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About
Us
The Headquarters of the Organization
is located in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.
The Daughters of Isabella is a Catholic Women's Organization.
It is made up of members in the U.S.A. and Canada, each working
together in one common bond of "UNITY, FRIENDSHIP AND CHARITY".
This fraternal order is not a parish or diocesan organization,
it is an international order of Catholic women who are dedicated
to their church, family and needs of their fellow men. The only
requirements necessary to become a member are that you must be
a practicing catholic woman in union with the Holy See. You must
be at least 16 years of age.
THE DAUGHTERS OF ISABELLA MARKS 102
YEARS IN JULY 1998. PRAY FOR US!
-We are collecting articles from other
Circles around the U.S.A. and Canada for the Millennium. What
experience did you have on your last retreat, charitable fund
raiser, new ideas your circle tried and felt accomplishment as
a team COMMUNITY SERVICES, SPECIAL MASSES ATTENDED, WHAT'S NEW
IN YOUR CHURCH, PRAYER, ACTIVITIES AND MUSIC. If you would like
to tell me about your experience in the Daughters of Isabella,
please email Jean at theruffners@peoplepc.com
Thank you.
Member Church
Web Sites and other sites of interest:
St. Elizabeth,
Wyandotte, MI
Daughters of Isabella.org/
Daughters of Isabella/Knights of Columbus Webring
The
Vatican website, The Holy See.
Knightsite
of the Knights of Columbus
Catholic
Information Network(CIN)
Bible
Study On-Line: Extract words or verses easily!
The
Holy Rosary - Great for those studying the Rosary!
Roman
Catholic Catechism - Great for those studying the NEW Catechism!
WHAT'S
NEW
Daughters of Isabella.org/,
Catholic Files,
Michigan
Catholic Conference Statement on the Defeat of Proposal B,
Catholic Online Links,
National Right to Life, Catholic
Schools, Catholic Online,
HISTORIC BACKGROUND OF ISABELLA
Isabella I
("THE CATHOLIC.")
Queen of Castile; born in the town of Madrigal de las Altas
Torres, 22 April, 1453; died a little before noon, 26 November,
1504, in the castle of La Mota, which still stands at Medina
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
Flórez tells us, to prevent the two royal children from
serving as a standard to which the discontented nobles might
rally. The Castilian nobles had been constantly increasing in
power during the repeated long minorities through which the crown
had passed, and had taken advantage 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 deprived of their leader, the Infante Alfonso, who died–by
poison, as was believed–on 5 July, 1468, 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
occasion 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, committed the astounding folly
of recognizing Isabella as his immediate heiress, to the exclusion
of Joan. Historians have generally been willing to interpret
this act of Henry IV as an implicit acknowledgment 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,
1468. 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 marriage.
In 1460 Henry had already offered the hand of Isabella to
Don Carlos, Prince of Viana, the eldest 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 obtain the hand of Isabella (which carried with it the crown
of Castile) for his younger son, Ferdinand. Negotiations were
protracted until the unhappy death of the Prince of Viana. In
1465 an attempt was made to arrange the 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 Girón, Master of Calatrava, a member of
the powerful Pacheco family, whom the king sought to win over
by this means. Other aspirants for Isabella'a hand were Richard,
Duke of Gloucester, brother of Edward IV of England, and the
Duke of Guienne, brother of Louis XI of France. The Cortes was
assembled at Ocaña in 1469 to ratify the Pact of Guisando,
when an embassy arrived from Portugal 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 although fear of the Infanta's partisans
prevented him from carrying out this threat, he exacted of his
sister a promise not to enter into any matrimonial negotiations
during 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 Enríquez, to Madrigal and thence
to Valladolid, and from there sent Gutierre de Cárdenas
and Alfonso de Palencia in search of Ferdinand, who had been
proclaimed King of Sicily and heir of the Aragonese monarchy.
Ferdinand, 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 Portugal, and Henry, revoking the Pact of Guisando,
had caused her to be proclaimed heiress of his dominions. The
Archbishop of Toledo, the Marqués de Villena, the Master
of Calatrava, and other nobles, who in her father's lifetime
had denied La Beltraneja'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, abandoned 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 still bear. Isabella displayed her prudence
and gentleness–qualities which she possessed in a degree
seldom equalled–in the agreement she made with Ferdinand
as to the government of their dominions: they were to hold equal
authority, a principle expressed in the device or motto, "Tanto
monta, monta tanto–Isabel como Fernando (As much as
the one is worth so much is the other–Isabella as Fernando)".
The harmonious union of the peoples and the crowns being thus
realized, it was necessary to reduce the power of the nobles,
who had acquired a position almost independent of the crown and
rendered good government difficult. Towards this object the Catholic
sovereigns directed their efforts; among the means which they
took should be mentioned chiefly: (1) the establishment of the
Santa Hermandad (Holy Brotherhood), a kind of permanent
military force, very completely organized, supported by the municipal
councils, and intended for the protection of persons and property
against the violence of the nobles; (2) an improved and properly
ordered administration of justice with a wise organization of
the tribunals, the establishment of the Chancery at Valladolid,
and the promulgation of the royal edicts generally called "Edicts
of Montalvo" after the jurisconsult who drew them up; (3)
the abolition of the right of coining money, which certain individuals
held, and the regulation of the currency laws so as to facilitate
commerce; (4) the revocation of extravagant grants made to certain
nobles during the reigns of the late monarchs, the demolition
of their castles, which constituted a menace to public peace,
and the vesting in the crown of the masterships of military orders.
To preserve the purity of the Faith and religious unity, against
the intrigues of the Jews, who were employing the influence of
their wealth and their usurious dealings to pervert Christians,
the Catholic sovereigns solicited of Pope Sixtus IV the establishment
of the Inquisition.
Their government thus strengthened at home, the sovereigns
proceeded to bring to a completion, by the conquest of Granada,
the great work of reconquest which had been virtually at a standstill
since the time of Alfonso XI. The taking of Zahara, of which
the Moors possessed themselves by surprise, afforded an occasion
for the war; which opened happily with the conquest of Alhama
(March, 1482). The Christians were favoured by the internal troubles
of Granada, which were due to the party of the Emir Muley Hassan
and his son Boabdil, and, after the death of the former, to the
supporters of his uncle Abdallah el Zagal. The sovereigns kept
up the war in spite of the serious defeats sustained by them
at Ajarquia and Loja, and possessed themselves successively of
Coin, Guadix, Almería, Loja, Vélez, Malaga, and
Baza. Isabella took a prominent part in this war; not only did
she attend to the government of the kingdom, and provide for
the support of the army while Ferdinand did battle at its head,
but she repeatedly visited the camp to animate the troops by
her presence. This was the case at the siege of Malaga, and at
that of Baza, where the stern usages of war did not hinder the
Moorish leader, Cid Hiaya, from displaying his chivalry towards
the queen. She was in danger of being assassinated by a Mohammedan
fanatic before the walls of Malaga, and of perishing in the conflagration
of the besieging camp at Granada. In consequence of this conflagration
the city of Santa Fe was built, to put an end to the vain hopes
of the people of Granada, that the Catholic sovereigns would
abandon their enterprise. Granada surrendered 2 January, 1492,
and the territorial unity of the Spanish monarchy was established.
To protect its normal unity, an edict was issued three months
later (31 March) expelling from Spain the Jews (170,000 to 180,000
souls), whose cities had admitted the Mussulman invaders in the
eighth century, and who constituted a perpetual danger to the
independence and security of the nation.
While they were carrying on the war against Granada Christopher
Columbus presented himself to the Catholic sovereigns, and to
Queen Isabella fell the honour of appreciating the genius who
had not been understood at Genoa, at Venice, or in Portugal.
Protected first of all by the Spanish friars, he was presented
to the queen by her confessor, Padre Hernando Talavera, and Cardinal
Mendoza (el Cardenal de España); and with the means which
the king and queen procured for him he fitted out the three famous
caravels which placed America in communication with the Old World
(see COLUMBUS). Sailing, 3 August, 1492, from the port of Palos,
he discovered on 12 October–the day on which the feast of
Our Lady of the Pillar is observed in Spain– the first of
the Bahama Islands. Not only did Isabella the Catholic always
show herself the protectress of Columbus, but she was also the
protectess of the American aborigines against the ill­usage
of the colonists and adventurers. In 1503, she organized the
Secretariate of Indian Affairs, which was the origin of the Supreme
Council of the Indies. Isabella was no less the patroness of
the great Cisneros in the reformation of the monasteries of Spain,
a work which he accomplished under the authority of Alexander
VI given by the Brief of March, 1493, and which anticipated the
reform afterwards executed throughout the whole Church. The good
government of the Catholic sovereigns brought the prosperity
of Spain to its apogee, and inaugurated that country's Golden
Age. The manufacture of cloths and silks developed at Segovia,
Medina, Granada, Valencia, and Toledo, as also that of glass
and of steel weapons, of leather and silverware. Agriculture
prospered, while navigation and commerce rose to an unprecedented
height in consequence of the great discoveries of that epoch.
Queen Isabella by her example led the way in fostering the
love of study, and in many respects her Court recalls that of
Charlemagne. When she was already a grown woman she devoted herself
to the study of Latin, and became an eager collector of books,
of which she possessed a great number. Her Castilian has been
ranked as a standard of the language by the Spanish Royal Academy.
She was extremenly solicitous for the education of her five children
(Isabella, John, Joan, Maria, and Catherine), and in order to
educate Prince John with ten other boys, she formed in her palace
a school similar to the Palatine School of the Carlovingians.
Her daughters, too, attained to a degree of education higher
than was usual at that epoch, and they so combined with their
learning the industries peculiarly appropriate to their sex,
that Ferdinand the Catholic could imitate Charlemagne in using
no article of clothing that had not been spun or sewn by his
consort and his daughters. This example of the queen, a model
of virtue, piety, and domestic economy, who mended one doublet
for her husband the king as often as seven times, exercised a
great moral influence on the nobility in discouraging inordinate
luxury and vain pastimes. It also fostered learning not only
in the universities and among the nobles, but also among women.
Some of the latter distinguished themselves by thier intellectual
attainments–ee.g. Beatriz Galinda, called la Latina,
Lucia Medrano, and Francisca Nebrija, the Princess Joan and the
Princess Catherine (who afterwards became Queen of England),
Isabella Vergara, and others who reached great proficiency in
philosophy, Latin, and mathematics, and became qualified to fill
professional chairs in the universities of Alcalá and
Salamanca.
Isabella the Catholic was extremely unhappy in her children.
Prince John died in youth, full of the most brilliant promise;
Catherine was eventually repudiated by her husband Henry VIII;
Joan, heiress to the kingdom, lost her reason. Not the least
notable trait in the life of Isabella was the making of that
last will and testament, immortalized in Rosales's picture in
the Madrid Museum. Her heart was filled with sympathy for the
fate of the American Indians, she charged her successors to protect
them and to regard them as they regarded their other subjects,
and she pointed out Spain's mission in Africa–a mission
which the Moroccan question has tardily enough brought to the
world's knowledge.
CLEMENCíN, Elogio de la Reyna Católica Da. Isabel
in Mem. Acad. de la Historia (Madrid, 1821); FERNÁNDEZ Y GONZÁLEZ, Da. Isabel
la Católica (Madrid, 18–); MARTÍNEZ
DE VELASCO, Isabel la Católica (Madrid, 1883);
RADA Y DELGADO, Retratos de Isabel
la Católica in Boletín Acad. de la Historia
(Madrid, 1885); MARIANA,
LAFUENTE, and other
writers in the history of Spain.
RAMÓN RUIZ AMADO
Transcribed by WGKofron
With thanks to St. Mary's Church, Akron, Ohio
From the Catholic Encyclopedia, copyright
© 1913 by the Encyclopedia Press, Inc. Electronic version
copyright © 1998 by New Advent, Inc. |
