Vulgar History Podcast
Isabella I of Castile (Ann’s Version)
February 26, 2025
Ann Foster:
Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast, my name is Ann Foster. Before we get into the content of today’s episode, I do have two exciting announcements/reminders for you. And that is that I’m coming to Minneapolis! First and foremost, I’m going to be doing an event with friend of the podcast, Allison Epstein, who is promoting their new book, Fagin the Thief, at the Minneapolis bookstore, Magers & Quinn, which is in uptown Minneapolis. She and I are going to be appearing, Allison and I, on March 4th at 7:00 PM at Magers & Quinn Booksellers for a free event but you do need to register to attend. Registration, again, is free. I’ll put a link to that registration in the show notes of this episode. And since I’m in Minneapolis, and I know that several of you live there or nearby in St. Paul, which I understand is a different city, I am going to be having a Vulgar History Tits Out Brigade meetup in Minneapolis, probably on March 5th, but date TBD. If you’re interested and want to get details about that, please go to VulgarHistory.com/Meetup just to let me know your interest so I know how many people to expect and so I know kind of where we should go for that exciting wintertime meetup in March in Minneapolis.
So, today’s episode, we’re going to be revisiting an episode from March of 2020, which, as you may recall, was the beginning of the COVID pandemic. I mention that because my past self that you’re going to be hearing in a minute does mention that a couple times during this episode. And when I saw that just in terms of, like, revisiting episodes, the next one up was this one, Isabella of Castile, I’m always like, “Oh god!” It’s an episode that I am proud of and that I really struggled with at the time and that I’m still just, like, [squirms] about because her story, it’s… Well, the way that I see it, it’s just really… The way I presented it in this, it’s really two parts. There’s the part where she’s this underdog, and you’re cheering for her, and she’s so capable, and she’s this young woman facing adversity. And then the second half, it’s like, she’s perpetuating multiple genocides and kind of setting up the world hellscape that we all live in now.
So, it’s two different parts, and I do appreciate my past self for putting in lots of suggested readings, which I’m going to attach to this episode as well, to get more of a full picture of the scope of the various genocides involved. But also, if you want to revisit some other Vulgar History episodes, the fallout of what Isabella perpetuates in the second half of this story, you can see that in my past episodes about Sayyida al-Hurra, the Muslim woman who left, was forced out, of Spain, as well as the story of Doña Gracia Nasi, the Jewish woman who was forced out of Spain, and then also our various episodes about the Indigenous people of the Americas, like the episode we did about Malintzin, the episode about Matoaka, about Thanadelthur, about Sacagawea, just kind of the ripple effect of what Isabella did has have large repercussions on lots of people we’ve talked about on this podcast as well.
But anyway, I think, as I say in this episode, you’re about to hear that I recorded in 2020, it’s an important story to recognize, and I think it’s a good one to think about. So, I don’t know, I feel, I was going to say “Enjoy,” but it’s like “Enjoy?” Please listen to this episode about Isabella of Castile.
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Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History. My name is Ann Foster, and this is a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. We are on Season Two, and the theme for Season Two has been Women Leaders in History and the Men Who Whined About Them. We’ve started off before the year zero, we went through ancient Roman times, early Britain situations, last time we did Empress Matilda. And now, we’re just zooming a few years ahead, like, 300-ish years ahead, and we’re looking at a woman who was a descendant of Empress Matilda. And frankly, most Western European monarchs were a descendant of Empress Matilda in some way or another because she was one of those… Or her son, Henry, was one of those people who just had so many kids, and they just kind of spread far and wide all over the place. I can’t even get into the great-great-aunt-removed of it all, but just trust me, I double-checked this, my facts are solid. Empress Matilda was an ancestor of this person who we’re going to look at today.
This is another sort of person who I was like, “Oooh, does this…?” Like, it fits the theme. It fits the theme well and in an interesting way. But my hesitation of doing this person for the podcast was more about, is it inappropriate to be talking in sort of a lighthearted, comedic-type way about somebody whose actions had horrific repercussions that are still being dealt with on an international scale. But then I thought, you know, I don’t want to not talk about her. Like, if we’re looking at women and leadership through history, skipping over her would sort of leave a hole in the narrative. So, I’m going to treat this story as I do other stories in a sort of lighthearted, whimsical way, but also with appropriate, I hope, respect to the consequences of her actions. Most of the women so far really have been, sort of like, it’s easy to cheer for them because there’s so many gross dudes who are against them and the women achieved great stuff and then, eventually, were undone by some gross dudes around them. The thing about the women who are doing today, Isabella I, is that she actually lived for a pretty long time, and she actually wound up being successful in what she chose to be a success at doing which, spoiler, includes genocide of a couple of different groups.
But the thing about her reign is that she was so successful. The beginning of her story is similar to other people in the sense of, like, she was a woman and people like, “Oh, but should women be in charge?” Like, all those same issues came up. She surpassed them, she found ways around it, and she ended up… So, it’s kind of like there’s two parts to her story. There’s the part where you’re like, “Yes! I want this young woman to succeed against all these odds.” And then there’s the second part where you’re like, okay, well, once she’s in power, what’s she going to do?
And that’s the part of this whole situation that we haven’t actually dealt with, really, so far in the season of this podcast is so much of what the women we’ve been looking at have been doing is just, like, trying to get a seat at the table or, like, the head seat at the head table. But with the exception maybe of Cleopatra, who was in charge for quite a while and did do a lot of governing, et cetera, a lot of the other women just never got to really show their mettle as a leader beyond being a military leader or a behind-the-scenes leader. And the thing is, and it does still bother me when I hear people say, still today, one hears the things about like, you know, “Men have had their chance, like, let’s just let women be in charge.” Like, women are more… People think are more compassionate or smarter or whatever. And it’s like, there’s a lot of cultural baggage around that as to why people think that, and a lot of it is that women are culturally groomed to behave in a certain way and for women to succeed, often it means sort of leaning into these sort of stereotypical roles.
But also, I firmly believe, and this is a theoretical thing so I think it’s fair to firmly believe things that you can never actually prove, is that if there were an equal amount of male and female leaders and other gender leaders, if there’s an equal amount of every gender leader throughout all of human history, there’d be an equal amount of good ones and shitty ones because your gender doesn’t mean you’re going to be better or worse at being a leader. It can affect how people treat you depending on the cultural context that you’re looking at, and it can depend what you’re able to do depending on the cultural context you’re looking at, but I don’t think one gender is inherently better or worse, like, inherently not with… Like, if you divorce all the cultural stuff from another.
So, this is the first time we can really look at a woman who actually got to lead, got to be very significant, and what did that look like? So, when we get to the end, and it’s like, how scandalicious was she? It’s like, oooh, we’ll see how we feel about that by that point. I mean, we’re going to go through her story and see where she lands. But personally, I think she’s going to be high up Significance-wise, not very high up Scandalicious-wise, because she was a very… She was responsible for some horrific stuff. But it’s not scandalicious stuff, it’s not, like, secretly poisoning your lover or whatever. So, I don’t know, this is going to be a different sort of paradigm we’re looking at today. But it’s an important story, it’s one I want to look at.
I think it’s interesting too that Isabella of Castile was sort of a generation, basically one generation, before Queen Elizabeth I. And Queen Elizabeth I, like, if you look at all this sort of feminist, you know, picture books and fridge magnets and T-shirts and things, there’s a certain group of people who are often celebrated. It’s like Queen Elizabeth I and, like, Frida Kahlo and Harriet Tubman. And there’s certain sort of big names that are often there Cleopatra is often involved. Isabella I isn’t, and I think it’s because the repercussions of what she did really make it harder for us to be like, “Yes, girl! Go queen!” when we’re still wrangling with a lot of the stuff that she was responsible for. On the other hand, she was a significant figure. She was successful at what she set out to be successful at doing. I think she was more successful at those things than other people would have been of any gender. So, she was a significant woman. But this isn’t like a “Go girl!” sort of scenario, but it’s an interesting situation, and maybe this will get all of our minds off of the fact that we’re all self-isolating and the world is… seems kind of different. Well, I mean, it’s obviously different, but it just seems sort of uncertain, and what’s going to come next? Who knows? So, we’ll get into it.
So, Isabella of Castile. We’re going to do a bit of place-setting because we’ve been doing a bunch of, like, England/Rome things that all sort of led into each other, and now we’re going over into Castile/Aragon/Spain, and that’s a whole different, different kingdom. So, briefly, what happened? So, Isabella’s parents, what got her to the point of her being born? What’s the situation? So, a clever and ambitious young woman named Isabel of Portugal, not Isabella, but her mother Isabel wound up with a terrible husband named King Juan II of Castile. So, Castile was a kingdom— There’s a bunch of kingdoms all around, sort of like how England used to be all the different kingdoms. So, Spain, there was Aragon, there’s Castile, nearby was Portugal. So, there wasn’t, like, one country of Spain. So, Castile was a medium-powerful kingdom. So, Juan’s first wife Maria had probably been poisoned to death by Juan’s evil henchmen because she was too old to have any more babies. The only surviving baby that Maria had was a person named Prince Enrique, who was AKA, even while he was alive known as el Impotente, the Impotent, because he grew up, had two different wives and didn’t have any children, not even illegitimate children. So, Juan wanted to have some new kids to be his heirs because of the usual situation of you want your dynasty to continue on because when dynasties change, there’s civil war, and that’s just, like, not good for the economy or people being alive. So, Juan married Isabel, Isabel of Portugal, which again, these are the parents of today’s heroine, Isabella I.
So, Juan and Isabel had one son and one daughter, Isabella, our hero, and Alfonso, her brother. When Juan died, Enrique sent his stepmother and two little half-siblings to live in poverty in a castle that was allegedly haunted by ghosts. Isabel, pretty understandably fed up with all of this scheming and backstabbing and murdering, she had a psychological break, began spending her time in a fugue state, like, not responding, not eating, screaming at ghosts in the castle, just not doing well psychologically. This brings us to this week’s heroine, her daughter, Isabella.
So, Isabella was born April 22, 1451. She was the older child, Alfonso was born three years later. So, when the same year that Alfonso was born, Juan died, the king. So, although Juan had left instructions in his will that his older, useless adult son Enrique should take care of Isabel, Isabella and Alfonso, Enrique did not do this. So, they went to the ghost castle, et cetera. Enrique didn’t send them as much money as they should have received, meaning that the three-person family didn’t have enough food or clothes or furniture. Again, also the castle was potentially haunted by ghosts. So, little girl Isabella lived in this situation from ages 3 to 11 meaning that she and her brother Alfonso were mostly fending for themselves for several years, most of her childhood.
Even in this situation though, Isabella distinguished herself by being extremely clever and intelligent and basically not giving up, being resilient despite living in a pretty dire, underdog, unwinnable-type situation. All of the members of this family drew strength from their Catholic faith. So, they were all really, really sincerely, truly religious in a really strict sort of way. Also, it’s important to mention because perhaps her experience of religion mixed with a deep personal trauma of growing up with her mother who had all these mental issues, not having enough to live on in, like, a castle that was maybe haunted by ghosts, it was obviously a traumatic childhood. This might have something to do with her worldview later on, how she might have drawn her strength from her Catholic religion.
So, when she was about 11 years old, her older half-brother Enrique invited her and Alfonso to join him at the royal court. Why did he invite them after all these years after ignoring and not giving them money, et cetera? It’s because after seven years of marriage, Enrique’s wife Juana of Portugal was having a baby. This baby would supplant both Isabella and Alfonso in the line of succession. So, right now, because Enrique, AKA el Impotente, had not had any children, he didn’t have an heir at all. So, when he died, it would go to Alfonso, his much younger half-brother, because it went to boys and not girls, but he didn’t want that. He wanted the crown to go to his own son. So, he was feeling more kindly towards his much younger half-siblings because now they weren’t threats anymore because he was going to have his own heir, or so he thought.
So, just side note on Enrique’s wife, Juana of Portugal. Like all the women who surrounded him, Juana had developed a reputation for being “crazy.” You know, it’s the thing where, like, “Oh my God, my ex-girlfriend was crazy. My wife was crazy.” Where it’s like, I think probably you treated them badly. Why is every woman around you “crazy”? So, in this case, it mostly meant that Juana voiced her opinions, sometimes wore lower cut dresses than the Castilian nobles preferred, and was seen to be bossy towards her husband Enrique. Also, rumour had it that she was carrying on with various lovers as well. And now, based on everything we know about Enrique, namely that his personality was terrible and, allegedly, or maybe not even allegedly, but he didn’t have any children, hence the name el Impotente, his penis was maybe shaped in a way that it just, like, wouldn’t work to father children. It seems reasonable to me that his wife might go and have a lover. It’s very Henry VIII, I think, of Enrique to always be like, “Well, I’m totally fine. It’s just these crazy women all around me who keep not having sons and are crazy. It’s them, not me, right?” So, the point of all this is that Juana suddenly became pregnant after seven years and everybody pretty much agreed right away that there’s no way that Enrique was possibly the father of this baby. He might have been, who knows? But basically, nobody believed that.
So, Juana’s rumored lover was a man named Beltrán de la Cueva, which is an amazing name and he sounds super hot and I hope he was. She gave birth to a daughter, which of course everyone was just like, “Ooooh, the whole point of this is we needed a son, what are we going to do with a daughter?” et cetera, the usual stuff. So, she and Enrique named the daughter Juana after her mother and everybody started calling the baby Juana la Beltraneja, meaning basically Beltran’s baby. Like, they just started calling the princess by the name of the guy who everyone thought was her father, who was not the king. So, if Enrique had been more of a popular king and less of a horrible human being, maybe this nickname wouldn’t have stuck, but he was a terrible king and a really useless person. So, even in history books, baby Juana is referred to as Juana la Beltraneja, but her father was officially the king, which made her the new heir to the throne of Castile, which shoved Isabella and Alfonso down to second and third in line. Enrique decided to let his half-siblings stay and I’m sure they were pretty happy about that, to stay in a place with enough food and clothes and not ghosts. Isabella finally got to begin getting proper education from actual teachers and not just ghosts.
It’s here that Isabella’s extreme intelligence started to become more noticeable. She was brilliant in all of her studies, including science, math, religion, and dancing. She was also really interested in learning about politics and scheming. So, the politics of Castile and Portugal were… There was just a lot of back-and-forth going on, everybody was always trying to take over the other kingdoms. So, Isabella learned about how her half-brother Enrique was not a good king. She saw what he did that was bad and kind of learned like, “Okay. If I was monarch, maybe I’d do this different or that different.” She learned about how Portugal and other kingdoms were constantly trying to attack Castile. She also learned that there was a strong faction who wanted to make her brother Alfonso the new heir instead of baby Juana. Basically, Isabella laid low, paid attention and was super smart and sort of like a Sansa Stark sort of way. Meanwhile, in the outside world, battles were fought, and treaties were brokered. And eventually, el Impotente agreed with the rebels that he’d name Alfonso as his heir, but only if his half-brother married baby Juana. So, and before like… This is just, like, a weird incestuous child marriage situation but then you don’t have to worry about it for too long because Alfonso died under mysterious circumstances. Spoiler, everybody in the story dies of mysterious circumstances because it’s that sort of story.
So, Alfonso was now dead, meaning that there were two potential heirs left for Enrique, his half-sister, teenage brilliant Isabella, or his potentially illegitimate baby daughter Juana. Both girls had their own supporters, none of whom cared about either of them as people, but mostly for what they represented. Isabella’s genetic profile was seen as preferable because nobody doubted who her parents had been, whereas baby Juana was tainted by association with her mother’s “crazy” reputation and the fact that she was maybe illegitimate and also everybody hated Enrique, who was her father. So, Isabella knew she had a chance here to seize power because there was no potential male heirs anywhere and but she knew that she had to play her cards right. So, she’d gone from being a royal princess to living in an abandoned ghost castle and she knew how quickly luck could change and she didn’t want to move until it was exactly the right time. But she was also a bit of a busybody and couldn’t just sit by while her half-brother ran around being a terrible king. She decided she had to intervene for the good of the country that she wanted to take control over.
So, what she did is, seeing as how the country of Castile was literally engaging in a civil war over who would inherit from Enrique, Isabella took it upon herself to sort things out on her own. So, she sat her half-brother down at a negotiating table and forced him to make a peace treaty with her. So, bear in mind, at this point, she was 17 years old, her half-brother Enrique was 43, and she is the one who had all the power at that table because that is just how amazing and intense and smart and capable she was. So, she proposed she’d get all of her supporters to stop fighting against Enrique if he named her Isabella as his heir instead of his daughter Juana. Enrique was like, “Sure, but you have to marry someone I choose,” and Isabella was like “Okay, but I can veto and you can’t make me marry someone if I don’t want to.” And Enrique was like “Okay, but you can’t get married without my permission.” So, it’s all just, like, loopholes, loopholes. They’re both thinking of sneaky ways around all of these conditions, but they still shook hands that day and agreed to the term. Isabella got her supporters to stand down and the civil war was ended because of this 17-year-old negotiator, which is amazing. It was amazing! Lik, she got herself named heir.
So, as a princess in late medieval Europe the question of Isabella’s marriage had been discussed by other people since basically the day she was born. Her first betrothal had come about when she was 6 years old, back in the ghost castle. Her child fiancé had been a boy around her same age named Prince Ferdinand of Aragon. One year later though, this had all gone belly up due to various infighting and shenanigans. In fact, as evidence that Ferdinand’s family was just as, sort of like, messy and drama-filled as Isabella’s, these failed marriage negotiations wound up with one of Ferdinand’s relatives thrown in jail for plotting to kill his own father. So, just bear in mind that every person in this whole story is really dramatic, like, everyone’s always doing the most. It’s very much like if you watch Picard; it’s like a Romulan-type situation; everyone just feels things really intensely, and there’s a lot of murder going on, and yet, it’s just the women who get called crazy because misogyny.
So, shortly after 17-year-old Isabella signed the treaty with her useless king brother, the king of Portugal contacted Enrique with a proposal of marriage for Isabella. So, his name, the king, is King Afonso. So, he was also very schemey and he kind of secretly worked back channels with Enrique on a double treaty that would marry 17-year-old Isabella to him, King Afonso, who’s 36 and at the same time the same treaty said that baby Juana who is now 4, so like, toddler Juana would marry Afonso’s son Juan who was 13. The end result of these proposed inter-family marriages would be that Isabella would wind up queen of Portugal with Juana as the heir to both Portugal and Castile, I think. Effectively though, this arrangement would cut Isabella out of the entire line of succession for Castile in a way… Isabella knew this was happening, she is in this situation and in many other situations much smarter than me, so I’ll trust that this was a bad deal for her. So, effectively, she was like, “Remember when you said I could have veto power about who I would marry when we had the treaty?” So, she refused to agree to these terms, and because she didn’t trust her brother, she also began working on her own secret plans to marry Ferdinand, her fiancé from when she was 6 years old. This part of the story is a-mazing.
So, what happens is… There are so many stories about women who run away to get secretly married, but this is the first one that I’ve come across with a bride-to-be… She not only arranged for a secret, sexy marriage, but she also arranged for a secret papal dispensation, like, she couldn’t just secretly run off and elope; she had to get the Pope to give a dispensation for the marriage, and she secretly managed to do that because she is amazing. So, she wasn’t just secretly marrying some random noble, she was going to marry Prince Ferdinand of Aragon, and it had to be done legally so no one could have any questions about the marriage. So, she was secretly exchanging messages with Ferdinand’s father, the king of Aragon, and also sending secret messages with the Pope because the situation or the issue was that Isabella and Ferdinand were second cousins, and they had to get permission from the Pope to get married because of the family relationship. And while she was throwing that all out, secretly, with the Pope, Enrique was still trying to find a way to make her marry King Afonso of Portugal, like, he just wanted to get rid of her, but he wasn’t very good at it. So, if she wouldn’t marry King Afonso, he tried to arrange a marriage between her and a French prince named Charles, which meant that he could ship Isabella off to France and out of his way, but he didn’t know what he was doing. Isabella was super smart, and here’s what happened.
So, because Isabella and Ferdinand couldn’t straight-up ask the Pope for dispensation for the marriage because then the news might get back to Enrique and he might try to stop them, but one of them knew someone who knew someone who had access to the Pope’s personal stationery or something like that, and so they acquired a forged letter from the previous Pope, not the current Pope but the previous Pope who was dead, a man who had been dead for five years. This false letter on the Pope stationery said basically, “Ferdinand can marry his second cousin or his third cousin, no big deal, if in the future this comes up.” So, they were good to go. So, once the paperwork was all in place, Isabella was like, “Hey, I’m just going to go pay tribute to my dead brother and visit my mentally unstable mother back in the ghost castle. I’ll be back in a bit, byeee!” And she left, and everyone was like, “That sounds true.” So, meanwhile, Ferdinand left his castle disguised as a servant, and the two of them headed out to meet each other for a secret wedding. I love this part of the story, and I love the story because they’re both just, like, planned really well, and we’re both really smart and capable. Because these two were so smart and their plan was so good, they met up and got married immediately. So, Isabella was 18, Ferdinand was 17, and now they were married to each other officially.
So, the secret wedding was effectively a declaration of war against Enrique. She’d broken the brother-sister treaty where she’d said that she would let him choose her husband, but in so doing, she had landed herself in a powerful alliance with Ferdinand’s country of Aragon. Isabella and Ferdinand knew that to solidify everything, they needed to have an heir because that would just kind of make their case even stronger for why they should be in charge of, basically, all of Spain. So, a son would have been ideal, but their first child was a daughter who they named Isabel because every woman in the story is called Isabel or Isabella. Enrique was super mad about the sneaky marriage, so he amended his will to name Juana his heir instead of Isabella. Juana, at this point, was 12 years old and just, like, poor her.
So, remember her mother, also called Juana, just flashback. So, Juana of Portugal, the mum, had a reputation for being “crazy” which basically meant she didn’t put up with Enrique’s bullshit so he badmouthed her and then she took a lover and here we all are. So, eventually, Enrique had her kicked out of his royal court, and she was like, “Is that supposed to be a punishment? Because great.” And she just, like, peaced the hell out of there. She went to stay with a bishop who was a friend of hers, and then she fell in love with the bishop’s sexy nephew, took him as her new lover, had two out-of-wedlock children with him, and was just living her best life. Good for her. Enrique because of all this, had eventually declared their marriage invalid and also divorced her, which might have been good for his self-esteem, but it meant that their daughter, Juana, was now sort of illegitimate because if the marriage had never been valid, then she was illegitimate. So, that complicated things.
So, back to our story. Juana is now 12 years old. So, just two days after Enrique did us all a favour by finally dying but he had written in his will that Juana would be his heir instead of Isabella because he’s a petty bitch who lives for drama et cetera, two days later, Isabella marched into Segovia (which is where the royal court was) and she pulled a coup, like, she just marched in… A coup! Like, she was just here to usurp things, and she did it via a parade. So, she was 23 years old at this time, and she literally paraded in a procession down the street wearing jewels and carrying a sword and basically daring anyone to stop her from doing this. No woman had ever taken over anything like this, ever, and she was so impressive the nobles basically just let her become queen because she was so terrifying and incredible. Like, she was grand marshal of her own coup parade, and she just took over despite what the king’s will had said. Part of her confidence here comes from her belief that she was God’s choice to be in charge of Castile, and so that sort of helped soothe the hurt feelings of all the misogynists around her who wouldn’t normally support a woman in power. But when the options were a 23-year-old parade-holding political genius versus her 12-year-old possibly illegitimate half-niece, Isabella seemed like the better of two options, and she just took over anyway. So, like, let’s just let her.
So, to complicate or maybe simplify things, Juana, the mom, Juana of Portugal, died at around this time too, leaving her daughter Juana in her own sort of ghost castle underdog scenario. But younger Juana still had lots of powerful supporters, like the entire Portuguese royal family, including a man you might remember from a few minutes ago, from the same story, King Afonso, the one who had wanted to marry Isabella in the first place, but she didn’t. So, his proposal to marry Isabella hadn’t worked out, and he now had his sights set on marrying Juana and, through her, taking over Castile.
So, just five months after Isabella had been crowned queen, Afonso and his troops marched from Portugal into Castile, and he seemingly picked up 12-year-old Juana and married her, and that just happened. So, this was another marriage that was also marriage/act of war, and for the next four years, there was a war called the War of the Castilian Succession. On one side was Juana and Afonso, on the other side was Isabella and Ferdinand. Lives were lost, battles were fought. Four years passed, and now it’s 1476, and it’s the Battle of Toro where the whole war was ended when Ferdinand invented public relations stunts.
So, here’s the thing: neither side was sure who had won the Battle of Toro. Like, they fought the battle, everyone was just, like, tired and exhausted, a bunch of people were dead, and everyone’s just like, “Wait, who just won?” So, Alfonso’s troops went back like “I guess we won,” and Ferdinand went around spreading fake news that he had won in a huge victory and his fake news spread to some of Afonso’s allies who were like “Oh, I guess we actually lost let’s go home now to Portugal,” or whatever. So many of Afonso’s troops mistakenly left because of these rumours that Ferdinand’s side ended up actually winning. So, it was a victory for mind games and strategy, and it wound up with Juana and Afonso heading back to Portugal where they stayed, basically, for the time being.
Back on the home front, Isabella was busy with a parallel PR stunt. In front of witnesses, she had her daughter, Isabel, officially declared to be the heir to the crown of Castile. So, not only was Isabella herself the queen by naming her daughter her heir, she was basically swearing herself in as queen at the same time. So, both Isabella and Ferdinand were just really good at this sort of thing, using, like, mind games and just confidence to just will themselves into the positions they wanted to be in, and they were just so, like, self-assured about it, everyone was like, “That seems true. I guess that’s what happened. He won that battle, she’s the queen. Here we all are. Okay, moving on.”
So, the team-up wasn’t just Ferdinand being a warrior and Isabella being a political mastermind because Isabella was also a literal warrior queen/continues to be a negotiating genius. For instance, later that same year, while Ferdinand was off fighting, like, whoever, other enemies, a rebellion broke out against a pair of them and Isabella was like “Well, I’m just going to go and quash this,” and all of her male advisors were like “But what if you just stayed home and were did woman things like sewing and raising your baby daughter?” And she was like, “Sorry, I can’t hear you. I’m busy running off on a horse to single-handedly negotiate this all,” and that’s what she did. So, she just negotiated with the rebels. The rebels were like, “Oh, you know what? We’re not against you anymore, we support you.” End of rebellion. Like, she’d been negotiating peace treaties since she was a teenager and could outsmart anyone; her mediation skills were just amazing.
So, she was a political mastermind, had married a man who seemed to be her true equal in terms of scheming and ambition, had given birth to a daughter and heir, had driven her tween half-niece back to Portugal. What more was left to solidify her place as queen? Well, basically, because of patriarchy and misogyny, she still needed to have a son. Like, having a woman queen who had a daughter was just, like, not quite enough for everyone to be super comfortable with the whole situation. But lo and behold, in 1478, she gave birth to a son who was named Juan Prince of Asturias. With this baby boy now supplanting Isabel as heir, there was really no argument to be made about why she shouldn’t be in charge of literally everything. She had the pedigree, she had the son, she had the record of military victories, she had charisma and intelligence, and she was just getting started. So, what happens next?
So, this is where she stops being underdog. This is where we’re getting into, like, and now she’s in charge of stuff and what’s that going to look like? Spoiler: genocide. So, Isabella and Ferdinand, at this point, are officially co-monarchs of both a huge kingdom of Castile and the smaller but important Aragon. They were truly an equal pairing, so Isabella was given the same level of respect and responsibility as her husband. It wasn’t a thing where it’s like “That’s the king and that’s his wife, we’ll call her the queen,” they were, like, co-monarchs. This was the first time in Western history that a woman actively ruled a country. This was before Elizabeth I, this was before Catherine the Great, this was 300 years after Matilda. There had been women who had ruled, like, kingdoms or they’d been duchesses, women had been in charge of stuff. But she was, like, actively a reigning monarch, so she and Ferdinand were both reigning; it wasn’t just the husband of or the wife of. So, when Isabella, 23 years old, and small, she was a small person with sort of like red-goldish hair. When she paraded down the street with a giant sword and declared herself queen, everyone was kind of like “Okay,” but by the middle of her 30-year reign, those same people were like “Isabella is the greatest human being the world has ever seen, at least in the past 500 years. We worship her,” basically.
So, we’re going to look now at what she was like as a queen and what made her such a significant figure. First of all, you remember when she was hanging around the castle and just paying attention to stuff and seeing like, “Oh, this is why my half-brother is like a terrible king and here’s what I would do differently”? So, she started implementing the stuff she figured out during her time with Sansa Stark-ing it. So, she was able to turn around Castile’s finances through her careful and meticulous leadership. The past two kings, Enrique and also her father who had been the puppet of his evil pal who is this guy called de Luna, her father had been, like, a shitty king, her half-brother had been a shitty king; they’d been literally awful at the job. She inherited a country that was in massive amounts of debt due to their financial mismanagement, including Enrique’s idiotic decision or his short-sighted decision to increase the country’s money by just, like, making more coins. That never works, that never works… like, that never works. So, basically, Isabella had numerous ideas about how to salvage this particular situation, like, for instance, putting an end to excess coin manufacturing and also forcing nobles to pay off their debts to the crown.
The ongoing war between Castile and Portugal had also been putting too much pressure on the country’s budget, so she used her brilliant strategic mind to put an end to this war with a number of peace treaties. Among the terms of these treaties was Portugal’s agreement that Juana, remember her? I feel so badly for her; she just like, didn’t… So, Juana would be confined to a convent for the rest of her life and forced to do lots of compulsory prayers which is, like, a weirdly specific punishment but it’s kind of a hint at the way that Isabella would sort of use piety and religion as a punishment in other things she would do.
Another terrible thing about the reigns of Enrique and their father was that criminals had never really been tracked down or punished in any sort of organized manner. This kind of made sense because the country’s laws had never actually been written down, so Isabella hired a scholar to write out an eight-volume set of all of the laws. She saw herself as the divinely appointed arbiter of all that was good and holy. So, again, like she’s so smart, she’s so capable, and if you asked her, she would be like, “Well, this is because God put me here. I’m a brilliant genius because of God.” That’s part of where her confidence came from, and that’s part of where, like, she wasn’t fazed by men doubting her, but that’s also why a lot of men wouldn’t doubt her because they were, like, “Well, God put her here. Okay.” So, she’s determined to have a zero-tolerance policy against criminality especially rape and sexual crimes. More rapists were tried and convicted during her reign than ever before. But, important note, Isabella considered homosexual acts in the same league of unforgivable criminality as she did rape and the punishment for men convicted of sodomy was to be castrated and hanged which was also the punishment for heterosexual rapists. So, basically, consensual sodomy was given the same punishment as unconsensual sexual activity between anyone.
So, because you can’t have medieval Spanish law without medieval Spanish order, Isabella also invented the concept of a state-sanctioned police department. Up to this point, justice had been mostly meted out by ad hoc gangs of men called brotherhoods or hermandads. Isabella called her new royally appointed squad La Santa Hermandad, the Holy Brotherhood. Her predecessors had been largely under the thumb of powerful aristocrats who got who themselves gave and accepted bribes for their own self-interest; they weren’t really there for the country, they were just there for their own personal gain. Isabella and Ferdinand put an end to this whole situation by positioning themselves as absolute monarchs. Now, obviously, being a dictator isn’t ideal most of the time… all of the time? I’m going to say most of the time. But this was one situation where it was kind of their only option. The country’s allegiances had been scattered, and the new monarchs were determined to coalesce all support behind them. So, this is what was best for them, but in several ways, it was also kind of best for the country. So, this meant they removed all power from the nobles, consolidating it all for themselves. Isabella had the nobles move from active participants in government to more, like, audience members and replace them with actual administrative staff like lawyers who would perform the actual tasks of running the country. So, it was sort of, like, really modernizing things in a really effective way.
So, they got a stronghold over the country just by having a vision and a plan and being a really good team together. The pair of them, especially Isabella, also wound up being really effective in other ways but the first steps and, sort of, the necessary first steps were to take a struggling country and make it over into something actually productive. So, in a sort of triage way, once they gathered all control into their own hands and established law and order, they were able to move on to other stuff, such as to unify the country under a single religion.
So, Isabella and Ferdinand were so pious that the Pope bestowed upon them the name “the Catholic monarchs,” which is the way the people refer to them now, sometimes. So, it should come as no surprise that the religion they wanted everyone to have was Catholicism. So, this wasn’t just conversion, like, to get the numbers up or whatever; Isabella truly saw herself as God’s hand on Earth, like, God had put her there, this is her job is to make everyone… save everyone, or whatever. So, her role was as the saviour to all non-Catholics. So, at the time that she took over, Spain was populated not by only Catholics but there’s also a lot of Muslims and the largest concentration of Jewish people of anywhere in Europe at that time. So, did this mean she ran around like a missionary converting people? No. What it meant is that she created policies forcing non-Catholics to convert, and then she changed her mind and later decreed that all non-Catholics were to be expelled from Spain without their money or possessions. Their money or possessions were then given to Isabella and Ferdinand, which helped out financially. So, they were all expelled. It was a horrifying time for Jews and Muslims in Spain, and there isn’t… This podcast’s thesis, not really time to get into all the details of it, but I’ll put some article links in the show notes to really get into how horrendous this whole thing was and the effect it had on world history. But basically, it was genocidal.
So, simultaneous to the expulsion of Jews and Muslims, Isabella and Ferdinand were also hard at work conquering the remaining Muslim strongholds in their area, which were run by a dynasty called the Nasrid dynasty. Isabella was actively involved with a multi-year campaign because, again, she had this military background, she’d had military victories before, so she helped to plan campaigns and accompany troops near the field of battle. Using the newly increased treasury of money that they got from genocide reasons, she amassed a larger arsenal of weapons than any previous monarch had ever acquired, including cannons strong enough to destroy castle walls. Her tactics and arsenal forced all armies in Europe to change their battle strategies. Again, I’m just presenting some facts here, and the fact is, like, she was a really competent leader, and some of her actions were horrific, and everyone around her kind of had to change their strategies against her because she was so effective. The final stronghold of the Nasrid empire was Granada, which finally surrendered to the Catholic monarchs in 1492. Isabella and Ferdinand entered the city and were ceremonially presented with the keys to the city. So, then they set out converting not only the people but the place itself; they reconsecrated the primary mosque into a Catholic church, for instance. Their success in defeating Muslim expansion forever altered the global balance of power forever, internationally. So, at this point, it had been, like, the global balance of power, eastern areas, countries, kingdoms had been more powerful, and then because of her actions, the West suddenly became more powerful. So, Spain was becoming the first Western superpower, paving the way for the domination of France and then England and then some of the colonies on the world stage, and we’re still dealing with that world order today.
So, Isabella and Ferdinand had achieved massive success in their plans to consolidate the various parts of Spain into a single empire with themselves as supreme rulers. Rather than spreading themselves to the east, like, spreading Spain more east, Isabella’s interest was piqued by a persistent Italian adventurer who kept visiting his name is Cristoforo Colombo, or his anglicized name is better known as Christopher Columbus and he was just this guy who was like, “Hey, I want to go to the west, I think there might be stuff there.” And she was finally like, “Augh, fine.” So, he approached the Catholic monarchs numerous times for financial support for his goal to voyage across the Atlantic to find new trade routes to the Indies, but they kept saying no. He kept, like, dropping his price of how much he needed, and finally, it was cheap enough that Isabella found it acceptable. So, she reappropriated the money seized from the expelled Jewish people and Muslims to fund this trip. So… okay.
So, Christopher Columbus whose actions in North America are fairly well-known and in case you weren’t sure how truly awful he was and the things he perpetrated were so awful, I’ll put some more links to a few things in the show notes as well because, again, that’s a whole other topic but worth reading about, for sure. I don’t feel personally capable of speaking to it to the extent it needs to be spoken about, but I will put some links on the show notes.
So, one thing that’s interesting about this whole scenario is that Isabella was never comfortable with the idea of enslaving or mistreating the Indigenous people of the Americas. This was partially because she viewed Christopher Columbus’s colonies as subsidiaries of Castile, which made the Indigenous people, she thought of them as Castilian subjects and she was their monarch, and the law of the land was that Castilian subjects could not be enslaved. Furthermore, she was keen to convert the Indigenous people to Catholicism and, to her, Catholics could also not be enslaved. But also, like, note to her, she wasn’t like a civil rights… To her, Black people captured during her conquest on the African continent could be enslaved; it’s just, like, Castilian subjects and Catholics couldn’t be enslaved.
But her desire to convert people to Catholicism was not limited to the Indigenous people of the Americas, they were still consistently obsessed with ensuring that every single person living in Spain practiced the same religion they did, to the point that they began even mistrusting people who claimed to be Catholic. It makes sense to me if you’re there and everyone says, “Are you Catholic?” Like, you just start being like, “Yeah, I’m Catholic.” But Isabella and Ferdinand were like, “But are they? Are they Catholic enough?” So, they wanted to build a country that was entirely Catholics and all of whom fully supported them so, like, a full-on dictatorship situation, and so that’s why they founded a royal inquisition, AKA the Spanish Inquisition. They weren’t the first people to do something like this, but they were among the most successful at it, by which I mean they captured and killed more people than most other inquisitions did. I will put a link to that in the show notes as well. This is what I was talking about. At first, it’s easy to cheer for this person, and now she’s actually getting a lot of stuff done, and it’s just, like, the global implications of what she did are quite extreme.
So, Isabella’s religious fervor was not just limited to just her subjects; she applied similar high standards to her children, including some problematic/abusive methods. It is in her home life that Isabella found herself… Like, she was so savvy and so competent and so ruthless and so successful at her political stuff, but it was at her home life where she wasn’t able to control things quite as much because, guess what? Her children inherited her strong emotions and strong force of personality. So, Isabella and Ferdinand had five children. Her oldest daughter was also called Isabel; her son Juan, Prince of Asturias; Juana of Castile; and Maria of Aragon; and Catherine of Aragon. Yes, that’s right! The first wife of Henry VIII was the youngest child of Isabella of Castile, which puts her whole thing in context too, I think, in terms of her strong force of personality.
Isabella ensured that all her children were provided with extensive education; she hired humanists as tutors. So, education was important to her, even for girls, which her daughter, Catherine of Aragon, would also feel was really important to the point that Isabella’s granddaughter Mary I of England was also very well-educated as well. It had not been standard for children to be educated to this extent, especially not girls, but Isabella presented herself as a role model to her daughters in other ways by bringing them with her when she accompanied troops into battle. So, it was really like, you know, “Women can do anything!” asterisks, all the caveats I’ve already said. But she was raising her daughters in a way that a lot of women were not being raised at the time, and that affected her daughters’ lives.
Part of the reason why she was so intent on getting them really well-educated was because she herself, if you’ll recall, hadn’t received much schooling in her childhood, like, until she was age 11, she was in the ghost castle not really getting a lot of education. So, it was really important for her to her that her children were all taught basically everything possible. So, languages, science, history, politics, archery, dancing, music. Juan, the only son, was trained in how to become the new king while the girls learned skills about how to be a wife and mother alongside their other studies. Isabella and Ferdinand ensured that their family would be impervious to criticism by training the children to behave so perfectly and so Catholicly. Each of the children was recorded as being both really accomplished, really intelligent, and also really gorgeous, which is, like, they were. Like, if you look at the portraits, they have this gorgeous red-blonde hair, the same as their mother, some of them. The girls all seem to have inherited many of the personality traits of their mother as they all wound up expressing very stubborn personalities alongside resiliency and tenacity. Of all the children, Isabella clashed the most with her daughter Juana, perhaps because these two were more alike than the others, which is, like, isn’t that how it always is with mothers and daughters? And we’re going to learn more about Juana perhaps next week, we’ll see.
One final part of Isabella and Ferdinand’s strategy for complete domination of Spain/the Western world was to connect their dynasty with royal families in other countries, so they arranged the best possible matches for each of their children. Isabel was shipped off to marry the Portuguese king — don’t worry, not Afonso, he’s not the king anymore — while Juan and Juana were each married off to a Habsburg royal. Isabel’s husband died suddenly at a very young age, after which Isabel begged to be allowed to remain unmarried and to live life as a nun because this whole family was, like, really Catholic. But Isabel was needed to help firm up the same alliance with Portugal and so, Isabella sent her daughter Isabel back to marry the new Portuguese king. Isabel died in childbirth a year later and her baby son passed away shortly after that as well. At around this time, as well, Juan, the only son in the family, and Isabella had always favoured him, referring to him as “her angel” also died. So, this meant much to Isabella’s grief and frustration, if you’re going chronologically, that her least favorite daughter, Juana, was suddenly and unexpectedly heir to the thrones of Castile and Aragon because that was it.
Her youngest daughters… So, Juana was the oldest daughter, there’s two other sisters, Maria and Catherine. So, Maria and Catherine were sent off for their own politically advantageous marriages; Maria was to be the second wife to her sister Isabel’s widower, the king of Portugal, which is just like, blergh! So, like, Isabel married the king of Portugal who dies, then she married the new king of Portugal then she died, then that second king of Portugal married her sister Maria which is just like blergh. So, [sighs]. Catherine was sent off to marry Arthur, the crown prince of England. This did not go particularly easily for Catherine, which is… That’s the whole Henry VIII situation, and we’ll talk about that some other time. But basically, the children were married off to other countries that Spain wanted to ally with.
But these deaths in quick succession — Isabel, Isabel’s baby son, and then Juan — combined with the heartbreak of having all her children almost simultaneously move away to other countries where she never seen them again, severely affected Isabella’s health, including her mental health. Remember, she grew up with the trauma, and her mother had some psychological problems, like, there’s some undealt with trauma in her life, kind of clearly. So, as she had when she was a girl in the ghost castle, Isabella turned to prayer and fasting for strength, but this weakened her constitution because she wasn’t eating enough. She was believed to come to the effects of dropsy which I think is an oldey-time word for… It’s basically swelling, I think it has something to do with heart conditions. Anyway, she wasn’t eating, she’s not doing well, it was the 15th century, things weren’t great. But she kept enough wits about her to be able to compose her will.
So, the document is part advice and instruction to Ferdinand, and Ferdinand would continue on being the solo monarch for another 12 years, and it’s also instructions for their successors. Her will is sort of like a manifesto almost. So, she charges her successors to “Remain vigilant against the devil and his minions,” which included the Muslim and Jewish people, as well as to “Continue to work to conquer the African continent and to continue the Inquisition.” She’s just like, “This is what’s important to me.” She also noted in her will her desire for the Indigenous people of the American colonies to be treated fairly and not to be abused. Isabella I died aged 53 at the Medina del Campo royal palace where she had been living, bedridden, for her final months. This was in 1504. Her tomb is in Granada, the site of one of her greatest military and political victories. When Ferdinand died, he was buried next to her, and when their daughter Juana died 55 years later, she was buried there as well, as well as was— Oh sorry, Juana, her daughter Juana, not Juana the Portugal, stuck in the convent having to do prayers all the time person, and Isabel’s dead baby son Miguel was also buried there. So, a little family tomb situation.
So, just to like, wrap up her story before we get into the whole scoring situation is that Isabel of Castile, her life, her reign forever changed the course of world history. Other people in the same place in the same time might have done some of the same stuff, but I don’t know if anyone could have accomplished as much as she did. Again, I’m not calling the things she did good, I’m just saying that they were accomplishments for her, for what she wanted to do, to have happen. She founded the first cross-Atlantic colonial empire, creating a template that was used later by both the French and the English. Her successes in the wars against Muslim areas paved the way for Christianity to become the dominant religion through most of Western Europe. She was also the first European woman to be recognized as a monarch in her own right, changing the word ‘queen’ to mean ‘woman who rules’ rather than just the woman married to the king. There are echoes of her story in the character arc of Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones, including the fact that Daenerys was also narcissistic and became a dictator and killed a lot of people. But basically, like Isabella, Daenerys went from a forgotten, sidelined young woman to an ambitious would-be queen to a seemingly power-mad colonizer. Isabella’s legacy is complex and impossible to label as entirely positive or entirely negative. I mean, nothing is really… It’s hard to find something that you can say is entirely positive or entirely negative. So, I’m just trying to present, like, here’s the facts, here’s what she did. Some of it was impressive, some of it is horrendous, all of it is significant and truly changed world history.
So, hers is one of the most consequential and important reigns in European history and it’s ridiculous but now we’re going to score her on our Scandalicious Scale which, I mean, it’s hard for me to quantify the purpose of the Scandalicious Scale but it’s mostly just it’s a nice way to wrap up each episode, and it’s a way to sort of measure the different women who are talking about, not saying who is better than who but just more, kind of like, where do they all stack up, if we’re putting them on a list and measuring them in these various different ways?
So, the first category— Oh, my cat is here being, like, real friendly with her claws. I don’t know if Isabella had… Pets had all been brainwashed by enzymes and cat poo to worship… Anyway, so the first category is Scandaliciousness, and I’m just giving her a 0. A 0! Have I ever given anyone a 0? I don’t… I don’t think I’ve ever given someone a 0 in Scandaliciousness, but she’s… I feel like the ghost of Isabella Castile would come and, like, strike me down if I suggested anything about her life was scandalous. You know what? No, I’m going to give her a 2. A 2 for Scandaliciousness because the whole running away, secretly marrying situation.
Schemieness. Now, for a lot of the women we’ve been looking at, this has meant sort of like, behind the scenes, how did they, you know, orchestrate a murder or whatever? But for Isabella, I think it’s more just, like, planning. Did she come up with plans? Were those plans effective? And I think I kind of need to give her… Her plans were good. She had a plan to take over all of Castile, which she did. She had a plan to also have Aragon taken over by marrying Ferdinand, which she did. She had numerous military plans. I think her Schemieness is… I mean, even outside of the, like, genocide of it all, she came up with plans, the plans went well for her. 10 for Schemieness, I think.
Significance, I think, also has to be a 10. I would give her, like, 10-plus if I could because the significance of her reign, even the people who we have higher up on the Scandalicious Scale like Agrippina, Matilda, even Cleopatra, they did stuff that mattered a lot at the time, but Isabella of Castile is the first person who we’ve looked at who I think what she did literally changed world history. Like, we’re still dealing with the effects of the colonizing of Africa and of the Americas and what happened with Jewish people and Muslims in Spain and, like, the east versus the west. Other people might have been monarchs at the same time, she happened to be the person that was there, and she, with her scheminess, just had these plans that just did what she wanted them to. So, Significance is 10.
And then this one is… So, the Sexism Bonus. I usually think to myself, like, it could never be less than five because everybody is always dealing with sexism. Once she became queen, and I think she was protected or sort of inoculated from a lot of criticism both by being married to Ferdinand, so there was a man that people could think like “Well, she’s in charge but also there’s a man there,” so it’s not quite so threatening to people. But the fact that she, like, the sexism that got in the way of her not being named Enrique’s heir to begin with when her brother was… and the fact she had to kind of fight to take over, but then just fighting against a different woman/girl. I’m going to stick to my guns, I’m going to give her a 5 because I feel like, show me a person who hasn’t had at least a 5 out of 10 of sexism affecting their life.
So, that brings her total up to… 27, which is kind of right in the middle which makes sense to me because this is a podcast where, like, we prioritize schemieness and scandaliciousness and things like that and so the people who are at the top are the people who did scandalous type things combined with some significance type things. Isabella of Castile is significant, but she’s not, like, again, this is where you’re not there’s not a lot of… There’s not a lot of sexy movies and historical novels about Isabella of Castile and all the schemes she did. She was a military leader, and she’s an effective military leader but not the sort of person who is going to get to the top based on what we’re scoring on here, on Vulgar History.
So again, I’m going to put, like, a whole lot of links in the show notes for this because there’s a lot of important context that I breezed over pretty quickly in the aim of giving you a whole big-picture view of her life from beginning to end but that context is really crucial to glean and to really appreciate the effect that this woman had on all of world history. I mean, she’s one of the most significant not just women but, like, people of any gender to have ever lived? Just the stuff… and that’s partially, like, she could have been the same personality, the same person with the same skills in a different situation, and she wouldn’t have done all these things. It was, like, a combination of who she was, her skills and just the situation she was in and her ability to make the best of it and to win people over to her side.
So yeah, this is Vulgar History, my name is Ann Foster. I have a couple little links you can look at. First of all, if you want to find more of my writing, including effectively a transcript of this podcast, just the two essays I’ve written before about Isabelle of Castile, that’s at AnnFosterWriter.com. This podcast, we’re on Instagram and Twitter @VulgarHistoryPod on Instagram, @VulgarHistory on Twitter. If you want to email me, you can reach us at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com. If you want to support this podcast, I’m on Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. I’ve also got some merch, including from last week’s episode a shirt that I find the most hilarious thing in the world; it’s just like a plain white shirt and then it says in sort of oldey-time font like “Empress Matilda in the snow,” because of how last time I talked about how she camouflaged all in white and was hidden in the snow. You can get that image on a mug and a bag and all kinds of different hilarious stuff. That’s at TeeSpring.com/Stores/VulgarHistory.
If you’re interested in a book that I have to recommend to you, there’s a book called Isabella: The Warrior Queen by Kristin Downey that came out in 2015 that I think gives a really good, sort of, balanced appraisal of her and her life. There’s also a book called Isabella of Castile: Europe’s First Great Queen by Giles Tremlett, which also… Both of them really do I think a fine job of balancing the Isabella, kind of the cool parts of her story with the horrific effects of the things she did without saying, “She was a bad person” or “She was a good person,” it’s just kind of, like, here’s some facts and here’s some information so both of those books I would recommend definitely.
Also, if you go to the website Bookshop.org, I have an ongoing book list there. I think it’s just called, the book list is if you go to… Again, it’ll be in the show note links, but it’s Bookshop.org/Lists/Vulgar-History-Recommends, and that’s where you can find a lot of the books I’ve been reading for researching for all the different podcast episodes. And Bookshop.org is a lovely site that helps support independent bookstores; you can tell them who’s your local store is, and then the purchases you make can go to help support them as well. And then also, if you are interested in audiobooks and that sort of thing, if you’re considering a subscription to Audible, if you go to AudibleTrial.com/VulgarHistory, then you can get a free trial, and some of that money brings back to help support this little podcast project.
So, I hope you’re all keeping well. Wash your hands, don’t touch your face, stay inside, and I’ll talk to you next time!
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So, just to remind you about the exciting things that are coming up very soon in the sense of next week, I guess. So, I’m going to be in Minneapolis to do this event with Allison Epstein at Magers & Quinn bookstore in uptown Minneapolis on Tuesday, March 4th at 7:00 PM, and you can sign up for that, you need to pre-register, but it’s free. The link to that, just go to Magers & Quinn website events or just click on the link in the show notes of this episode you’re listening to right now. And then the day after that, I guess one week from today on March 5th is when I’m hoping to have a meetup for the Tits Out Brigade Minneapolis and also nearby St. Paul branches. Yeah, and just fill out the form at VulgarHistory.com/Meetup so I know how many people to expect, and that will affect where we meet and what we do. So, I’m really excited to go there and to hang out with Allison and Lana Wood Johnson, friend of the podcast, lives there too and many of you as well. So, I’m looking forward to that, it’s all happening next week. In the meantime, for people who don’t live in Minneapolis, I’m excited to one day be in your city as well.
If you want to stay on top of all the things I’m doing in a non-overwhelming way, I send out an email newsletter once per month. So, you get your one-stop shopping of Vulgar History and Ann Foster news by signing up for my mailing list and that will have all the latest information about in-person events, updates about my book Rebel of the Regency, updates about the podcast, and also book and movie recommendations by me and sometimes by other guests. You can sign up for this mailing list, which again is, like, a once-monthly email at VulgarHistory.com/News. If you’d like more frequent updates from me, I’m also on Substack, where you can get that newsletter. So, you go to VulgarHistory.Substack.com and every other week, I post there, essays about women from history as well as some sneaky peeks from my upcoming book Rebel of the Regency.
You can also stay up with what I’m doing by joining my Patreon. That’s where I post lots of stuff; I post interesting links of things that are happening that connect back to some of our episodes, book recommendations, if I do a guest spot on somebody else’s podcast, I share it there usually, polls, lots of things like that. You can join the Patreon for free, you go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, and you can choose a free membership, and you’ll get all those updates. If you want to get a little bit more and you can afford so, if you pledge one dollar or more a month, you get early, ad-free access to all episodes of Vulgar History as well as ad-free access to the archive of all the past episodes.
If you pledge five dollars or more a month you get access to all the above as well as bonus episodes of things like Vulgarpiece Theatre where I talk about costume dramas with Allison Epstein and Lana Wood Johnson, So This Asshole, where I talk about shitty men from history, including I did one about Christopher Columbus who we mentioned in this episode today, and also The Aftershow, where I just kiki with some of the guests that we had on the show as well. When you join the Patreon at five dollars or more a month you also get access to our Discord which is just literally a big group chat where we talk about various things, share pictures of our pets, share our despair and hopefulness at the state of the world, mostly despair lately, and yeah, talk about The Traitors and Survivor. So, anyway, Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, you can just see what all the options are there. You can also get a free trial if you want to see what it’s like at the five dollars a month level without paying five dollars a month you can get I think it’s a seven-day free trial to just listen to some of those bonus things try out the Discord and see if you like it, you know, try before you buy sort of thing.
We also are partnered with Common Era Jewelry, which is a woman-owned small business that makes beautiful heirloom jewelry pieces inspired by women from history but also by history in general, including classic mythology. So, their designs include in terms of mythology there’s people like Circe is there, Hecate, Athena, Artemis, Medusa, Pandora, Persephone, as well as historical figures like Hatshepsut, Hypatia, Livia, Olga of Kiev, Cleopatra, Sappho, Agrippina, and Anne Boleyn. As well, there’s the recent Esoterica collection, which features jewelry inspired by jewelry that’s been found in, like, archaeological digs, like there’s one that is engraved with a Roman saying that means “May you live carefree,” basically. There’s also one that is a fertility charm sort of thing so inspired by the amulets worn in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, “providing the wearer a sense of agency and empowerment during pregnancy and childbirth times.” There’s also one featuring the Magic Sator Square which is, it was it’s sort of a symbol that was often found carved on the walls of ancient houses all over Roman territories. This particular piece is inspired by a Magic Sator Square that was found in Pompeii excavations, it’s thought to be a symbol of protection and a spell to ward off evil spirits, fevers, and hexes. There’s also the Eye of Horus necklace, inspired by an amulet originally from 330 BCE. Anyway, it’s gorgeous jewelry. These pieces are available in solid gold, you can get pendants, you can get rings, as well as in more affordable gold vermeil. Vulgar History listeners can always get 15% off your order from Common Era by going to CommonEra.com/Vulgar or using code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout at CommonEra.com.
If you want to get some Vulgar History merchandise, we have that available too! You go to VulgarHistory.com/Store if you’re in the US. If you’re outside the US, go to VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. If you want to get in touch with me, I would love if you would, and you can do that by filling out the form, go to VulgarHistory.com, and there’s a little ‘Contact me’ button there. I’m also reachable on social media like Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads, where I’m @VulgarHistoryPod. Next week, we’re going to be revisiting another classic episode as alluded to in this one. It’s going to be one of the daughters of Isabella of Castile and what her trajectory was like. Until next time, keep your pants on and your tits out and I’ll see you soon, Minneapolis!
Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.
References:
Isabella of Castile: Europe’s First Great Queen by Giles Tremlett
Isabella: The Warrior Queen by Kirstin Downey
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RSVP to the Vulgar History Minneapolis meet-up!
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Get 15% off all the gorgeous jewellery and accessories at common.era.com/vulgar or go to commonera.com and use code VULGAR at checkout
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