Catholic Monarchs of Spain
The Catholic Monarchs were Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, whose marriage and joint rule marked the de facto unification of Spain. They were both from the House of Trastámara and were second cousins, as they were both descended from John I of Castile. To remove the obstacle that this consanguinity would otherwise have posed to their marriage under canon law, they were given a papal dispensation by Sixtus IV. They married on October 19, 1469, in the city of Valladolid; Isabella was 18 years old and Ferdinand a year younger. Most scholars generally accept that the unification of Spain can essentially be traced back to the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella. Their reign was called by W.H. Prescott "the most glorious epoch in the annals of Spain."
Spain was formed as a dynastic union of two crowns rather than a unitary state, as Castile and Aragon remained separate kingdoms until the Nueva Planta decrees of 1707–1716. The court of Ferdinand and Isabella was constantly on the move in order to bolster local support for the crown from local feudal lords. The title of "Catholic King and Queen" was officially bestowed on Ferdinand and Isabella by Pope Alexander VI in 1494, in recognition of their defence of the Catholic faith within their realms.
Marriage
At the time of their marriage on October 19, 1469, Isabella was eighteen years old and the heiress presumptive to the Crown of Castile, while Ferdinand was seventeen and heir apparent to the Crown of Aragon. They met for the first time in Valladolid in 1469 and married within a week. From the start, they had a close relationship and worked well together. Both knew that the crown of Castile was "the prize, and that they were both jointly gambling for it." However, it was a step toward the unification of the lands on the Iberian Peninsula, which would eventually become Spain.Because they were second cousins, they needed a papal dispensation to marry. Pope Paul II, an Italian pope opposed to Aragon's influence on the Mediterranean and to the rise of monarchies strong enough to challenge the Pope, refused to grant one, so they falsified a papal bull of their own. Although the bull is known to be false, it is uncertain who the actual author of the falsification was. Sources tend to cite Alfonso Carrillo de Acuña, Archbishop of Toledo, as the person who provided the dispensation, while other scholars point at Antonio Veneris.
Isabella's claims to Castile were not secure because her marriage to Ferdinand enraged her half-brother, Henry IV of Castile, who had withdrawn his support for her to be his heiress presumptive, a status that had been codified in the Treaty of the Bulls of Guisando. Henry instead recognised Joanna la Beltraneja, born during his marriage to Joanna, Princess of Portugal, but whose paternity was in doubt because Henry was rumoured to be impotent. When Henry died in 1474, Isabella asserted her claim to the throne, which was contested by thirteen-year-old Joanna. Joanna sought the aid of her husband, Afonso V of Portugal, to claim the throne. This dispute between rival claimants led to the War of the Castilian Succession from 1475–79. Isabella called on the aid of Aragon, with her husband, the heir apparent, and his father, Juan II of Aragon providing it. Although Aragon provided support for Isabella's cause and acknowledged her as the sole heir to the crown of Castille, her supporters had extracted concessions. Juan II died in 1479, and Ferdinand succeeded to the throne in January of that year.
In September 1479, Portugal and the Catholic Monarchs of Aragon and Castile resolved major issues between them through the Treaty of Alcáçovas, including the issue of Isabella's rights to the crown of Castile. Through close cooperation, the royal couple were successful in securing political power in the Iberian Peninsula. Ferdinand's father had advised the couple that "neither was powerful without the other." Though their marriage united the two kingdoms, leading to the beginnings of modern Spain, they ruled independently, and their kingdoms retained part of their own regional laws and governments for the next two centuries.
Royal motto and emblems
The coat of arms of the Catholic Monarchs was designed by Antonio de Nebrija with elements to show their cooperation and working in tandem. The royal motto they shared, Tanto monta, came to signify their cooperation." The motto was originally used by Ferdinand as an allusion to the Gordian Knot: Tanto monta, monta tanto, cortar como desatar, but later adopted as an expression of equality of the monarchs: Tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Fernando.Their emblems or heraldic devices, seen at the bottom of the coat of arms, were a yoke and a sheaf of arrows. Y and F are the initials of Ysabel and Fernando. A double yoke is worn by a team of oxen, emphasizing the couple's cooperation. Isabella's emblem of arrows showed the armed power of the crown, "a warning to Castilians not acknowledging the reach of royal authority or that greatest of royal functions, the right to mete out justice" by force of violence. The iconography of the royal crest was widely reproduced and was found on various works of art. These badges were later used by the Fascist political party FET y de las JONS, the official party of Francoist Spain, which claimed to represent the inherited glory and the ideals of the Catholic Monarchs.
Royal Councils
succeeded to the throne of Castile in 1474 when Ferdinand was still heir-apparent to Aragon, and with Aragon's aid, Isabella's claim to the throne was secured. As Isabella's husband was king of Castile by his marriage and his father still ruled in Aragon, Ferdinand spent more time in Castile than Aragon at the beginning of their marriage. His pattern of residence in Castile persisted even when he succeeded to the throne in 1479, and the absenteeism caused problems for Aragon. These issues were partially addressed by the creation of the Council of Aragon in 1494, which joined the Council of Castile established in 1480. The Council of Castile was intended "to be the central governing body of Castile and the linch-pin of their governmental system" with wide powers and with royal officials who were loyal to them and excluded the old nobility from exercising power in it. The monarchs created the Spanish Inquisition in 1478 to ensure that individuals converting to Christianity did not revert to their old faith or continue practising it. The Council of the Crusade was created under their rule to administer funds from the sale of crusading bulls, a right appointed by the Holy See. In 1498, after Ferdinand had gained control of the revenues of the wealthy and powerful Spanish military orders, he created the Council of Military Orders to oversee them. The conciliar model was extended beyond the rule of the Catholic Monarchs, with their grandson, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor establishing the Council of the Indies, the Council of Finance, and the Council of State.Domestic policy
The Catholic Monarchs set out to restore royal authority in Spain. To accomplish their goal, they first created a group named the Santa Hermandad "Holy Brotherhood". These men were used as a judicial police force for Castile, as well as to attempt to keep Castilian nobles in check. To establish a more uniform judiciary, the Catholic Monarchs created a curia regis and appointed magistrates to run the towns and cities. This establishment of royal authority is known as the "Pacification of Castile" and can be seen as one of the crucial steps toward the creation of one of Europe's first strong nation states. Isabella also sought various ways to diminish the influence of the Cortes Generales in Castile, though Ferdinand was too thoroughly Aragonese to do anything of the sort with the equivalent systems in the Crown of Aragon. Even after his death and the union of the crowns under one monarch, the Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian Corts retained significant power in their respective regions. Furthermore, the monarchs continued to rule through a form of medieval contractualism, which made their rule pre-modern in several ways. One of those is that they traveled from town to town throughout the kingdom to promote loyalty, rather than possessing any single administrative center. Another is that each community and region was connected to them via loyalty to the crown, rather than bureaucratic ties.Religious policy
Along with the desire of the Catholic Monarchs to extend their dominion to all the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, their reign was characterised by the religious unification of the peninsula through militant Catholicism. On receiving a petition for authority, Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull in 1478 to establish a Holy Office of the Inquisition in Castile. This was to ensure that Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity did not revert to their previous faiths. The papal bull gave the sovereigns full powers to name inquisitors, but the papacy retained the right to formally appoint the royal nominees. The Inquisition did not have jurisdiction over Jews and Muslims who did not convert. Since the kingdom of Aragon had existed since 1248, the Spanish Inquisition was the only common institution for the two kingdoms. Pope Innocent VIII confirmed Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, a confessor of Isabella, as Grand Inquisitor of Spain, following in the tradition in Aragon of Dominican inquisitors. Torquemada pursued aggressive policies toward converted Jews and Muslims moriscos. The pope also granted the Catholic Monarchs the right of patronato real over the ecclesiastical establishment in Granada and the Canary Islands, thereby granting the state control over religious affairs.The monarchs initiated a series of campaigns known as the Granada War, which was supported by Pope Sixtus IV, who granted tithe revenue and implemented a crusade tax to finance the war. After 10 years of fighting, the Granada War ended in 1492 when Emir Boabdil surrendered the keys of the Alhambra Palace in Granada to the Castilian soldiers. With the fall of Granada in January 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand pursued further policies of religious unification of their realms, in particular the expulsion of Jews who refused to convert to Christianity.
In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, which gave Jews in Spanish-ruled territory four months to either convert to Catholicism or leave the territory. Tens of thousands of Jews emigrated to other lands such as the Kingdom of Portugal, North Africa, the Low Countries, the various countries of Italy, and, in particular, the Ottoman Empire. People who converted to Catholicism were not subject to expulsion, but between 1480 and 1492 hundreds of conversos and moriscos were accused of secretly practising their original religion and arrested, imprisoned, interrogated under torture, and in some cases burned to death, in both Castile and Aragon. Jews whose ancestors were subject to this expulsion and the subsequent Persecution of Jews and Muslims by Manuel I of Portugal are known as Sephardic Jews, and are roughly divided into the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of Western Europe and the Eastern Sephardim of territories along the Mediterranean.
The Inquisition was created in the twelfth century by Pope Lucius III to fight heresy in the south of what is now France and was subsequently established in a number of European kingdoms. The Catholic Monarchs decided to introduce the Inquisition to Castile and requested the Pope's assent. On 1 November 1478, Pope Sixtus IV published the papal bull Exigit Sinceras Devotionis Affectus, by which the Inquisition was established in the Kingdom of Castile; it was later extended to all of Spain. The bull gave the monarchs exclusive authority to name the inquisitors.
During the reign of the Catholic Monarchs and long afterwards, the Inquisition was active in prosecuting people for violations of Catholic orthodoxy such as crypto-Judaism, heresy, Protestantism, blasphemy, and bigamy. The last trial for crypto-Judaism was held in 1818.