ISABELLA
177
ISABELLA
leucia, the equivalent for the Eastern Syrian Church
of the Council of Nicoea. The Persian bishops met
under the express orders of the monarcli at the cap-
ital of the Sassanide kingdom. Isaac presided, in
concert with Maruthas of MartjTopoUs, whom the
"Western Fathers", i. e., the bishops of the Syr-
ian Province of Antioch, had delegated to assist
in the reorganization of the Christian rchgion in
Persia. Two Persian nobles and the (irund Vizier,
who represented the king at this imjiortant assembly,
promulgated a decree authorizing the t'hristians to
practice their religion and to construct churches.
They recognized Isaac, the Catholicos of Seleucia, as
the sole official head of the Persian Christians, and
declared that the secular arm would repress all who
were insubordinate to him. Shortly after this great
success, which a.ssured the vmification and the sta-
bility of the Porsi;in Church. Isaac died.
ChABOT, S!/n,„ll,'„„ onriil.ih' (PmIIS, 1',HI2); BrAUN, DoS
BuchSynhados (Sliitteart, lHllll); r>cs,inrl,i iiinenil synorlo iUiin- ster, 1898): Labouht, Lc cfirislianismc dans V Empire perse (Paris, 1904).
J. Labourt.
Isabella I (The Catholic), Queen of Castile; b. in the town of Madrigal de las Altas Torres, 22 April, 1451 ; d. a little before noon, 26 November, 1.504, in the castle of La Mota, which still stands at Jledina del Campo (Valladolid). She was the daughter of John II, King of Castile, by his second wife, Isabella of Portugal. Being only a little more than three years of age when her father died (1454), she was brought up carefully and piously by her mother, at Arevalo, until her thirteenth year. Her brother, King Henry IV, then took her, together with her other brother, Alfonso, to his court, on the pretext of completing her education, but in reality, as Florez tells us, to prevent the two royal childi-cn from serving as a standard to which the discontented nobles might rally. The Castilian nobles had been constantly incrrasiui; in power during the repeated long minorities tliroDgh which the crown had passed, and had taken advan- tage of the weakness of kings like Henry II and John II. At this period they had reached the point of completely stripping the throne of its authority. They availed themselves of Henry IV's incredible imbecility and- of the scandalous relations between Joan of Portugal, his second wife, and his favourite, Beltran de la Cueva. Defeated at Olmedo, and de- prived of their leader, the Infante Alfonso, who died — by poison, as was believed — on 5 July, 146S, they sought to obtain the crown for the Infanta Isabella, rejecting the king's presumptive daughter, Joan, who was called "La Beltraneja" on the supposition that Don Beltran was her real father. On this occa- sion Isabella gave one of the earliest proofs of her great qualities, refusing the usurped crown offered to her, and declaring that never while her brother lived would she accept the title of queen. The king, on his part, committetl the astounding folly of recog- nizing Isabella as his immediate heiress, to the exclu- sion of Joan. Historians have generally been willing to interpret this act of Henry IV as an implicit ac- knowledgment of his own dishonour. To be strictly just, however, it was not so, for even if Joan was his daughter in fact, as she was by juridical presumption, he might have yielded to the violence of the nobles, who sought to give the crown to Isabella immediately, and compromised with them by making her his heir, as he did in "the Inn of the Bulls" of Guisando (la Venta de los Toros), 19 September, 146S. For a year before this, Isabella had been living at Segovia, apart from the court, which resided at Toledo; after the conclusion of the pact she was at odds with her brother, the king, on account of his plan for her mar- riage.
In 1460 Henry had already offered the hand of Isabella to Don Carlos, Prince of Viana, the eldest VIIL— 12
son of John II of Aragon, and heir, at the same time,
to the Kingdom of Navarre. This Henry did in spite
of the opposition of the King of Aragon, who wished
to olitain the hand of Isabella (which carried with it
the crown of Castile) for his yoimger son Ferdinand.
Negotiations were protracted until the unhappy death
of the Prince of Viana. In 1465 an attempt was made
to arrange a marriage between Isabella and Alfonso
V of Portugal, but the princess had already chosen
Ferdinand of Aragon for a husband and was therefore
opposed to this alliance. For the same reason she
subsequently refused to marry Don Pedro Giron,
Master of Calatrava, a member of the powerful
Pacheco family, whom the king sought to win over
by this means. Otlicr aspirants for Isabella's hand
were Richard, Duke of Gliniccster, brother of Edward
IV of England, and the Duke of Guiennc, brother of
Louis XI of France. The Cortes was a.ssenibled at
Ocana in 1469 to
ratify the Pact of
Guisando, when
an embassy ar-
rived from Portu-
gal to renew the
suit of Alfonso V
for the hand of
Isabella. When
she declined this
alliance, the king
went so far as to
threaten her with
imprisonment in
the Alcazar of
Madrid, and al-
though fear of the
Infanta's parti-
sans prevented
him from carry-
ing out this threat,
he exacted of his
sister a promise
not to enter into
any matrimonial
negotiations dur-
ing his absence in Andalusia, whither he was on
the point of setting out. But Isabella, as soon
as she was left alone, removed, with the aid of
the Archbishop of Toledo and the Admiral of
Castile, Don Fadrique Enriquez, to Madrigal and
thence to Valladolid, and from there sent Gutierre
de Cardenas and Alfonso de Palencia in search
of Ferdinand, who had been proclaimed King of
Sicily and heir of the Aragonese monarchy. Fer-
dinand, after a journey the story of which reads like
a novel, for its perils and its dramatic interest, was
married to Isabella in the palace of Juan de Vivero,
in 1469.
On the death of Henry IV, Isabella, who was then at Segovia, was proclaimed Queen of Castile. But La Beltraneja had been betrothed to Alfonso V of Por- tugal, and Henry, revoking the Pact of (Unsando, had caused her to be proclaimed heiress of his dominions. The Archbishop of Toledo, the Marques de Villena, the Master of Calatrava, and other nobles, who in her father's lifetime had denied LaBeltraneja's legitimacy, now defended her claims. And thus was begun a war between Spain and Portugal which lasted five years, ending with the peace of 1479, when a double alliance was arranged. La Beltraneja, however, aban- doned her claims, taking the veil in the monastery of Santa Clara of Coimbra (1480). and with that event the right of Isabella to the throne of Castile became unquestioned. Ferdinand had meanwhile succeeded to the throne of Aragon, and thus the definitive unity of the Spanish nation was accomplished in the two monarchs to whom a Spanish pope, Alexander VI, gave the title of "Catholic " which the Kings of Spain
