Ferdinand and Isabella

Description

This book is about a couple, not a single, dominant ruler. Thus it raises issues of gender, and the dynamics of a marriage over thirty-five years, as well as the practice of monarchical power. The reader sees Ferdinand and Isabella struggle to establish their regime, and then work out an elaborate reform programme in Church and State. It sees them fight a ‘total war’, by fifteenth-century standards, against Muslim Granada, leading to that kingdom’s conquest, and an equally ‘total’ war, through the Inquisition and the Church in general, to convert Spanish Jews and Muslims to Christianity, and to reform and purify the religious and social lives of the established Christians themselves.  For readers interested in Early European History.

Contents

1. Inheritance and apprenticeship

2. Building a regime

3. The War against Islam

4. Defenders of the Faith

5. Diplomacy and Expansion

6. Court and Culture

7. Dynasty and Legacy

Epilogue

Bibliography

List of Dates

Monetary Values

Glossary

Features

• Shows how Ferdinand and Isabella developed further an older Spanish ideology of strong monarchy and expressed it in cultural patronage, especially in Court
• Shows how, despite the instability in Spain which followed Isabella’s death, in 1504 she and her husband forged the basis of their united monarchiesa as first a European and then a World Power
• Focuses on powerful personalities who impacted on whole societies in Europe and America
• Combines the exercise of power with royal and religious ideology
• Focuses on the often painful interaction between Christians, Jews and Muslims, and their respective religions
• This book views the history of Spain, in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, from the perspective of the rulers and their government

Author

John Edwards has been involved in work on Spanish history and literature for over thirty years, having published, to date, eight books and over eighty articles and conference papers in Britain, the USA, Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Poland and Israel.

For twenty years he has taught at the University of Birmingham, successively as Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Medieval History and as Reader in Spanish History. He is also a University Research Fellow in Spanish at Oxford University.