Late Middle Ages

Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs

The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in Valladolid on 19 October 1469 was, in the strict constitutional sense, an act of political improvisation. Both parties were still heirs in dispute: Ferdinand was the second son of John II of Aragon and was not yet his father’s heir; Isabella had been displaced in the Castilian succession by the half-brother who had become Henry IV. The marriage was made without the consent of Henry IV, of John II, of the pope, and of the archbishop of Toledo, all of whom had a customary interest in such matters. By the end of the year, however, it had produced the political union that would, in the course of the next twenty-three years, give Christian Iberia a single crown, complete the conquest of Granada, and lay the foundations of the Spanish state. The pope Alexander VI conferred the title Reyes Católicos — Catholic Monarchs — on Ferdinand and Isabella in 1496, and the title stuck. This article treats the marriage of 1469, the Castilian and Aragonese successions of 1474–1479, the long working of the joint monarchy, and the religious policy that has given the reign its place in the European memory.

The marriage of 1469

The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella was a long time in the making. The betrothal had been proposed as early as 1461, when Ferdinand was nine and Isabella was ten, in the context of the long quarrel between John II of Aragon and the Castilian magnate faction that was allied to him. The contract was signed at the Convent of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo on 7 January 1469. The marriage was a violation of the settlement by which Henry IV had intended to marry Isabella to Afonso V of Portugal. Henry IV had been crowned at Las Huelgas in 1454, and he had not yet produced a male heir, and his only child, Joanna, was rumoured to be the offspring of an affair with Beltrán de la Cueva, the duke of Ledesma and master of Santiago, the king’s favourite. The question of the Castilian succession was open, and the question of the Castilian marriage was the political question of the moment.

The actual marriage took place in the Palacio de los Vivero in Valladolid on 19 October 1469. The political consequences were immediate. Henry IV was affronted; the archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso Carrillo, was horrified; the marquis of Villena, Juan Pacheco, the great power-broker of the Castilian court, withdrew his support. The marriage produced the long Castilian civil war of 1475–1479, the War of the Castilian Succession, in which the supporters of Joanna (“La Beltraneja”) and her fiancé, Afonso V of Portugal, fought against the partisans of Isabella. The war was settled by the Treaty of Alcáçovas of 4 September 1479, by which Portugal recognised the Castilian succession of Isabella, and by which Castile and Portugal agreed to divide the Atlantic discoveries and the rights of conquest in Africa.

The Castilian and Aragonese successions

Isabella succeeded to the throne of Castile in Segovia on 13 December 1474, two days after the death of Henry IV. Her succession was contested by the supporters of Joanna, the alleged daughter of Henry IV and Beltrán de la Cueva, who was betrothed to Afonso V of Portugal. The War of the Castilian Succession lasted from 1475 to 1479, and it was, in the first instance, a war of succession; it was also, in a sense, a war of European politics, since Afonso V was supported by Louis XI of France and Joanna was supported by a faction of the Castilian nobility. Isabella’s claim was defended by a powerful Castilian nobility, by the archbishop of Toledo, and by the agreement of the major Castilian cities. The decisive battle was the Battle of Toro on 1 March 1476, in which the Castilian forces defeated the Portuguese and their allies. The treaty of Alcáçovas, concluded in 1479, was the political settlement.

Ferdinand succeeded to the throne of Aragon on 19 January 1479, on the death of his father John II. The succession was uncontested. The crowns of Castile and Aragon were now united in the persons of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the political union of Christian Iberia was, in effect, complete. The crowns were not, however, formally united. Castile and Aragon remained separate kingdoms, with separate laws, separate institutions, separate fiscal systems, and separate systems of justice. The two crowns were united only in the persons of the two monarchs and, after 1479, in the persons of their daughter Joanna. The political union was a personal union, not a constitutional one; the formal union would not come until the Nueva Planta decrees of Philip V in 1707–1716.

The consolidation of royal authority

The years 1480–1492 were the period in which the new regime was consolidated. The most important institutional reform was the establishment of the Santa Hermandad, the Holy Brotherhood, in 1476. The Hermandad was a police force, organised by the cities and the crown, with jurisdiction over a wide range of crimes in the rural areas; it was the basis of the new royal justice in the countryside, and it was, in the longer term, a model for the more famous Guardia Civil of the 19th century. The Cortes of Castile, which had been in decline since the late 14th century, were convened in 1476 and 1480; the Cortes of Toledo of 1480 were the most important, and they produced a series of constitutional reforms that would last until the 18th century. The royal council, the Consejo Real, was reorganised in 1480 to remove the great aristocrats and to bring in lawyers of the letrado class — the professional, university-trained jurists who were the backbone of the new regime.

The other great institutional reform was the establishment of the Inquisition. The Castilian Inquisition was established in 1478 by a bull of Pope Sixtus IV; the Aragonese Inquisition was established in 1484. The first inquisitor general of Castile was Tomás de Torquemada, a Dominican friar of the convent of Santo Tomás in Ávila. The Inquisition was a royal, not a papal, institution: it was funded by the crown, its officers were appointed by the crown, and it was answerable to the king. The first targets were the conversos — Jews who had converted to Christianity, often under the pressure of the riots of 1391 and the social legislation of the previous century — and the subsequent targets were the moriscos — Muslims who had been forced to convert after the fall of Granada. The Inquisition has, in the long run, been read in three ways: as a religious tribunal, as a political instrument, and as a hybrid institution that served both. The most useful modern study is Henry Kamen’s The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (4th ed., 2014), which is sensitive to the local and regional variations.

The foreign policy of the Catholic Monarchs

The foreign policy of the Catholic Monarchs was, in the long view, a careful series of marriages and treaties. The first treaty was the Treaty of Alcáçovas of 1479, which settled the Castilian succession. The second was the Treaty of Barcelona of 19 January 1493, by which France returned the counties of Roussillon and Cerdanya, which had been occupied by Louis XI in 1473, to Aragon. The third was the Treaty of Tordesillas of 7 June 1494, by which Castile and Portugal agreed to divide the Atlantic discoveries. The fourth was the First Treaty of Medina del Campo of 27 March 1489, by which Castile and England agreed to a marriage between the Catholic Monarchs’ daughter Catherine and Arthur, prince of Wales, and to a mutual defence pact. The fifth was the Second Treaty of Medina del Campo of 26 May 1496, by which the marriage of Catherine and Arthur was reaffirmed, and the marriage of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII (after Arthur’s death in 1502) was provided for.

The most important foreign-policy event of the reign was the conquest of Granada. The fall of the city on 2 January 1492, treated in the related article, completed the long Christian campaign to recover the Iberian peninsula from Muslim rule. The Treaty of Granada of 25 November 1491, by which Boabdil, the last Nasrid king, agreed to surrender the city, was a generous settlement, but the Alhambra Decree of 31 March 1492, by which the Catholic Monarchs ordered the expulsion of the Jews from Castile and Aragon, was a more controversial act. The discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus in October 1492, sponsored by the Catholic Monarchs, was the third great event of the year, and it was, in the longer term, the most consequential. The Alhambra Decree and the discovery of the New World were, in different ways, the two events that defined the long working of the Catholic Monarchs’ reign.

The instruments of confessional state

The most distinctive political instrument of the reign was the alliance of the crown, the church, and the urban patriciate. The crown drew its support from the cities, the letrados, the new religious orders (the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Hieronymites), and from a small but influential group of the great nobility. The church was the institutional backbone of the regime: the archbishopric of Toledo, the see of Seville, the new bishoprics of the New World, the religious orders of the south, the inquisition, the new foundations of the late 15th century. The urban patriciate was the financial backbone: the great mercantile families of Burgos, Seville, and Barcelona, the Genoese and Florentine bankers of the late 15th century, the converso financiers of the royal court. The alliance of these three groups produced a regime that was unusually stable, unusually centralised, and unusually religious.

The reputation of the Catholic Monarchs has gone through several revisions. The older Catholic historiography (W. H. Prescott’s History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella of 1837, the Spanish centro de estudios of the late 19th century) treated them as the founders of the Spanish nation-state. The revisionist historiography of the 20th century (the generación de 1898 of Unamuno and Menéndez Pidal, the Catalan school of Vicens Vives, the Marxist work of Manuel Tuñón de Lara) treated them as the founders of a centralised, repressive state. The newer historiography (Peggy Liss’s Isabel the Queen of 1992, Barbara Weissberger’s Isabel Rules of 2004, John Edwards’s The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs of 2000) has been more balanced: the Catholic Monarchs were effective monarchs, ruthless in their consolidation of royal authority, brilliant in their diplomacy, and responsible for an expulsion and a religious policy that have to be read in the context of the period. The legacy is real, but it is also complex.

References and further reading

  • W. H. Prescott, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (Boston, 1837).
  • Peggy Liss, Isabel the Queen: Life and Times (New York, 1992).
  • Barbara Weissberger, Isabel Rules: Constructing Queenship, Wielding Power (Minneapolis, 2004).
  • John Edwards, The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474–1516 (Oxford, 2000).
  • Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (4th ed., New Haven, 2014).