Isabella Of Castile Quotes

The world is only as small as we see it, my lady. Imagination knows no limits.

And I vowed that were it ever within my power, I would see to it that he had his voyage.

Those who abuse political power create a debt of hatred that almost certainly brings them to a bad end.

Though I strived for spiritual and physical unity in all of Spain, I believed a truly great country, one that would endure for centuries, must be built on the foundation of a literate and well-rounded society.

He was now wealthy beyond his wildest dreams and wanted for nothing, so Columbus retired to Valladolid, which at one time was considered the capital of Castile and Leon, a historic region of northwestern Spain. On October 19, 1469, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had been married at the Palacio de los Vivero, in the city of Valladolid, giving it great significance for Columbus. It was only a year and a half after retiring, on May 20, 1506, that Christopher Columbus quietly died. Dr. Antonio Rodriguez Cuartero, a professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Granada, stated that the Admiral died of a heart attack caused by Reiter's Syndrome, also known as reactive arthritis. He was only 54 years of age; however, he had been suffering from arthritis for quite some time prior to his death.

ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 3, 1492, Don Cristóbal Colón—newly entitled as High Admiral and newly appointed a noble of our court—departs the port of Palos. He travels with three ships—the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. Serenaded by his crew, he stands at the prow of the Santa María, the wind ruffling his silvery hair. He looks ahead, always ahead, to the horizon.

The Warburg family is the most important ally of the Rothschilds, and the history of this family is at least equally interesting. The book The Warburgs shows that the bloodline of this family dates back to the year 1001.[28] Whilst fleeing from the Muslims, they established themselves in Spain. There they were pursued by Fernando of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and moved to Lombardy. According to the annals of the city of Warburg, in 1559, Simon von Cassel was entitled to establish himself in this city in Westphalia, and he changed his surname to Warburg. The city register proves that he was a banker and a trader. The real banking tradition was beginning to take shape when three generations later Jacob Samuel Warburg immigrated to Altona in 1668. His grandson Markus Gumprich Warburg moved to Hamburg in 1774, where his two sons founded the well-known bank Warburg & Co. in 1798. With the passage of time, this bank did business throughout the entire world. By 1814, Warburg & Co had business relations with the Rothschilds in London. According to Joseph Wechsberg in his book The Merchant Bankers, the Warburgs regarded themselves equal to the Rothschild, Oppenheimer and Mendelsohn families.[29] These families regularly met in Paris, London and Berlin. It was an unwritten rule that these families let their descendants marry amongst themselves. The Warburgs married, just like the Rothschilds, within houses (bloodlines). That’s how this family got themselves involved with the prosperous banking family Gunzberg from St. Petersburg, with the Rosenbergs from Kiev, with the Oppenheims and Goldschmidts from Germany, with the Oppenheimers from South Africa and with the Schiffs from the United States.[30] The best-known Warburgs were Max Warburg (1867-1946), Paul Warburg (1868-1932) and Felix Warburg (1871-1937). Max Warburg served his apprenticeship with the Rothschilds in London, where he asserted himself as an expert in the field of international finances. Furthermore, he occupied himself intensively with politics and, since 1903, regularly met with the German minister of finance. Max Warburg advised, at the request of monarch Bernhard von Bülow, the German emperor on financial affairs. Additionally, he was head of the secret service. Five days after the armistice of November 11, 1918 he was delegated by the German government as a peace negotiator at a peace committee in Versailles. Max Warburg was also one of the directors of the Deutsche Reichsbank and had financial importances in the war between Japan and Russia and in the Moroccan crisis of 1911. Felix Warburg was familiarized with the diamond trade by his uncle, the well-known banker Oppenheim. He married Frieda Schiff and settled in New York. By marrying Schiff’s daughter he became partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Paul Warburg became acquainted with the youngest daughter of banker Salomon Loeb, Nina. It didn’t take long before they married. Paul Warburg left Germany and also became a partner with Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York. During the First World War he was a member of the Federal Reserve Board, and in that position he had a controlling influence on the development of American financial policies. As a financial expert, he was often consulted by the government. The Warburgs invested millions of dollars in various projects which all served one purpose: one absolute world government. That’s how the war of Japan against Russia (1904-1905) was financed by the Warburgs bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co.[31] The purpose of this war was destroying the csardom. As said before, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, James P. Warburg said: “We shall have a world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government

The Inquisition in Ferdinand’s domains almost immediately acquired an even more unsavory reputation than that in Castile.

Without question, Isabella was fervently religious and spent many hours in prayer at her private altar seeking to divine God’s purpose for her life, obsessively attending mass, even living inside a suite of rooms positioned above the chair at the Cathedral in Toledo when she was visiting Castile’s spiritual center.

Her religiosity had a dark side. She feared unknown and dangerous things in the spiritual realm. It’s not coincidence that she commissioned the large family portrait that showed her sheltering under the arms of the Virgin Mary while menacing demons danced above their heads.

The University of Salamanca was one of the greatest and oldest universities in Europe, and Queen Isabella supported scholarship.

The medieval structure was unprepossessing, not looking at all like a home to monarchs. The site underscored to me how humble Isabella’s beginnings had been, and how unlikely her meteoric rise to power. It seemed almost unbelievable that a young woman from this background at a time when women seldom wielded power, would pave the way to world dominion for her grandchildren.

When she split the world in half, in other words, did she know she was keep half of it for herself and leaving half to her beloved daughter as the queen of Portugal, and that the two halves were likely to come together in the next generation?

Charles living in faraway Flanders, was now the heir to the kingdom, but was being raised far from the land that Isabella had spent her life so fiercely defending.

Philip’s advisers controlled him by feeding his vices, as Álvaro de Luna had done with King Juan II of Castile, Isabella’s father. Juana was as little able to handle the situation as her grandmother Isabel had been when she found herself in a similiar predicament, caught between, caught between her husband the king and his favourite.

For while both families wanted the match, both were ferociously angling for advantage. Henry VII was always watching his promises, which eventually made his son and heir a very rich man and Isabella had fair daughters to dower. The families dickered over the prices each should pay and the terms of the arrangement from 1488 to 1509, from the time Catherine was three years old until she was twenty-four.

Isabella used the same mixture of flattery and manipulation in her international negotiations as she did in domestic affairs.

It was always good to have an ally in a foreign court.

By the time King João II finally inherited the throne, he noted with disgust that the only property his father had left him by right was the land under the roads.

When his father died and João became king in 1481, he embarked on the same program of centralized royal administration that other successful European countries, including Spain, France, and England, were employing to stabilize themselves and plane a check on nobles who had grown arrogant and lawless during times of disorganized governments and evil chaos.

With the nuptial ceremonies concluded, Juana became Archduchess of Burgundy through her marriage to Phillip, who was Archduke of Burgundy. He ruled the land essentially as king, but his title was archduke because of a historical anomaly in how the confederation of states it represented had come together-as a duchy designated by a French king for rule by his son, as duke. This realm was composed of a crescent-shaped set of provinces that included Holland, Belgium, and areas of Northern France, particularly the Burgundy region. To the east was the Holy Roman Empire, which was rules by Phillip’s father and grandfather, but to the west and soutth was France, which was a powerful and dangerous ally.

In the Great Square of Brussels, for example, of series of living tableaux, with actors representing fictitious, mythological, and historical figures, were presented for Juana’s education and entertainment. One tableau depicted Juana’s education and entertainment. One tableu depicted Juana in the guise of the biblical Judith, killing Holofernes to free her people. Similiar scenes also showed women as heroines defying male authority.

The exploits of Queen Isabella, Juana’s mother, seemed to have attracted attention everywhere as representing a new model of woman as warrior, and clearly Juana’s new subjects expected her to do more of the same in Flanders.

Isabella’s legacy was visible everywhere in Panama, once the hub of Spain’s colonnial empire, where tons of gold and silver were transported to Europe so that the queen’s descendants could expand their power and dominion in the Old World. There were dozens of sites, mostly crumbling, abandoned ruins, covered in jungle vines, where the Spaniards had lived and worked when they ruled the planet. The derelict Castilla de San Lorenzo and the tumbled-down walls of Panama Viejo were evidence that even awesome political power can be fleeting. This made a vivid impression on me, a child of American empire overseas, then at the apex of its strength, both admired and resented around the world.

The patterns in the Castilian court in the late 1400s are remarkably similar to those that have been revealed in recent public scandals involving the clergy and other powerful figures.

What I have tried to do is place Isabella within the context of the time and place in which she lived. She was a religiously fervent Catholic, living in an era when the Ottomon Turks seemed on the verge of wiping Christianity off the map, I am convinced that much of what she did was a reaction to this perceived threat, and to her belief that she was being called upon the bolster the faith against a very formidable enemy.

Isabella was born in 1451, in the town of Madrigal, in the kingdom of Castile (now part of Spain).

She could not blame him,for it was natural that he was concerned about the succession,and every man wanted a boy to carry his line,be he king or yeoman. But Katherine,the daughter of Isabella of Castile, did sometimes wonder why it was seen as essential for a man to rule. Her mother had been a great queen and pray god that Mary would take after her; and thus she herself could see no good reason why Mary should not rule. Yet now was not the time to say that to Henry. That conversation would have to wait on an opportune moment.

Martín de Córdoba, a distinguished Augustinian friar, disagreed strongly. In a book he wrote to guide Isabella in the exercise of authority, The Garden of Noble Ladies, he claimed that it was ignorant or old-fashioned to ‘believe it evil when some kingdom or other polity falls to a woman’s government … I, as I will declare, hold the contrary opinion.

The dusty facts are that; Ferdinand II, the Regent of Castile, was 63 years old when he died on January 23, 1516; his wife Queen Isabella was 53 years old when she died on November 26, 1504; and Columbus had passed away almost 10 years prior on May 20, 1506. The earlier death of Isabella and the death of her children changed the normal succession of heirs, forcing Ferdinand to yield the government of Castile to Philip of Habsburg, the husband of his second daughter Joanna. The son of Joanna and her husband Philip I of Castile was Charles I, who would inherit Spain from his maternal grandparents as well as the Habsburg and Burgundian Empires of his paternal family. Thus, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella became the most powerful ruler in Europe and by 1516 King Charles I of Spain also ruled the Netherlands. In 1519 as Charles V, he became the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, King of Germany, as well as the King of Italy.

Strange surroundings make youngsters cling to habits that represent earlier securities.

She had difficulty accepting adultery despite its prevalence among high-born men of the era.

The aborigines were a source of wonder and amusement to be alternately fed, clothed, teased, educated, and petted.

The accused were considered guilty unless proven innocent.

The conversos were thus both a troubled and troublesome population in late fifteenth century Castile.

Punishments were severe, their harshness underscored by the fact that they were written in blood. At the very least, petty thieves were beaten with whips. Those convicted of stealing property...routinely lost an army or a leg. the most serious offenders were tied to a post, where, as it was stipulated, 'his body shall be taken as a target,' with arrows.

In 1469, the regions of Aragon (Aragón) and Castile (Castilla) were united by the marriage of Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I, thus creating España or Spain. The treasury of this fledgling nation had been depleted by the many battles they had waged against the Moors. The Spanish monarchs, seeing Portugal’s economic success, sought to establish their own trade routes to the Far East. Queen Isabella embraced this concept from the religious standpoint of going out into “all the world” and converting the pagan people of Asia to Christianity. At the same time, a tall, young, middle-class man, said to have come from Genoa, Italy, who held that his father was a fabric weaver and cheese merchant, sought to become a navigator. As such, Columbus sailed to Portugal where pirates allegedly attacked the ship he was on. Fortunately, he managed to swim ashore and joined his brother Bartholomew as a cartographer in Lisbon. Apparently to him, becoming a mapmaker must have seemed boring when there was a world to explore. Returning to the sea, he sailed to places as far away as Iceland to the north, and ventured south as far as Guinea on the West-African coast. It is reasonable to assume that he had heard or perhaps even read the stories about the Vikings that took place almost five hundred years prior to Columbus’ arriving there.

hose watching Isabella process through the cold streets of Segovia could not know that they were witnessing the first steps of a queen destined to become the most powerful woman Europe had seen since Roman times. ‘This queen of Spain, called Isabella, has had no equal on this earth for 500 years,’ one awestruck visitor from northern Europe would eventually proclaim, admiring the fear and loyalty she provoked among the lowliest of Castilians and the mightiest of Grandees.4 This was not hyperbole. Europe had limited experience of queens regnant, and even less of successful ones. Few of those who followed Isabella have had such a lasting impact. Only Elizabeth I of England, Archduchess María Theresa of Austria, Russia’s Catherine the Great (outshining a formidable predecessor, the Empress Elizabeth) and Britain’s Queen Victoria can rival her, each in their own era. All faced the challenges of being a female ruler in an otherwise overwhelmingly male-dominated world and all had long, transformative reigns, leaving legacies that would be felt for centuries. All faced the challenges of being a female ruler in an otherwise overwhelmingly male-dominated world and all had long, transformative reigns, leaving Only Isabella did this by leading a country as it emerged from the troubled late middle ages, harnessing the ideas and tools of the early Renaissance to start transforming a fractious, ill-disciplined nation into a European powerhouse with a clear-minded and ambitious monarchy at its centre. She was, in other words, the first in that still-small club of great European queens. To some she remains the greatest.

From his mother, Philip inherited the Burgundian possessions. But a few years after Philip’s marriage, his wife Joanna, daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand, inherited not only Castile, but Aragon, Sicily, Naples, America, and the Indies. So when Charles V came of age, he inherited from his father, his mother, and his grandparents a great empire. He was, at once, prince of the Netherlands, king of a united Spain, and emperor of Germany.