The Queen Who Funded the World – Paperback

She died at Medina del Campo on November 26, 1504, fifty-three years old, having done more in thirty years than most dynasties accomplished in three centuries. In January 1492 she completed the seven-century Reconquista with the fall of Granada. In March 1492 she signed the Alhambra Decree expelling the Jews from Spain. In August 1492 she funded the Columbus voyage that sailed from Palos de la Frontera with three ships. In October 1492 Columbus landed in the Bahamas. The western world has been living in what she organized ever since.

She is Isabella I of Castile. The queen who was not supposed to be queen. The queen who created Spain.

The Queen Who Funded the World: Isabella of Castile is a literary novel that enters the consciousness of the girl who was displaced from the Castilian succession by the dynastic politics of her half-brother’s court and who organized the specific circumstances that put her back in it – who chose Ferdinand of Aragon herself, against the king’s wishes, eight weeks after inheriting the crisis, who fought the War of Succession and won, who spent thirty years governing the unified Castile and Aragon that became Spain, who completed the Reconquista and funded Columbus and established the Spanish Inquisition and expelled the Jews and organized the colonial governance of the Americas.

The novel follows the full arc of the reign. The Castilian chaos of the Henry IV court where she was formed. The self-organized marriage to Ferdinand in 1469. The War of Succession. The ten-year Granada campaign and its January 1492 completion. The Columbus relationship – the six years of waiting, the Santngel funding arrangement, the August departure, the October landing. The Inquisition. The expulsion. The Americas governance. The death at fifty-three.

The question the novel organizes itself around: what does it mean to organize a single year – 1492 – that changes the world forever?

The Queen Who Funded the World is the sixth book in The Women Who Became Legend series by I. Ioakim.