THE LANDS AND PEOPLES OF IBERIA - Spain and Portugal: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 8

partnership in matters of policy as well as personal relationship, all
would go smoothly. Unification, however, was very much a work in
progress throughout the 35 years of their marriage. This being said, the
process was much more rapid than the slow, agonizing business of
bringing France together—a labor that took more than twice as long.
Isabella and her consort agreed to a remarkable degree about pri-
orities, such as breaking the power of the great nobles in Castile,
restoring security on the highways of the kingdom, working with the
cortes to guarantee reliable tax revenues, and building up a central
bureaucracy and royal authority in the municipalities. This latter con-
cern was met by the reshaping of the old royal council into a cluster
of committees, each charged with a particular sphere of government
business (finance, military affairs, external relations, and so on), and
by the appointment of corregidores to supplant the power of local mag-
nates in town government. These tasks were assigned to newly cre-
ated officials drawn from the ranks of lawyers, merchant families, and
petty nobility (hidalgos). Like the “new men” who fulfilled a similar
mission for the Tudor kings in England, such individuals owed every-
thing to their royal patrons and could be counted upon for loyal ser-
vice—unlike the traditionally unreliable and self-serving aristocrats of
Castile's great noble houses. In matters of religion, Ferdinand may
simply have accepted Isabella's demand that the alien element be
purged from Castile (a concern that he did not share with regard to
the Aragonese realms). It has also been suggested that they both sub-
mitted to popular hostility in Castile toward Muslims and Jews. In any
event, the conquest of Granada in 1492 was immediately followed by
an expulsion order directed against the kingdom's Jews, and initial
promises of personal and religious liberty to the “Moors” were sup-
planted by a decree of banishment.
Militant Christianity had become a characteristic of crusading Castile
and would envelop the whole of Spain as it unified. Ferdinand and Isa-
bella were designated “the Catholic Kings” (los Reyes Católicos) by the
pope in 1496, and the religious orthodoxy enforced through the Inqui-
sition became state policy. Ferdinand was, of course, ready to exploit
any advantage in religious affairs. He secured the revenues of the old
crusading orders for the royal treasury, obtained the right to designate
bishops and other high-ranking ecclesiastics, and integrated the Inquisi-
tion (established in 1478) into the civil administration. Nevertheless,
for all his cynicism he was clearly impelled by popular fervor and what
some have described as a Castilian fanaticism, shared by his wife and
her subjects, to champion the faith against infidels. This identification
between the Crown and Catholicism would be reinforced during the