The Queen's Vow: A Novel of Isabella of Castile by C.W. Gortner
Synopsis:
No one believed I was destined for greatness.
So begins Isabella’s story, in this evocative, vividly imagined novel about one of history’s most famous and controversial queens—the warrior who united a fractured country, the champion of the faith whose reign gave rise to the Inquisition, and the visionary who sent Columbus to discover a New World. Acclaimed author C. W. Gortner envisages the turbulent early years of a woman whose mythic rise to power would go on to transform a monarchy, a nation, and the world.
Young Isabella is barely a teenager when she and her brother are taken from their mother’s home to live under the watchful eye of their half-brother, King Enrique, and his sultry, conniving queen. There, Isabella is thrust into danger when she becomes an unwitting pawn in a plot to dethrone Enrique. Suspected of treason and held captive, she treads a perilous path, torn between loyalties, until at age seventeen she suddenly finds herself heiress of Castile, the largest kingdom in Spain. Plunged into a deadly conflict to secure her crown, she is determined to wed the one man she loves yet who is forbidden to her—Fernando, prince of Aragon.
As they unite their two realms under “one crown, one country, one faith,” Isabella and Fernando face an impoverished Spain beset by enemies. With the future of her throne at stake, Isabella resists the zealous demands of the inquisitor Torquemada even as she is seduced by the dreams of an enigmatic navigator named Columbus. But when the Moors of the southern domain of Granada declare war, a violent, treacherous battle against an ancient adversary erupts, one that will test all of Isabella’s resolve, her courage, and her tenacious belief in her destiny.
From the glorious palaces of Segovia to the battlefields of Granada and the intrigue-laden gardens of Seville, The Queen’s Vow sweeps us into the tumultuous forging of a nation and the complex, fascinating heart of the woman who overcame all odds to become Isabella of Castile.
My Review:
“The world is only as small as we see it, my lady. Imagination knows no limits.”
Queen Isabella is a fascinating sovereign queen of Spain in her own right. She is famous in history for sponsoring Christopher Columbus’s expeditions to America, but she was also known for uniting a divided Spanish kingdom. She is often criticized for starting the Spanish Inquisition and for her violent crusade in driving the Muslims out of Granada. So was she a saint or a villain? The Queen’s Vow lets Isabella tell her own story and what we find is a woman of faith, love and an endless devotion who wanted to ensure that her beloved Castile thrived in the ever-expanding world around them.
Gortner’s biographical novel is told in the first person by Queen Isabella herself. The author portrays the Spanish queen as both a human woman that is plagued by her inner conscience and her unrelenting faith. Gortner shows the motivations behind those actions that were criticized, starting from her early beginnings as an impoverished princess of Castile. Queen Isabella is a woman that is driven by her faith in God. Her early life as a princess is difficult, a path filled with danger at every turn.
At the beginning of the novel, her life as a princess of Castile is shattered when her father dies, and her half-brother, Enrique IV, becomes King of Castile. She, along with her mother and younger brother, Alfonso, are forced to live in poverty and are barely acknowledged by her half-brother, the king. However, danger comes to both Isabella’s and Alfonso’s front door when a group of power-hungry noblemen wants to rebel against King Enrique and install Alfonso as king in his stead. Isabella finds herself in a dangerous situation and must make the ultimate choice to be loyal to King Enrique or Alfonso, whom she had always looked after. Isabella is a brave and intelligent woman. She is loyal to her king and country because she believes that it is God’s will. However, King Enrique IV does not trust her and instead tries to undermine Isabella’s influence by using her as his pawn. He prevents her to marry her love, Prince Ferdinand of Aragon and threatens to take away her succession to the Castilian crown. For Isabella to get both her kingdom and her prince, she must use her intelligence, her courage, and her unyielding faith in God.
Love her or loathe her, the Isabella found within these pages is an extraordinarily compelling woman. In an age when queens were expected to be controlled, she determined to chart her course, arranging her marriage against the explicit wishes of her half-brother. While it is generally believed that Isabella did not meet her husband-to-be, her cousin Ferdinand of Aragon, until their wedding day, Gortner takes some license with the record to suggest an earlier meeting between the two, a moment in Enrique’s court which plants the seeds of a relationship that would blossom into a love story for the ages. While there was an undeniably strategic political advantage to their union, benefiting both parties and their respective kingdoms, theirs is a life-long partnership that transformed the trajectory of their people forever. Theirs is an electric partnership, fraught with tension, but in the end a “marriage of true minds”, a ground-breaking union where each cherished and valued the contributions and strengths of the other.
For a fifteenth-century Catholic monarch like Isabella, the dictates of the church were the literal alpha and omega, the beginning and the end by which all decisions are measured, and heresy and dissent in matters of faith are not to be tolerated. By understanding the fallibility of Isabella’s now legendary, larger-than-life persona, and restoring her humanity he delivers an unvarnished, compelling portrait of a woman who fought for the right to determine her future and strove to live out her faith in the best way she knew how for good or ill. While the consequences of allowing the Inquisition into Spain or of the expulsion of the Jews aren’t fully analyzed, the agony and fear that went into Isabella’s decisions are fully explored, resulting in a perfectly realized portrait of an imperfect, but a compelling woman.
In The Queen’s Vow, Isabella emerges as a fully realized, multi-faceted woman, a compelling and contradictory mix of tradition and ground-breaking, forward-thinking independence. With meticulous attention to detail and a deft hand for period mannerisms and dialogue, Gortner excels at bringing Isabella and her world to life on the page. He is the rare author capable of balancing his audience’s modern sensibilities with a soul-deep understanding of the time in which Isabella lived, a gift of restoring the triumphs and short-comings of his leading lady, capable of explaining her motivations and fears with a compassionate and clear-eyed touch. A Gortner novel is an experience to savor, and Isabella’s story is no exception by turns exhilarating, maddening, and heartbreaking.
For a fifteenth-century Catholic monarch like Isabella, the dictates of the church were the literal alpha and omega, the beginning and the end by which all decisions are measured, and heresy and dissent in matters of faith are not to be tolerated. By understanding the fallibility of Isabella’s now legendary, larger-than-life persona, and restoring her humanity he delivers an unvarnished, compelling portrait of a woman who fought for the right to determine her future and strove to live out her faith in the best way she knew how for good or ill. While the consequences of allowing the Inquisition into Spain or of the expulsion of the Jews aren’t fully analyzed, the agony and fear that went into Isabella’s decisions are fully explored, resulting in a perfectly realized portrait of an imperfect, but a compelling woman.
In The Queen’s Vow, Isabella emerges as a fully realized, multi-faceted woman, a compelling and contradictory mix of tradition and ground-breaking, forward-thinking independence. With meticulous attention to detail and a deft hand for period mannerisms and dialogue, Gortner excels at bringing Isabella and her world to life on the page. He is the rare author capable of balancing his audience’s modern sensibilities with a soul-deep understanding of the time in which Isabella lived, a gift of restoring the triumphs and short-comings of his leading lady, capable of explaining her motivations and fears with a compassionate and clear-eyed touch. A Gortner novel is an experience to savor, and Isabella’s story is no exception by turns exhilarating, maddening, and heartbreaking.
My Rating:
✬✬✬✬✬
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