In that place, a wife is made sport of, like a prostitute, as her husband grows ashamed, and she is given to another man…” There, a mother is bought in the presence and to the dismay of her son. There, they are examined and stripped naked … There a son is sold with his mother watching and grieving. His name is Georgius de Hungaria, his memoir bemoans how he saw “public selling ground, the poor captives are brought, bound with ropes and chains, as if sheep for slaughter. One of the few captives who managed to escape was a student at the time his country (Romania) fell to the Turks. The Turks tended to capture Christians and sell to slavery and the women would fare worse. There were reasons for these hostilities. Finally when the Turks made their intentions clear to encroach on the Italian peninsula and started taking on Eastern Europe, the Christian kingdoms became more hostiles. Though there was the practice of “convivencia” or healthy living in Spain between Moors, Jews, Conversos (converted Jews) and Christians, this tended to fluctuate. This was an age of massive religious intolerance. However, as we all know, there was a darker aspect to Isabella. But Isabella was there to stay, and her decisions would not be questioned –even by her husband. And she brought many nobles to heel and appointed many conversos and people of humble beginnings to important posts that of course caused a lot of dissension among the “Grandees” –the noblest families of Spain. Isabella *took* the Crown and she owed her ascension to no one else but herself. Isabella was born in 1451, she came to the throne in the early 1470s, taking the crown instead of waiting for the Cortes to appoint a legal successor to her late half-brother, Enrique IV.
But this thread is not about her ascension but instead of her leadership and bringing Christian countries together at a time when they couldn’t be farther apart.
Isabella’s path to the throne has been widely explored many times in countless biographies, and indeed she deserves many more for her rise as her English counterpart, is fascinating. Her name was Isabella and this woman was the first to head this Holy League, as well as the first to set a precedent of this scale. A century before the Holy League was formed to combat a powerful woman who was Queen in her own right, and strip her of that right, there was another woman, a powerful ancestor of her late sister, the first Queen Regnant of England, and of her dreaded rival, Philip II of Spain.
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