More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She ordered that all the slaves be returned to the New World as soon as possible, which was done for some, although by this point many of the Indians had died of cold or exposure to new diseases.
Columbus soon sailed away, always more interested in finding new lands than in governing those he had already discovered.
She also established Christianity as the formal religion. Human sacrifice and cannibalism would be prohibited, and by 1542, so too would slavery.
Queen Isabella was an affectionate but demanding mother. Stern, doggedly determined, and devoutly religious, she expected the same qualities in her family.
A number of Catholic clerics who had been opposed to Isabella’s insistence that they live simply and honor their vows of chastity found that life in the Muslim world was more pleasant. They took their concubines with them and settled into happy married life.
When Charles VIII arrived in Naples, his men descended into an orgy of drinking and licentiousness, just as syphilis from the New World was making its unhappy appearance in Europe.
Some seven thousand Croatian soldiers lost their lives in a single day, and most of the kingdom’s nobility was killed or enslaved. It caused another vast movement of population, as waves of Croatian refugees fled toward Austria and the Italian coast to escape from the Turks.
This was all bad enough. But in addition, the Ottoman Empire was growing increasingly oppressive to women of all walks of life, as a fundamentalist orthodoxy clamped tighter and tighter controls on women’s behavior.
The rape of captured Christian women was not only condoned but advocated by Ottoman rulers.
The boys became pirates who attacked Christian vessels and made their living capturing Christians and Jews to enslave them.
Conditions for women deteriorated over the years, according to reports issued much later by the Turkish Ministry of the Interior, describing what had become invisible to Western visitors. Women were increasingly sequestered inside their homes, living within high walls, seeing sunlight only through latticed windows, often guarded by eunuchs.
Women had to be concealed from the world.
Women were not allowed to buy or sell anything, he wrote. They were not allowed to ride horses. They went veiled even in their own homes. In one house where he had lived, the daughter-in-law had never eaten, spoken a word, or uncovered her face in the presence of her father-in-law, despite having lived in the same house with him for twenty years.
This was one reason Queen Isabella was so insistent about the marriages of her daughters to the kings of England and Scotland. She was trying to get those rulers to take a greater interest in joining efforts against the Ottomans.
Queen Isabella offered two suggestions to the English king: either send Catherine back home to Spain, or marry her to Arthur’s younger brother Henry.
