Ferdinand And Isabellas Short Term Effects

What are the short-term effects of the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella until 1483?

The accession of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469 succeeded in uniting two of the largest sections of the Iberian Peninsula, Castile and Aragon. There was a prenuptial agreement made by both Ferdinand and Isabella’s families, of, ‘Tanto Monta Monta Tanto’ (‘equal opposites in balance’) which sums up the attempt of joint rule in an effort to create a single Spanish state. However, the idea of a single ‘Spanish’ state is not seen to occur till Philip v’s reign in 1707-1715 and therefore not a short term effect however the idea of conquest and creation of a power base in Spain is certainly relevant in the short term, examples of this being the war against the moors in Granada and the defeat of

Religion in Spain was very important, a politically Catholic country, with the vast majority of the country following the Catholic tradition. As Pendrill says in (Spain 1474-1700), ‘Even more threatening to the Moorish community than the political re-conquest of Spain were the efforts to conquer the Moors spiritually’, which explicitly states the importance of the Inquisition over the Reconquista. The Spanish Inquisition commenced in 1478, it was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in the kingdom and to replace the Medieval Inquisition, which was previously under Papal control. The inquisition was provoked by a conversation between a Dominican friar from Seville and Isabella, who convinced Isabella that there was Crypto-Judaism taking place throughout her kingdom. After the creation of the Inquisition, they found power amongst the nobility which rose to the first ‘auto-da-fé’ in Seville 1481, where six people were burnt alive as heretics. The premise of the Inquisition was to secure the catholic religious security in Spain, and some would argue that it was to scapegoat