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FERDINAND AND ISABELLA
One night in early October 1469, a small party of merchants set
out across the mountains above Saragossa in the Spanish kingdom of Aragón. Their destination was the town of Valladolid in
the neighboring kingdom of Castile and León. Although their
mules were loaded with boxes and bales, these men were no
ordinary merchants. The shabbily-dressed boy of seventeen
who tended the mules was, in fact, their young master, Ferdinand, King of Sicily and heir to the crown of Aragón. In
Valladolid, he was to meet and marry the eighteen-year-old Infanta Isabella, heiress of Castile.
Ferdinand traveled in disguise and at night for two reasons:
first, because Isabella’s half-brother, King Henry IV of Castile,
and most of his nobles were eager to prevent the wedding; and
second, because Ferdinand’s father, old King John of Aragón,
could afford neither the men nor the money his son would have
needed to enter hostile Castile in a manner becoming his rank.
The journey was a long and dangerous one. The merchant
caravan, winding its way through the wild sierra country that
divided Aragón and Old Castile, had to keep a constant lookout
for the robber bands that infested the mountains. Once safely
through, the travelers followed the curving river Duero across
the empty, rock-strewn plains of the Castilian tableland.
Whenever they stopped at some lonely inn, Ferdinand, to avoid
suspicious glances from the innkeeper and fellow guests, waited
on the other members of the caravan and fed and watered their
mules.
At Burgo de Osma, a walled town perched high above the
Duero, he was suddenly forced to reveal his identity. Some of
Isabella’s partisans challenged him from the battlements.
Whatever reply he invented on the spur of the moment was obviously not satisfactory. One of the sentries hurled a large
stone that narrowly missed killing the future King of Spain.
When Ferdinand revealed that he was their princess’s bridegroom, however, the townsfolk quickly made up for their
hostility, and the mayor himself escorted the prince on the next
stage of his journey, to Dueñas in León. Here Ferdinand was
greeted by a band of nobles who were loyal to Isabella, and he
could abandon his disguise at last.
Six days later, on October 15, he rode into Valladolid to meet
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his bride for the first time. Isabella was waiting for him in the
private house where she had been staying. With her were the
Archbishop of Toledo, a strong supporter of the proposed
match, and her lifelong friend, a girl her own age named Beatriz de Bobadilla. Isabella had dressed simply for the occasion,
and her only ornament was a magnificent gold and ruby necklace that Ferdinand had sent her as a present. The two young
people talked together for two hours, and then Ferdinand returned to Dueñas, eighteen miles away.
By arranging to marry Ferdinand, Isabella was deliberately defying her half-brother the king, who had other plans for her
marriage, plans that dismayed her. She had risked a great deal
by coming to Valladolid and asking Ferdinand to meet her
there. But she was cautious by nature and had already insisted
on writing to the king, asking for his approval. The marriage,
she now said, could not go ahead until she received his answer.
However, the Archbishop, who was alarmed that an unfavorable
reply might upset everything, managed to persuade her that
the wedding should not be postponed. Isabella then raised another objection. Since she and Ferdinand were second cousins,
they could not marry without a dispensation from the Pope. A
letter requesting this would have to be sent to Rome.
By now the suspense was unbearable. Fortunately, King John,
Ferdinand’s wily father, had foreseen such an obstacle, and he
and the Archbishop between them had forged a papal bull of
dispensation that authorized Ferdinand to marry any female
cousin if he so wished. This was now shown to the unsuspecting
Isabella, and the Archbishop proclaimed joyfully that the marriage could proceed.
On October 19, the couple were quietly married by the Archbishop of Toledo in the same house where Isabella had been
staying. There was none of the pomp, pageantry, and splendor
usually associated with royal weddings. Only after they were
safely married could the cloak of secrecy be thrown off, and
even then, they had to borrow the money to pay for the weeklong celebrations that followed.
This furtively-contracted marriage was to prove one of the most
important events in Spanish history. It meant that when
Ferdinand and Isabella in turn acceded to their separate
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FERDINAND AND ISABELLA
thrones, the kingdoms of Aragón and Castile – that formed the
greater part of what is now known as Spain - would be united.
Although each kingdom was to remain separate, the same heir
would inherit them both. This would inevitably, if not immediately, mean the integration of the two. Upon unity depend
power and strength, and it was as a united country that Spain
was to become one of the foremost powers of Europe in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The concept of Spain as a nation emerged during the reign of
Ferdinand and Isabella. But the task of molding a collection of
sovereign states into a more-or-less united whole was by no
means an easy one. It was to take all of Isabella’s resolute and
selfless devotion and all of Ferdinand’s military ability and diplomatic guile.
The land to which they were born had a long and turbulent
past, so turbulent that it is impossible to appreciate the extent
of their achievements without first realizing exactly how much
they had to contend with.
From earliest times, when the land was occupied by the primitive Iberians who gave their name to the peninsula, Spain
suffered a series of invasions, reconquests, and civil wars.
Phoenicians, Celts, Greeks, Carthaginians, and Romans occupied the country in turn. In the fifth century A.D., as the Roman
Empire crumbled under barbarian attacks, successive waves of
Suevians, Alans, Vandals, and Visigoths poured into Spain,
adding to the existing mixture of races.
In 711 came the most fateful invasion of all, when the Arabs
crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and established the religion and
culture of Islam throughout Spain. The Visigothic King Rodrigo
disappeared in battle, and his few remaining followers fled to
the mountains in the far north. Within eight years, the Arabs
dominated the entire peninsula - a situation that was to continue for another 500 years. When Isabella married Ferdinand
in 1469, the kingdom of Granada was still under Arab control,
and the Spain they inherited had been shaped by the centuries
of combined co-existence and warfare with the Moors, as the
Arabs in Spain are usually called.
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