Giles Tremlett > Quotes

“Calzada de Calatrava, as Almadovar's brother once put it, 'is the sort of place where people spend their whole life saving for a decent gravestone in the cemetery.”
― Giles Tremlett, Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and its Silent Past

“hose watching Isabella process through the cold streets of Segovia could not know that they were witnessing the first steps of a queen destined to become the most powerful woman Europe had seen since Roman times. ‘This queen of Spain, called Isabella, has had no equal on this earth for 500 years,’ one awestruck visitor from northern Europe would eventually proclaim, admiring the fear and loyalty she provoked among the lowliest of Castilians and the mightiest of Grandees.4 This was not hyperbole. Europe had limited experience of queens regnant, and even less of successful ones. Few of those who followed Isabella have had such a lasting impact. Only Elizabeth I of England, Archduchess María Theresa of Austria, Russia’s Catherine the Great (outshining a formidable predecessor, the Empress Elizabeth) and Britain’s Queen Victoria can rival her, each in their own era. All faced the challenges of being a female ruler in an otherwise overwhelmingly male-dominated world and all had long, transformative reigns, leaving legacies that would be felt for centuries. All faced the challenges of being a female ruler in an otherwise overwhelmingly male-dominated world and all had long, transformative reigns, leaving Only Isabella did this by leading a country as it emerged from the troubled late middle ages, harnessing the ideas and tools of the early Renaissance to start transforming a fractious, ill-disciplined nation into a European powerhouse with a clear-minded and ambitious monarchy at its centre. She was, in other words, the first in that still-small club of great European queens. To some she remains the greatest.”
― Giles Tremlett

“El sultán de Egipto Venecia, 2 de octubre de 1501 La importancia cada vez mayor de Isabel y la posición de España como potencia política emergente en Europa significaban que las repercusiones de sus actos más audaces y polémicos llegaban ahora a pueblos y tierras lejanos. Así pues, se sintió obligada a dirigir su atención hacia el hombre a quien consideraba «sultán de Babilonia, Egipto y Siria y señor de toda Palestina», es decir, el sultán mameluco de El Cairo, Kanshu al-Ghuri. En octubre de 1501 ella y Fernando enviaron a Pedro Mártir de Anglería a ver al sultán con instrucciones estrictas de que negara la existencia de conversiones forzosas. «Y si os replicare alguna cosa tocante a la conversión de los moros deste reino de Granada diciendo que se les hizo alguna fuerza y agravio para que fuesen convertidos a nuestra santa fe católica, decirle heis la verdad: que a ninguno fue hecha fuerza ni se hará, porque nuestra santa fe católica quiere que a ninguno se haga.»[1”
― Giles Tremlett, Isabel la Católica: La primera gran reina de Europa

“Martín de Córdoba, a distinguished Augustinian friar, disagreed strongly. In a book he wrote to guide Isabella in the exercise of authority, The Garden of Noble Ladies, he claimed that it was ignorant or old-fashioned to ‘believe it evil when some kingdom or other polity falls to a woman’s government … I, as I will declare, hold the contrary opinion.”
― Giles Tremlett, Isabella of Castile: Europe's First Great Queen

“They were going away to spend three days with their teachers and lots of farmyard animals at a ‘granja escuela’ – ‘a school farm’. This had been sold to us as a further, intensive round of group-formation training and, therefore, key to their education. I felt a pang of envy as I watched my child go. He already belonged to that noisy, congenial mass known as Spaniards in a way that I – with my innate, sometimes awkward, anglosajón individualism – find impossible.”
― Giles Tremlett, Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and its Silent Past