Title: Isabella: The Warrior Queen Author: Kirstin Downey
Published: October 28, 2014
Genre(s): Nonfiction
Page Count: 520
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Born at a time when Christianity was dying out and the Ottoman Empire was aggressively expanding, Isabella was inspired in her youth by tales of Joan of Arc, a devout young woman who unified her people and led them to victory against foreign invaders. In 1474, when most women were almost powerless, twenty-three-year-old Isabella defied a hostile brother and mercurial husband to seize control of Castile and León.
Her subsequent feats were legendary. She ended a twenty-four-generation struggle between Muslims and Christians, forcing Moorish invaders back over the Mediterranean Sea. She laid the foundation for a unified Spain. She sponsored Columbus's trip to the Indies and negotiated Spanish control over much of the New World with the help of Rodrigo Borgia, the infamous Pope Alexander VI. She also annihilated all who stood against her by establishing a bloody religious Inquisition that would darken Spain's reputation for centuries.
Whether saintly or satanic, no female leader has done more to shape our modern world, where millions of people in two hemispheres speak Spanish and practice Catholicism. Yet history has all but forgotten Isabella's influence, due to hundreds of years of misreporting that often attributed her accomplishments to Ferdinand, the bold and philandering husband she adored.
For the modern reader, Isabel the Catholic is a difficult figure. She stands out for being a truly powerful female monarch in a time when women had little agency or freedom; she also stands out for being the figurehead of some truly horrific actions—the religious persecution of the Inquisition and the all-out genocide of the Americas. I had hoped that Kirstin Downey would find some measure of fair representation in this biography, but, as is probably only to be expected, Isabella: The Warrior Queen comes out strongly pro-Isabel (as does almost any author who writes about her). It’s not a bad book, but several areas are certainly left open to criticize.
As is perhaps unsurprising, I can’t say I learned a great deal from this biography. I was previously familiar with the details of Isabel’s life, mostly through my fiction reading, though I’m by no means a scholar of Spanish history in any way. Anyway, I didn’t come away from this with any new insights, though I give Downey full credit for her thoroughness. I felt this was a fairly comprehensive overview of not only Isabel’s life, but the political situations in Spain and abroad that heavily influenced her reign.
That being said, it seemed at times that the author lost focus. This is a biography of one specific person, not an overview of history during a particular period of time. However, Isabella: The Warrior Queen becomes a discussion of important Spanish political events that directly affect Isabel and her reign, but fails to so much as mention her for pages at a time. During these times when Isabel was more or less completely out of the picture, I would grow bored and start to skim. Context is nice, but it’s also important to keep focus on the main theme, which Downey would often forget.
But, to come to my main complaint: heavy, heavy bias. Downey vastly underscores the genocide of millions of indigenous Americans that occurred in the New World, and tends to be wishy-washy about Isabel’s participation in the Inquisition, expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain, and aforementioned genocide. For instance, Isabel couldn’t possibly have been anti-semitic because she “had Jewish friends”! Okay. Sure. Meanwhile she’s sending penniless Jews out of her country with nowhere to go and torturing converts who are suspected of heresy. Oh, and also, anything that happened in the New World wasn’t her fault—Columbus was a very bad man and just didn’t follow Isabel’s wise and just orders. (No arguments on the first, but I’m iffy on the second). Plus, Downey managed to generalize about 800 years of Moorish rule as “not good” which is unfair and hardly takes into consideration centuries of governmental changes.
So, basically. This book is easy to read and a good introductory overview of a highly important and iconic historical woman. I’m disappointed by Kirstin Downey’s pro-Christian, rose-tinted view of her subject matter, but at the same time, it’s rare to find someone willing to write an entire biography about someone they hate. I liked Isabella: The Warrior Queen, with strong misgivings. I did, however, glean the interesting tidbit that the modern game of chess, with the most powerful piece being the queen, came about entirely because of Isabel. So there is that.
