Isabella I of Castile
Isabella I of Castile completed the reconquest, financed Columbus, and established the Spanish Inquisition. Born in Ávila province in 1451, she was the daughter of John II of Castile and grew up in relative obscurity, becoming heir presumptive only when her half-brother Henry IV's daughter Joanna was widely believed illegitimate. She married Ferdinand of Aragon in secret in October 1469, against Henry's wishes and using a forged papal dispensation, and fought a four-year civil war after Henry's death to secure the throne against Joanna and Portugal. She and Ferdinand ruled as equals in Castile under the formula tanto monta, and their marriage joined the two crowns while leaving them legally distinct. They restored royal authority against a nobility that had run the kingdom for decades, reviving the Santa Hermandad as a rural police force, taking back alienated crown lands, and staffing the administration with university-trained lawyers rather than magnates. Granada, the last Muslim state in Iberia, fell in January 1492 after a ten-year campaign she attended in person. The same year she and Ferdinand expelled the Jews who would not convert, perhaps a hundred thousand people, and backed Columbus's voyage after six years of refusals. The Inquisition, established in 1478 under royal rather than papal control, pursued converts suspected of secret practice, and Muslims were forced to convert or leave from 1502. She insisted in her will that the indigenous peoples of the Americas be treated as free subjects and not enslaved, an instruction routinely ignored. She was intensely devout, learned Latin as an adult, and built a library. She died in 1504.
- Lived: 1451 CE – 1504 CE
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: queen, head_of_state
