“It was Isabel, far more than even
bold Ferdinand, who had made Spain the that was about to burst the ancient
bonds of the Ocean and transform the girdle of the world. She had united Spain,
brought it justice, law, and order; she inspired it with a renewed awareness of
its Catholic identity and mission; now she was about to complete the
centuries-old task of its re-conquest.
Isabel the Catholic is probably the greatest
woman ruler in history. Born in Madrigal de las Altas Torres in Castile in
1451, she was thirty six years olf in 1487, at the height of her powers,
nearing the summit of her career. She was adored by her people and especially
her soldiers, a golden-haired beauty with blue-green eyes who prayed the divine
office every day like a nun, trusting in God for all things; who once rose two
hundred miles without rest in a crisis (the last fifty at night in the rain),
and tamed a rebel city with a word; who had borne and was raising five
children, and knitted her husband’s shirts herself; with love for her God and
her people and her husband and her children sparking like a hearth-fire and her
will like a Toledo blade”
Our
Lady of Guadelupe and the Conquest of Darkness, Warren H. Carroll
