It is well-researched and has numerous notes to my great content. Giles Tremlett’s Isabella of Castile – Europe’s First Great Queen is a magnificent volume on the life of, indeed, Europe’s first great Queen, a worthy title.

She allied herself with the most powerful Prince she could find and together they built an empire.

She succeeded in having herself named heiress to her brother, Henry IV of Castile. Her brother’s early death pushed her centre stage and Isabella became a firm believer in her right to rule.

She was first and foremost, a woman and in her way stood not only her younger brother, who preceded her in the line of succession but also Joanna la Beltraneja, who may or not have been her niece. Isabella of Castile‘s path to the crown was not an easy one. 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.

Isabella of castile europe's first great queen