Every booklover has a favorite place to steal away to read and dream of distant lands. When I was a girl living in the American-controlled Panama Canal Zone, my special spot was a concrete seawall near my house where I could look out over the Caribbean Sea. I didn’t have to travel far in my imagination because the place where I sat, dangling my legs over the water, had been visited by explorer Christopher Columbus in 1502, on his last voyage, when he was still desperately eager to bring back good news to his sponsor, the intense and dynamic Queen Isabella of Castile.
Isabella’s legacy was visible everywhere in Panama, once the hub of Spain’s colonial empire, where tons of gold and silver were transported to Europe so that the queen’s descendants could expand their power and dominion in the Old World. There were dozens of sites, mostly crumbling, abandoned ruins, covered in jungle vines, where the Spaniards had lived and worked when they ruled the planet. The derelict Castillo de San Lorenzo and the tumbled-down walls of Panama Viejo were evidence that even awesome political power can be fleeting. This made a vivid impression on me, a child of the American empire overseas, then at the apex of its strength, both admired and resented around the world.
In college I continued to pursue my interest in Spanish history, art, and literature. When I attended Spain’s University of Salamanca, a college favored by its patroness Queen Isabella, I toured the country, visiting the palaces, castles, and museums that the wealth of the New World had financed. General Francisco Franco had just died, and the country was once again opening itself to the world after a dark phase in its history.
Then one day when I was traveling to Madrid, the train made an unexpected stop at the forlorn hamlet of Madrigal de las Altas Torres. With time on my hands, I wandered about its dusty alleyways and stumbled upon a brick building that caught my eye. A small sign noted that Isabella had been born there. The medieval structure was unprepossessing, not looking at all like a home to monarchs. The sight underscored to me how humble Isabel’s beginnings had been, and how unlikely her meteoric rise to power. It seemed almost unbelievable that a young woman from this background, at a time when women seldom wielded power, would pave the way to world domination for her grandchildren. I was fascinated, and I think the idea for the book began percolating in my mind at that time—although I spent some decades in journalism before circling back to my early interest in history. I was curious about Queen Isabella, puzzled by her actions, and I wanted to better understand her, what she did and why she did it. It seemed essential to try to understand her from the context of her own times, which is what I have attempted to do.
Queen Isabella’s life is a Rorschach test for her biographers. 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.
It seems only fitting that I should bare my own particular biases here as well. First, on the issue of faith: I am not religiously active; I am primarily descended from a mix of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews from Europe. I have attempted to be open-minded about the sensitivities of all the participants to the events I am describing, but I have a particular bias in that I think killing or enslaving people is evil, regardless of who the victims are or why the cruelty was rationalized at the time.
On balance, I think the fact that Isabella sent Christopher Columbus to the New World was a good thing. Why? Because I myself am a product of what has been called the Columbian Exchange.
When I was a child, my mother would proudly say that her family first came to the New World at Jamestown, meaning that she hailed from early American stock. And my father, partly of Native American heritage, through the Lenni Lenape tribe, would laughingly respond, “Yes, we met your boat and we greeted you when you arrived.”
Consequently, I am sympathetic to the claims of Native Americans that their lands were stolen. And I am also sympathetic to the challenges faced by the Europeans when they arrived, for they suffered hardship and loss, too.
I also bring to the task a profound appreciation for the courage and daring shown by the early explorers to the New World. The first time I saw a Spanish fort in the New World was when I was six years old and visited Fort Saint Augustine in Florida. A few years later, my family moved from the United States to Panama, a trip that then entailed a three-day car ride along modern highways to reach New Orleans, where we embarked on a four-day voyage by sea. It was a long journey even in the 1960s.
One day we drove through the jungles on the Caribbean coast of Panama to Fort San Lorenzo, which I realized with amazement was a sister fortification to the one I had seen in Saint Augustine. I early saw the massive scope and scale of the Spanish empire, how far it had reached across the oceans, and how effectively it had imposed its culture, language, and religion in places thousands of miles apart. Whatever you might think of Spain during this period, its achievements and accomplishments cannot be denied.
Another part of my perspective comes from my life experience as a journalist. I’ve covered the present manifestations of some of the same issues and problems that were confronted by the Iberians of the fifteenth century. As a reporter, I place great value on primary accounts of events that occurred, and so in researching this book, I always looked first to what had been said from the beginning by people who were there and saw things occur themselves. I have paid attention to later critiques of these sources as well, but generally tend to favor eyewitness reports over later interpretations of events by people who were not there. I was fortunately able to find a great many of these primary resources at the Library of Congress, the world’s preeminent library, where dozens of librarians helped me track down titles or provided access to ancient books and manuscripts that allowed me to find the first published accounts of many of the incidents described in this book.
I made a special effort to locate nontraditional or “outsider” accounts to round out the story as clearly as possible. For accounts of the Inquisition and its effects, I sought out Jewish sources and found valuable material in the Judaica Collection at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. For accounts of what transpired in the Kingdom of Granada and during the Ottoman advances, I sought Arabic accounts and first-person contemporary reports from Eastern Europe. Some of these accounts have only recently been translated into English. In some cases, I paid for translations of original materials that have not yet been published in English. I traveled to Spain, England, France, Panama, and Puerto Rico in pursuit of the tale, using libraries and archival resources wherever they could be found.
I sometimes quoted older history books rather than more contemporary sources simply because of the beauty of their language. The work of William Hickling Prescott and Benzion Netanyahu, to cite just two examples, has been superseded by other, more contemporary research, but these men’s accomplishments remain seminal in the field and have provided the foundation for much that came later.
That means this book is somewhat different from those that are written by most academic historians today. There are a couple of areas where this is most obvious—the topics of cannibalism in the Caribbean and the probable origins of syphilis in the New World. Many modern historians have expressed doubts about the accounts of those things, probably as an overcorrection for the deep-rooted racism and ethnocentrism of some of the original European chroniclers, who were eager to justify seizing land in the Americas. However, numerous first-person accounts agree in describing the same basic sets of facts, and so I have presented them as likely facts myself.
Moreover, cannibalism has had ritual elements or been the result of human desperation a great many times in history. I don’t see mentioning it as pejorative to any individual group. New research has found signs of cannibalism in Jamestown, so no culture had a monopoly on the idea that human flesh could be palatable under the right circumstances.
On syphilis, the arrival of the disease in such a virulent form in Europe at that particular time does not seem coincidental to me. Many of the first-person accounts at the time described a terrible new disease spread by sexual intercourse. Moreover, contagion is usually a two-way street. Syphilis may have gone east, but smallpox, the measles, influenza, and the bubonic plague went west at the same time, producing a far greater number of deaths. And it was the Americans and Europeans who introduced syphilis for the first time in the Hawaiian Islands in the 1800s.
The discussion of the distinct possibility of childhood sexual abuse in Isabella’s family comes from my own journalistic work and that of my colleagues, and after consultation with psychologists who are experts in the field. Isolated archival records discussing events in Isabella’s family, taken together, paint a picture of the kind of predation that has been around forever but that is only now being investigated and exposed. The patterns in the Castilian court in the late 1400s are remarkably similar to those that have been revealed in recent public scandals involving the clergy and other powerful figures.
What I have tried to do is place Isabella within the context of the time and place in which she lived. She was a religiously fervent Catholic, living in an era when the Ottoman Turks seemed on the verge of wiping Christianity off the map. I am convinced that much of what she did was a reaction to this perceived threat, and to her belief that she was being called upon to bolster the faith against a very formidable enemy.