This is a surprising book, since Father Azcona has until now been little known in the profession, and that chiefly for his studies in recondite ecclesiastical matters. It is also a salutary one. General works on Isabella have recently tended to be ingenuous rhapsodies. On the other hand, most expert modern research on the subject—with all of which Father Azcona is awesomely familiar—has been both hostile to the Queen and restricted to monographs on specific points. Father Azcona is at the same time a trained scholar and an admirer. It is his belief—and his book goes a long way toward proving it—that Isabella can be stripped of her legendary and sentimental halo and still emerge a noble woman, that she is great enough to survive the cold light of even the most rigorous research. This is a welcome indication for the future. Perhaps the current wave of debunking has crested at last.
The book’s methodology is one of rigid adherence to documents. Its passion for primary evidence may even be carried a little too far; our knowledge of the period would be austere and skeletal indeed if it were stripped of all testimony from the chronicles, as Father Azcona is determined it must be. But what a wealth of unpublished new material is here! The author’s eye seems to have pierced into everything. He has made exhaustive examinations of no fewer than nineteen major archives—not only in Spain but in Lisbon, Coimbra, Paris, Naples, and Rome. The vast amount of fresh material from Portuguese sources—an area too often neglected by Spanish scholars— is most welcome. The Vatican Archives have yielded many treasures (although not, alas, the elusive dispensation of consanguinity by Pope Nicholas V for the second marriage of Enrique IV). In Simancas itself the author has made countless discoveries. And how could he not have ? He has done the heroic labor of going completely through the Patronato Real, Diversos de Castilla, Real Patronato Eclesiástico, Estado-Roma, Estado-Castilla, Registro General del Sello, Libros de Cédulas, Libros de Copias, and partially through the Cámara de Castilla, Consejo de Castilla, and Contaduría Mayor. In the last-named he found an absorbing list of the global expenses of the Crown for 1495-1503, such as the cost of the war in Naples and an astonishing sum to maintain Catherine in England for three years. Many of these documents will oblige the conscientious scholar to revise his thinking on the matters involved. One hardly knows which examples to choose. But Carrillo’s pact of March 1477 with the nobles (p. 279), from the Archivo de Frías, shows that the archbishop was not nearly so hostile at that period as has been believed ; and the citing of protests against the oath of loyalty to the Princess Juana in 1462 (p. 39, from the same source) is clear proof that those modern scholars who accuse Isabella of lying in her circular letter of 1471 do so at their peril.
As a storehouse of information, then, the book has great merits. It does not have many others. Even for specialists it makes heavy going. It is poorly, almost chaotically, constructed; in fact, the volume bears every evidence of having been produced in extreme haste. Although Latin Americanists will be pleased that it devotes some fifty pages to “Isabel y el Hecho Americano,” the dilation elsewhere upon ecclesiastical issues, if natural enough, crowds out many other matters of importance: economic questions, for instance, are hardly touched, and the social and cultural achievements of the reign are omitted. The book, however, is one which no serious student of the woman who patronized the Discovery can afford to ignore. There is little risk in saying that it is the most important single volume on Isabella to appear in over a decade.
