When women ran the world

In 1502, Queen Isabella of Castile’s ambassador arrived at the court of Qansuh al-Ghuri, sultan of Egypt. The Egyptians had heard about Isabella. She and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, were “tyrannical, violent sovereigns and lying perjurers”. Isabella had instructed her envoy to cover up the brutal forced conversion of Spain’s Muslims, some of whom had sought the sultan’s help. Fortunately for the queen, the sultan was prepared to overlook the fate of his coreligionists in return for Spanish backing against his Ottoman rival. As Giles Tremlett shows in his magnificent biography,

Isabella of Castile (Bloomsbury, £25),

the queen had a good grasp ofMediterranean realpolitik.

Born in 1451, Princess Isabella’s rise to power was far from inevitable. Even after the deaths of her half-brother Enrique and brother Alfonso, she had to contend with a challenge from her half-niece Juana la Beltraneja, who had a good claim to the throne of Castile. Making the most of a rumour that Juana was not Enrique’s daughter, Isabella eventually forced her rival into a convent.

Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon – an alliance that united much of Spain – was an extraordinary partnership. Isabella defied her half-brother to make it, and Ferdinand rode, disguised as a servant, to join his wife in hostile territory.

Far fromceding power to her husband (as many had expected), Isabella asserted her role as joint monarch. One contemporary accused the queen of “usurping manly attributes”. Not everyone agreed: another insisted there was no “evil” in a kingdom falling to “a woman’s government”.

Isabella’s own ideas about a woman’s place, however, were traditional. She believed firmly in the “division of the sexes”. If God, for somemysterious reason, had chosen to accord her power, so be it. Isabella drew no general conclusions about the capabilities of women. At the heart of her story is religion: she knelt before no man but her confessor, representative of God. Still, she and Ferdinand divided their military tasks. When both were available, Ferdinand led in the field, with Isabella acting as quartermaster and ensuring supplies. When Ferdinand was occupied elsewhere (as he often was with campaigns on the borders with France), Isabella proved a highly effective commander-in-chief.

She is not, however, an easy or comfortable subject for the modern biographer. Her regime was defined by her determination to end heresy and win converts via the infamous Spanish Inquisition. Her treatment of the besieged people ofMálaga in theMuslim realm of Granada was brutal. In 1492 she oversaw the expulsion of Jews from Spain. The realm’s Jewish minority had once been afforded royal protection: Isabella withdrew it. “The price,” Tremlett observes, “in terms of human suffering and lives lost, did not trouble her greatly.”

1492 was also, of course, the year in which Christopher Columbus, with Isabella’s patronage, first arrived in what we now know as the Caribbean. The story of his voyage, and the fierce controversy that followed over the enslavement of native Caribbean islanders, plays out against a backdrop of court rivalry and close-to-fanatical piety, with rich detail of court ceremony and Spanish scenery. Much more than a biography, Tremlett has given us a triumphant and chilling account of the rise of Spain and its NewWorld conquests.

While Tremlett regards Isabella as one of a shortlist of truly great European queens who ruled in their own right, Sarah Gristwood portrays her as one of the brighter stars in a galaxy of 16th-century European queens regnant and consort. Isabella’s daughter, Katherine of Aragon, features strongly in the opening

Game of Queens: the Women Who Made SixteenthCentury Europe (Oneworld, £20).

chapters of

Gristwood’s Katherine is no longer the unhappy first wife of an English king. Here, instead, her Aragon heritage comes to the fore, as we learn how significant her Spanish ancestry was first to Katherine, and then her daughter Mary. The great strength of this book is to show how the stories of Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn andMary, Queen of Scots, so often

Isabella of Castile may be the brightest star in a galaxy of formidable 16th-century queens, says Catherine Fletcher

Doomed: Mary, Queen of Scots