Attitude of Isabella Toward Columbus

Columbus went about so ill clad that he was named "The Stranger with the Thread-bare Cloak." In this straitened condition he presented himself before the royal pair. In Ferdinand political sagacity predominated; in Isabella, the moral nature. The pious king believed, notwithstanding his piety, in the efficacy of works, and professed the dogma of aiding to execute the Divine will, which he generally found favorable to his undertakings; Isabella, with her enthusiasm, trusted in her hopes and in prayer. The queen was all spontaneity, the king all reflection. She trod the paths of good in order to attain to good; but he scrupled little to resort to dissimulation, deceit, and, in case of necessity, to crime. Valiant and warlike, Ferdinand joined the strength of the lion to instincts of the fox. Perchance in all history there has not been his equal in energy and craftiness. He was distrustful above all else; she, above all, was confiding. He was all mind; she all heart. Isabella took pleasure in increasing the number of her vassals, that she might possess dominion over human souls, whereby to swell the ranks of true believers upon earth and of the elect in heaven; Ferdinand took pleasure likewise in the growth of the Church and Christianity; but above such religious gratification he set the satisfaction born of domination and conquest. Daughter of a learned king and of an English mother who died bereft of reason, Isabella had a clear perception of ideas, and lived in a ceaseless state of exaltation. Son of that quarrelsome and wily king, John II. of Aragon, and of a mother of masculine and ambitious nature, Ferdinand inherited on the paternal side a mixture of political and warlike temperaments, and on the maternal that incredible ambition which led him to add to his royal house and to his native country by conquest and by marriage.

The two founded the Inquisition: Ferdinand for political reasons, Isabella for religious ends. Both were conquerors; Isabella gained Granada for Castile, and Ferdinand Navarre for his Aragon. The conquest of Granada reads like some book of chivalry; the conquest of Navarre, like a chapter of Machiavelli. By the one achievement Isabella expelled the Moors, and by the other Ferdinand drove the French from our peninsula.

As a natural consequence of their different temperaments, Isabella and Ferdinand each dealt with Columbus as their individual natures prompted; the queen ever enthusiastic, the king, as usual, cautious, guarded, crafty, and reserved. He computed the cost of the enterprise and the returns it might yield; she thought only of spreading the dominions of her idolized Castile, and winning souls to Christianity. Besides all this the sea had its temptations for the Queen of Castile, for all her enterprises and conquests tended oceanward, just as her great rivers, the Tagus, the Duero, the Guadalquivir, and the Mino flowed toward the main. With Ferdinand it was quite the other way; his conquests trended, like the Ebro, the Llobregat, and the Turia, toward the waters of the Mediterranean. The Canaries were the island domain of Isabella; the insular possessions of Ferdinand stretched from the Balearic Islands to Sicily. Ferdinand dreamed only of Italy; Isabella of Africa. Hence the one looked toward the past, the other toward the future. But both were great with measureless greatness; for they assumed the stature of a great idea, and obeyed, by ways and deeds as much in contrast as their characters, the quickening impulsive of the creative era in which they lived. The unity of the State, of the territory, of the laws was imposed upon them by the age, and to the attainment of such unity were all their efforts consecrated; so that, besides winning for themselves renown, they did good service to their nation and their time.

The sovereigns heard Columbus after their respective natures, Isabella with enthusiasm and Ferdinand with reserve.

—Century Magazine, 1892.