. This style featured traditional Iberian elements, with simple but soaring and cavernous Gothic-inspired interiors, and rich sculptural treatments for the exteriors, all carved in golden stone.... The first Isabelline-style building, and the one that most clearly bore her personal mark, was San Juan de los Reyes.
• The structure Ferdinand and Isabella jointly undertook to build in Rome, to honor the birth of their son Juan, became the world architectural masterpiece known as the Tempietto.... His name was Donato Bramante, and what he built on the site is considered the first example of High Renaissance architecture in Italy. It would delight, fascinate, and amaze generations of art historians. Domed, with Doric columns, the “circular plan symbolizes divine perfection,” according to the World Atlas of Architecture. “Inspired by ancient temples, the Tempietto is both a homage to antiquity and a Christian memorial.”15
• she looked much like her sisters, fair-skinned with strawberry blond hair that darkened to light auburn as she left early childhood. She later received an identifying sobriquet that would tie her to her father’s hereditary kingdom in the memory of future generations: she became known as Catherine of Aragon and soon thereafter as the Princess of Wales, the future queen of England. Of all Isabella’s children, she was the one who was most like her mother.
• They traveled constantly, as the demands of administering the kingdom never slackened.... Regal settings had to be composed at every location as well, which meant that paintings, illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, and rugs were hauled from place to place to accompany the royal family.
• Isabella’s emphasis on girls’ education helped spawn an academic revolution for women across Europe, as her court set a new standard of expectations for females who would rule either on their own or in partnership with their husbands.
• The Alcazaba of Córdoba, the fortress that served as Isabella’s military headquarters during the Reconquest, a war that lasted ten years, with terrible casualties and losses on both sides.... The Castilian siege of Ronda, which sits on a hilltop surrounded by sheer cliffs, was a major victory for Isabella,
• Friar Hernán de Talavera, Isabella’s long-time confessor and archbishop of Granada, a converso who fell victim to the Inquisition after being accused of using his home as a secret temple.
• In that year she commissioned the first of a series of artworks to memorialize each victory of the Reconquest. Initially choosing twenty events to be immortalized,...  The number of events deemed worthy of remembrance eventually totaled fifty-four. The relief carvings, a form of early military photojournalism, provide eyewitness records of tumultuous events that have otherwise slipped from historical memory.
• Queen Isabella wrote to him with painstaking care for his pride, with exaggerated courtesy and respect. She suggested at one point that Boabdil could have possession of the citadels of Baza and Guadix, properties that were held by El Zagal, in exchange for his surrender of Loja, but then ostentatiously appeared to catch and excuse herself: “Pardon me, your wife, because I speak about things I do not know.
• Chess was enormously popular in Spain at the time, and soon after this battle the Queen became the single most powerful piece on the chessboard, able to move great distances in all directions; her mission is to protect and defend the key piece on the board, the King.
• But when Isabella and Ferdinand decided that the presence of practicing Jews in the kingdom was leading conversos astray, they decided to try to force all the Jews in Spain to convert to Christianity.
• The Spanish Inquisition therefore owed its origins in part to the strains of wartime, when suspect loyalties were less tolerated than usual and suspicions were running high. But it turned out to be such an effective tool for government repression and control that it survived as an institution for three hundred years, giving successive rulers a convenient way to suppress enemies and punish various kinds of social nonconformity that the majority of the population found irritating.
• There were so many ways to go wrong. Giving charity to Jewish beggars was a sin. Visiting a synagogue on a Jewish holy day was a sin. Not eating pork was suspicious.
• Tax collectors are seldom loved by their fellow citizens, but many conversos had concentrated in that field of work, placing themselves in the position of seeking to maximize tax collections at a time of growing financial strain among the lower classes.
• Eliminating outsiders has had its advantages; religious tolerance is not a universal concept. Spain was now on the verge, ready and sufficiently ruthless, of becoming the greatest world power ever known.
• At some point Columbus began doctoring the logbook so he could minimize to the crew the great distance they were sailing away from known land.
• The first was led by Alonso de Hojeda, who had served in the war with Granada and traveled with Columbus on his second voyage. He was given permission to go adventuring to the south. He departed in May 1499 and soon reached the shores of South America, discovering a place he called Little Venice, or Venezuela.
• The families dickered over the prices each should pay and the terms of the arrangement from 1488 to 1509, from the time Catherine was three years old until she was twenty-four.
• Even madmen had a regiment, the deli, or loons, Riskers of their Souls, who were used, since they did not object, as human battering rams, or human bridges.