"Packed with vivid character sketches and lyrical description, Tremlett has told a gripping story, full of beauty and darkness." - The Times (UK) "If you're enjoying Victoria on PBS, you'll like Tremlett’s juicy history of Queen Isabella of Castile, who ascended the Spanish throne in 1474 at 23." - Entertainment Weekly "Tremlett writes so well as to make this read almost as entertaining as a traditional Spanish novel but with thorough balanced scholarship." - New York Journal of Books "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. With authority and insight he relates the story of this legendary, if controversial, first initiate in a small club of great European queens that includes Elizabeth I of England, Russia's Catherine the Great, and Britain's Queen Victoria. Their pivotal reign was long and transformative, uniting Spain and setting the stage for its golden era of global dominance.Īcclaimed historian Giles Tremlett chronicles the life of Isabella of Castile as she led her country out of the murky Middle Ages and harnessed the newest ideas and tools of the early Renaissance to turn her ill-disciplined, quarrelsome nation into a sharper, truly modern state with a powerful, clear-minded, and ambitious monarch at its center.
Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon united two kingdoms, a royal partnership in which Isabella more than held her own. At a time when successful queens regnant were few and far between, Isabella faced not only the considerable challenge of being a young, female ruler in an overwhelmingly male-dominated world, but also of reforming a major European kingdom riddled with crime, debt, corruption, and religious factionism.
In 1474, when Castile was the largest, strongest, and most populous kingdom in Hispania (present day Spain and Portugal), a twenty-three-year-old woman named Isabella ascended the throne. A major biography of the queen who transformed Spain into a principal global power, and sponsored the voyage that would open the New World.
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