The Sword Held by Its Point
A dozen days before Christmas 1474, in the windswept Castilian city of Segovia, a twenty-three-year-old woman with green eyes and light auburn hair — inherited, improbably, from an English grandmother, Catherine of Lancaster — processed through the streets in her finest clothes. Before her walked a gentleman holding the royal sword upright by its point, hilt raised toward heaven: the symbol of a sovereign's authority to punish by violence. The crowds watched in confusion. "Some of those in the crowd muttered that they had never seen such a thing," one contemporary chronicler recorded. They had not. No woman in the history of western Christendom had done what Isabella of Castile was doing in that moment — claiming not regency, not consort status, not a holding pattern until a man arrived, but absolute sovereign authority over one of Europe's largest kingdoms. Her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, was hundreds of miles away prosecuting a war with France. She did not wait for him.
The procession was a coup. Two days earlier, her half-brother Henry IV had been buried in Madrid in the rough clothes he liked to wear — a gentle, dissolute, compromising man whose kindness and hatred of conflict had, in Isabella's view, made him a catastrophe. His will bequeathed the throne to his twelve-year-old daughter Joanna, whose paternity was doubted by half the kingdom. Isabella had decided not to inherit the throne so much as seize it, and she choreographed the seizure with the instincts of a propagandist. The glittering jewels, the magnificent dress, the sword — these were not merely ceremonial. They were a declaration, broadcast in the visual language a largely illiterate population could read: this woman intended to rule as no woman had ruled before, and she would use force to do it.
What followed over the next thirty years would be so consequential that a German observer, struggling for adequate superlatives, declared: "This queen of Spain, called Isabella, has had no equal on this earth for 500 years." She would end a twenty-four-generation struggle between Christians and Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula. She would finance the expedition that delivered the Americas to European consciousness. She would lay the institutional foundation for what became the first global superpower. She would also establish a bloody Inquisition that darkened Spain's reputation for centuries and expel entire populations on the basis of faith. Whether saintly or satanic — and the argument has never been settled, the Catholic Church having opened her case for sainthood in 1958 and still not closed it — no female ruler in history has left a deeper mark on the shape of the modern world.
This is the story of how a girl who was never supposed to rule became the architect of an empire, and what it cost everyone, including herself.
By the Numbers
The Reign of Isabella I
30 yearsDuration of reign (1474–1504)
1,157,000Maravedís from the Santa Hermandad to finance Columbus's first voyage
10 yearsDuration of the Granada War (1482–1492)
~170,000Jews expelled or forced to convert in 1492
26,000,000Tax revenue in Reals by 1504 (up from 900,000 in 1474)
5Children, married into the royal houses of Portugal, Austria, Burgundy, and England
1New World — annexed to the crown of Castile by papal confirmation
The Ghost Castle and the Making of Iron
To understand the woman who held the sword in Segovia, you must go back to a small, drafty castle in Arévalo, where a girl of three or four was learning the first lesson that would define her life: that royalty meant nothing without the will to enforce it.
Isabella was born on April 22, 1451, in the dusty town of Madrigal de las Altas Torres — "Madrigal of the High Towers" — the daughter of King John II of Castile and his second wife, Isabella of Portugal. Her father was fifty at her birth, exhausted and controlled by his powerful favorite, Álvaro de Luna, who had effectively governed Castile through a compliant king. John II died when Isabella was three. The throne passed to her much older half-brother, who became Henry IV. The widowed queen was removed — not quite banished, but firmly sidelined — to the castle at Arévalo, given barely enough to maintain a household. Isabella, her mother, and her infant brother Alfonso lived in conditions of shabby gentility that bordered, at times, on genuine privation. The girl who would one day finance the discovery of continents sometimes lacked adequate food and clothing.
Her mother, Isabella of Portugal, was a woman of sound mind and pure heart who directed her daughter's education with rare judgment, instilling the Catholic fear of God so deep into the girl's psyche that it would become the load-bearing wall of everything she later built. But the elder Isabella was also fragile — prone to what contemporaries described as periods of mental disturbance, a darkness that may have been hereditary and that would surface again, devastatingly, in Isabella's own daughter Joanna. The years at Arévalo were formative in ways that went beyond curriculum. Isabella learned to observe, to be patient, to study the mistakes of the powerful from the vantage of the powerless. She watched from a distance as her half-brother's court descended into corruption, as nobles enriched themselves at the expense of the crown, as the treasury hemorrhaged, as law and order dissolved into a national joke. She was learning, though no one realized it yet, how not to govern.
When Isabella was thirteen, Henry IV summoned her and Alfonso to court. The ostensible reason was to keep them under the royal eye. The real reason was strategic: Henry's own marriage had produced a daughter, Joanna, but the girl was widely believed to be the child of Beltrán de la Cueva, one of Henry's courtiers, not of the king himself. Henry, who had endured the public humiliation of having his first marriage annulled for non-consummation, was rumored to be impotent — a devastating charge in a culture that conflated virility with legitimacy. The child became known as la Beltraneja, and the question of her paternity would drive Castilian politics for the next decade.
At court, Isabella encountered a world of baroque scheming — factions, betrayals, marriages proposed and withdrawn like chess moves. She was betrothed at six to Ferdinand of Aragon, then unbetrothed when his father's fortunes shifted. She was matched with Ferdinand's older brother Carlos, who was thirty years her senior. Then with Afonso V of Portugal, thirty-three to her fourteen. Then with the forty-three-year-old Juan Pacheco, master of the Order of Santiago. Each engagement was broken or abandoned as political winds shifted. One particularly repulsive suitor reportedly dropped dead on his way to meet her. Isabella, who had prayed for deliverance by any means, including death, may be forgiven for concluding that God had a plan.
The Marriage That Made a Country
The rebels came for Alfonso first. A faction of Castilian nobles, disgusted with Henry's misrule, staged a bizarre ceremony at Ávila in 1465 in which they deposed an effigy of the king and proclaimed the twelve-year-old Alfonso as his replacement. Civil war followed. Then, in July 1468, Alfonso died suddenly — likely of plague, possibly of poison. The rebels turned to Isabella, the next legitimate claimant. She refused the crown. It was, she understood, a trap: accept a throne offered by nobles, and you become their puppet. "A fruit which ripens before its time can never last," she is reported to have said. "Ambition to reign has no place in my heart, and I desire that the crown of Castile shall not be mine until death shall have ended the reign of my brother."
The refusal was not humility. It was strategy. Instead of taking what the nobles offered, she negotiated directly with Henry, extracting from him the Accord of Toros de Guisando on September 19, 1468 — an agreement that named her as his heiress, displacing the disputed Joanna, in exchange for Isabella's promise not to marry without his consent. She was seventeen. She had just outmaneuvered every faction in Castile, and she had done it not through force but through patience, refusal, and an instinct for the precisely calibrated concession.
Then she broke her promise.
Of all the suitors dangled before her, Isabella wanted only one: Ferdinand of Aragon. He was roughly her age — born March 10, 1452, just ten months after her — the son of John II of Aragon and Juana Enríquez, both of Castilian origin. Ferdinand had been raised by a father who was careful about his education and took personal charge of it, making sure the boy learned as much as possible from direct experience. John II provided him with humanist tutors who wrote treatises on the art of government, though Ferdinand showed no particular bent for formal studies. He was, however, a natural commander — he had already seen battle in the Catalonian wars — and he possessed what contemporaries described as sagacity, integrity, courage, and a calculated reserve inherited from his father, layered over an impulsive emotionality from his mother that he had learned to repress. He was good-looking, of medium height, a devoted horseman and hunter, with soft features, a small sensual mouth, and pensive eyes.
To Isabella, a marriage with Ferdinand was not romance. It was the best possible outcome for Castile — a union that would join two kingdoms sharing similar customs, geography, and interests. She sent Henry a letter requesting his consent. He never replied. She did not wait. In October 1469, Isabella traveled to Valladolid in secret to marry Ferdinand, who had rushed from Aragon disguised, by some accounts, as a muleteer. They were so poor that they had to borrow money for the wedding ceremony. The bride and groom met for the first time just four days before the service, which took place in the palace of Juan de Vivero.
The marriage contract itself was an extraordinary document. Isabella insisted on — and received — provisions that made her the sovereign ruler of Castile, with Ferdinand as king consort rather than king regnant. They would rule jointly, issue decrees under both names, but Castile's governance would remain under her authority. The formula that emerged captured the arrangement precisely: Tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Fernando — "It amounts to the same, Isabella as Ferdinand." In practice, what this meant was that a twenty-three-year-old woman had negotiated herself into a position of genuine co-sovereignty in an era when the word queen usually meant "the king's wife."
Henry, predictably, was furious. He revoked the Accord of Toros de Guisando, declared Isabella's marriage treasonous, and reinstated Joanna as his heir. The stage was set for a succession war that would consume the first four years of Isabella's reign.
A fruit which ripens before its time can never last. Ambition to reign has no place in my heart, and I desire that the crown of Castile shall not be mine until death shall have ended the reign of my brother.
A Queen Who Punished
Henry IV died on December 11, 1474, and within forty-eight hours Isabella had staged the procession in Segovia. Ferdinand, still in Aragon, was not consulted. When he arrived and found his wife already crowned, the arrangement stung — he was, after all, a king in his own right, the anointed ruler of Sicily since 1468. But the marriage contract was clear, and the matter was mediated by Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza and the Archbishop of Toledo. Ferdinand swallowed his pride. It was the first of many compromises that would make their partnership the most effective dual monarchy in European history.
The war came immediately. An opposing faction, led by the archbishop of Toledo, the master of Calatrava, and the powerful young marqués de Villena, championed Joanna's claim and invited Afonso V of Portugal to invade Castile and betroth himself to the girl. The conflict lasted four years. Ferdinand led the military campaigns; Isabella managed logistics, diplomacy, and finance. On February 24, 1479, the Portuguese were decisively defeated. That same year, John II of Aragon died, and Ferdinand inherited the Aragonese crown. The kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were now joined in the persons of their rulers — though each continued to be governed according to its own laws and institutions.
What Isabella inherited was, by any measure, a failing state. Decades of misrule by her father and half-brother had left Castile bankrupt, lawless, and despised. The treasury was empty. Criminals operated with impunity. Nobles had seized royal lands and revenues. The coin had been debased. The country's laws had never been codified. Isabella set about repairing all of it with a methodical ferocity that earned her the sobriquet "Iron Queen."
She hired scholars to compile an eight-volume code of all Castilian laws. She established the Santa Hermandad — the Holy Brotherhood — a kind of national police force financed by a new tax, which hunted down bandits and brought them to summary justice. She forced nobles to pay their debts to the crown. She ended the excess coin manufacturing that her brother had used as a desperate stopgap. She instituted a royal monopoly over the money supply. Tax revenue, which had been less than 900,000 reals in 1474, would reach over 26,000,000 reals by 1504 — a nearly thirtyfold increase accomplished without imposing a single new tax, through economic expansion and improved administration alone.
And she punished. Isabella saw herself as the divinely appointed arbiter of justice, and she was determined to enforce it without mercy. More rapists were tried and convicted during her reign than ever before. Her courts were blind to rank or fortune — a revolutionary posture in a feudal society where the nobility had operated above the law for generations. Alfonso de Palencia, the acerbic royal chronicler, described her as someone whose kindness was real but whose wrath was more real. She was, in the fullest sense, a ruler who governed through fear as much as through love — and she understood that in fifteenth-century Castile, this was exactly what was required.
The Last Crusade
The sword that Isabella carried before her in Segovia was not merely symbolic. She intended to use it.
For seven centuries, the Iberian Peninsula had been divided between Christian and Muslim rulers. The Reconquista — the slow, grinding campaign to reclaim the peninsula for Christendom — had been dormant for decades. The Nasrid kingdom of Granada, in the south, remained the last Muslim stronghold in western Europe. Isabella and Ferdinand were united in their determination to finish what their ancestors had started.
The war began in 1482 and lasted a decade. It was the longest, costliest military campaign Isabella would ever undertake, and it strained the finances of Castile to the breaking point. But the queen took a personal interest in the conduct of the war that went far beyond the ceremonial. She reorganized supply lines, improving methods of provisioning that had been inadequate for sustained campaigns. She established military hospitals — the first of their kind in European warfare — that became known as the "Queen's Hospitals." She visited the camps to encourage soldiers. In 1489, at the siege of Baza, she rode to the front lines, and her mere presence reportedly terrified the enemy, because they understood that this was a monarch who would not leave until the city fell.
In 1491, she and Ferdinand established a forward headquarters at Santa Fe, a purpose-built military encampment just outside Granada. They stayed there, through heat and cold and the grinding tedium of siege warfare, until the city capitulated on January 2, 1492. The Nasrid ruler, Muhammad XII — Boabdil to the Spanish — handed over the keys to the city and the principal mosque. It was consecrated as a Christian church. The twenty-four-generation struggle was over.
The conquest was not merely military. It was, in Isabella's mind, the fulfillment of a divine mandate — proof that God had chosen her and Ferdinand as His instruments. Pope Alexander VI, recognizing the achievement, formally conferred upon them the title los Reyes Católicos, the Catholic Monarchs, on December 2, 1496. The title was not honorific. It was a statement of purpose.
1492: The Year That Bent the World
Three events of 1492 define Isabella's legacy, and each illuminates a different facet of the paradox at her core.
The first was Granada. The second was Columbus. The third was the expulsion of the Jews.
While Isabella was still camped at Santa Fe, finishing the siege of Granada, a Genoese navigator named Christopher Columbus arrived to plead his case. Columbus — a visionary or a lunatic, depending on whom you asked — proposed to reach the Indies by sailing west across the Atlantic. He had been rejected by Portugal, by France, and initially by Ferdinand and Isabella themselves. But Columbus was persistent, and Isabella's councillors eventually persuaded her to approve the momentous voyage. The terms were drawn up on April 17, 1492 — the Capitulations of Santa Fe, which appointed Columbus as admiral, governor, and viceroy of any territories he might discover.
The story that Isabella pledged her jewels to finance the expedition cannot be accepted. The sum of 1,157,000 maravedís came from the funds of the Santa Hermandad, the national police force she had created. But Isabella and her councillors deserve credit for making the decision — a speculative investment in uncharted territory, backed by a man whose plans were, to many at court, bonkers. Columbus set sail on August 3, 1492, from Palos de la Frontera. What he found was not the Indies. It was something no one in Europe had imagined.
The New World was, with papal confirmation, annexed to the crown of Castile — not of Aragon, not of Spain generally, but of Castile specifically, in accordance with existing practice regarding Atlantic discoveries like the Canary Islands. This was Isabella's domain. And she took the responsibility seriously. When Columbus brought back enslaved indigenous people from his second voyage, Isabella ordered them released and returned to their homes. She instructed that the Indians be treated as subjects of her kingdom and therefore as free men, banning slavery and declaring that they would continue to own their land. Her concern for the rights of indigenous peoples was genuine — more genuine, certainly, than Columbus's — though it would be overwhelmed by the conquistadors who followed.
This queen of Spain, called Isabella, has had no equal on this earth for 500 years.
The third event of 1492 is the one that shadows all the others. On March 31, Isabella and Ferdinand issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering all Jews in Spain to convert to Christianity or leave the kingdom within four months. An estimated 170,000 Jews — roughly half the Jewish population — chose exile, scattering across North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe. Those who converted outwardly but practiced their faith in secret, the conversos or marranos, became targets of the Inquisition, which had been established in Andalusia in 1480.
The Inquisition was not Isabella's invention. It represented the culmination of a long and popular movement against non-Christians and doubtful converts that had manifested itself repeatedly in the late Middle Ages in Castile. But Isabella institutionalized it, empowered it, and wielded it as an instrument of state policy. The logic was coherent within its own terms: religious uniformity would produce political unity, which would strengthen the crown, which would serve God's purpose. The cost — the destruction of a society that had been marked, for centuries, by a remarkable degree of interfaith coexistence; the loss of a population that contributed enormously to Spain's intellectual and economic life; the suffering of hundreds of thousands of human beings — was, in Isabella's calculus, acceptable. Necessary. Divinely mandated.
However meritorious the expulsion may have seemed at the time in order to achieve greater religious and political unity, judged by its economic consequences alone, the loss of this valuable element in Spanish society was a serious mistake. The Britannica understates the case. It was a catastrophe — morally, economically, and culturally — whose reverberations have never fully ceased.
The Dual Monarchy and Its Architecture
It is difficult to disentangle Isabella's personal responsibility for the achievements of her reign from those of Ferdinand. They ruled jointly for twenty-five years, and they were, by all accounts, both effective partners and genuinely devoted to each other. Ferdinand loved Isabella sincerely, even as his restlessness drove him into other women's arms — he sired at least two illegitimate children, whose birth dates were never recorded. His extramarital affairs caused Isabella jealousy for several years. But the partnership endured, and it was the institutional architecture of their shared rule — the way they divided labor, resolved disagreements, and projected unity while maintaining separate legal systems — that gave Spain its foundational shape.
The arrangement was unprecedented. Each kingdom retained its own laws, currency, Cortes (parliament), and administrative apparatus. Ferdinand governed Aragon; Isabella governed Castile. They issued decrees jointly. They made war together. They negotiated with the papacy as a single entity. But Isabella retained an edge in Castile that was more than ceremonial — she controlled appointments, managed domestic policy, and directed the reform of the Spanish church with an independence that occasionally brought her into conflict with the pope himself.
Her choice of spiritual advisers revealed her character. The first was Hernando de Talavera — a converso Hieronymite friar of extraordinary learning and gentleness, who became Archbishop of Granada in 1492 and governed the conquered Muslim population with a patience and cultural sensitivity that was rare for the era. The second was Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, a Franciscan ascetic of terrifying austerity whom the monarchs secured the crucial position of Archbishop of Toledo in 1495. Cisneros was Talavera's opposite in temperament — rigid where Talavera was flexible, punitive where Talavera was conciliatory — and the tension between the two advisers reflected a tension within Isabella herself: between the impulse toward mercy and the conviction that God demanded severity.
Isabella was almost as interested in education as she was in religion. After she reached the age of thirty, she acquired proficiency in Latin — an unusual accomplishment for a queen whose early education had been limited. At court she encouraged scholars, including the Italian humanist Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, whom she installed as head of a new palace school for the sons of the nobility. Antonio de Nebrija dedicated his Gramática Castellana of 1492 — the first grammar of any modern European language — to the queen. She was a patron of Spanish and Flemish artists, and assembled an extensive collection of paintings, part of which survives. In Isabella's court, power and culture were not separate domains. They were instruments of the same project: the construction of a state that reflected, in every particular, her vision of Christian civilization.
The Dynastic Chessboard
Isabella understood, as every fifteenth-century monarch did, that children were strategic assets. She and Ferdinand had five: Isabella (born 1470), Juan (born 1478), Joanna (born 1479), María (born 1482), and Catalina (born 1485). Each was deployed on a European chessboard of breathtaking ambition.
The eldest, Isabella, was married to Afonso, heir to the Portuguese crown, binding Iberia's two great kingdoms. When Afonso died, she married his cousin, King Manuel I, producing a grandchild, Miguel, who might have united Spain and Portugal under a single ruler. Then the eldest Isabella died in childbirth in 1498. Miguel followed in 1500. The hope of Iberian unification through inheritance — Isabella's grand design — died with them.
Juan, the only son, the heir to everything, married Margaret of Austria, daughter of Emperor Maximilian I, in 1497. He was dead within six months, at nineteen. The cause was never definitively established.
Catalina — Catherine of Aragon — was married to Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of Henry VII of England. Arthur died in 1502, five months after the wedding. Catherine would eventually marry his brother, Henry VIII, producing the dynastic crisis that led to the English Reformation. The consequences of Isabella's matchmaking extended, in ways she could not have imagined, far beyond Spain.
That left Joanna, married to Philip the Handsome of Burgundy, son of Maximilian I. By 1501, Joanna had already shown signs of the mental instability that would earn her the appellation "la Loca" — the Mad. Whether Joanna was genuinely insane or merely a strong-willed woman crushed between an unfaithful husband and a controlling mother remains debated. What is certain is that she was Isabella's designated heir, and that Isabella died knowing the succession was a disaster.
The last decade of Isabella's reign was shadowed by these losses — a mother's grief that accumulated with the relentlessness of a biblical curse. Her only son. Her eldest daughter. Her grandchild. Her youngest daughter's first husband. And the slow, terrible realization that the heir who remained was not capable of governing.
The Will as Self-Portrait
Isabella left no memoirs. Her will, dictated in the final weeks of her life and signed just three days before her death on November 26, 1504, at Medina del Campo, is the most reliable picture we have of her.
It is an extraordinary document — part political program, part confession, part plea. In it she summarized her aspirations and her awareness of how much she and Ferdinand had been unable to do. She addressed the unity of the Iberian states. The maintenance of control over the Strait of Gibraltar. A policy of expansion into Muslim North Africa. Just rule for the Indians of the New World. Reform of the church at home. She named Joanna as her heir and Ferdinand as regent, a pragmatic acknowledgment that her daughter could not govern alone.
The will reveals a woman who thought in systems — who understood that institutions outlast individuals, that the durability of a state depends on the structures left behind, not on the charisma of the ruler. She had spent thirty years building those structures: the Santa Hermandad, the reformed tax system, the codified laws, the military orders absorbed into the crown, the apparatus of colonial administration. She understood, with the clarity of someone facing death, that all of it was provisional. That the work was unfinished. That the successor was inadequate.
The best and most excellent wife king ever had.
Ferdinand survived her by twelve years. In 1505, to secure his position in Castile, he married Germaine de Foix, niece of the king of France — another political marriage, though he always showed her the highest regard. He died on January 23, 1516, in the tiny village of Madrigalejo, on his way to Granada. His last will ordered that his body be moved to Granada and buried next to Isabella, so that they might be reunited for eternity. He died convinced, he wrote, that "the crown of Spain had not been so powerful for 700 years, and all, after God, because of my work and my labour."
They lie together still, in the Capilla Real of Granada — the city they conquered, the monument to everything they built and everything they destroyed. A relief sculpture by Alonso de Mena, dated 1632, shows them side by side: Ferdinand on the left, Isabella on the right. The arrangement is deliberate. In death as in life, tanto monta, monta tanto.
The Sword and the Cross
The question that every biographer of Isabella must eventually confront is whether her greatness and her cruelty can be separated — whether the ruler who established the rule of law, patronized the arts, protected indigenous rights, and financed the voyage that remade the world is the same person who expelled the Jews, empowered the Inquisition, and pursued religious uniformity through coercion and violence.
The answer, of course, is that she is the same person. That is the point.
Isabella did not compartmentalize. In her mind, the Reconquista, the Inquisition, the patronage of Columbus, the reform of the church, the codification of law — all of these were expressions of a single project: the construction of a Christian kingdom that would serve as God's instrument on earth. The faith that propelled her through life was not a decoration on a political program. It was the program. Every decision she made — from the humane to the monstrous — flowed from the same source. This is what makes her fascinating and what makes her terrifying: the absolute coherence of a vision that encompassed both the liberation of enslaved Indians and the expulsion of an entire people.
Modern concepts like anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, with their racial dimensions, did not exist in the form we understand them during Isabella's lifetime. The persecution she ordered was, in her framework, religious rather than racial — aimed at achieving doctrinal conformity, not ethnic purity. But the distinction offers limited comfort to the communities destroyed. Religious persecution in pursuit of religious conformity forms a core element of what we now recognize as systemic oppression, whatever the vocabulary of the era.
In 1958, the Catholic Church opened the case for Isabella's beatification. The process has stalled, repeatedly, on precisely this question. Proponents point to her genuine piety, her concern for the poor, her protection of indigenous peoples, her personal moral conduct — she was faithful to Ferdinand in a culture where queens were merely expected to tolerate their husbands' infidelities, not reciprocate them. Opponents point to the Inquisition and the expulsion. The case remains open, unresolved, suspended between veneration and condemnation — a mirror of the figure herself.
Isabella was fifty-three when she died. She had transformed a bankrupt, lawless, fractured kingdom into the preeminent power in Europe and the seed of the first global empire. She had reversed decades of Christian territorial retreat in the face of Muslim expansion. She had started the irreversible shift of global power toward the Atlantic rim — from Spain to Britain to, eventually, the United States. She had also caused incalculable suffering. These facts do not cancel each other out. They coexist, unresolved, in the same life, the same will, the same legacy.
In the Capilla Real, the queen lies in state, her tomb slightly lower than Ferdinand's — a final architectural submission to the convention that a wife, even a sovereign wife, defers to her husband. But the real power dynamics were settled long ago, in a cold December street in Segovia, when a young woman in magnificent dress walked behind a man carrying a sword by its point, and the crowds, who had never seen such a thing, fell silent.
