Marriage of the Catholic Monarchs
Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon married in October 1469 without permission, using a forged papal dispensation, and made Spain. They were second cousins and needed a dispensation that the pope would not give, so one was produced; a genuine one followed four years later once the marriage was a political fact. The union was dynastic rather than institutional. Castile and Aragon kept their own laws, parliaments, coinage, customs frontiers and languages, and the two monarchs governed each other's kingdoms jointly under a formula that had them ruling as equals — tanto monta, monta tanto — which was unusual in an age that expected a queen's husband to be the king. Isabella had to fight a civil war from 1475 to 1479 against the supporters of her niece Juana, whose legitimacy was disputed and whose claim Portugal backed. What they did with the union defined the next century. They subdued the Castilian nobility and its private wars, took over the military orders, obtained from Rome the right to nominate bishops, and established the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 under royal rather than papal control. They completed the reconquest at Granada in January 1492, expelled the Jews in March, and commissioned Columbus in April. The Americas were annexed to Castile alone, which is why Castilian institutions and language went there. Their heirs died one after another until the inheritance passed to a Habsburg grandson raised in Flanders who spoke no Spanish when he arrived. The title Catholic Monarchs was granted by a Spanish pope, Alexander VI, in 1496, and it is the name Spanish history uses for them. The word Spain as the name of a single monarchy came a good deal later than the marriage that produced it.
- Year: 1469 CE
- Category: Political
