Queen Isabella I – The Last Crusader

Isabella sentenced many of the criminals in person. Riding into a town with some troopers at her heels, she would announce that she had come to hold court, to show how justice could be administered without delay and without cost to the people. She would hear complaints, order reconciliations and restitutions, condemn the guilty to death, and go her way to another place. Corpses had been familiar sights to her from childhood. Many a time in her brother’s reign, she had seen bodies of murdered men by the roadsides. Two years of bitter warfare had made death even more familiar to her. Her soul sickened by it all, cried out within her, night and day, for peace. But peace required order, and order required political unity under a strong hand. Her justice now filled the country with terror by its cold thoroughness? It was the more terrible because it was felt to be impartial and incorruptible. When the Queen held court at Medina del Campo, a poor woman knelt before her, sobbing and begging her protection. Her husband, a notary, had disappeared after a visit to the house of a wealthy noble, Alvar Yanez. Isabella commanded a search. The notary’s body was found buried in the courtyard of Yanez’s home. A brief trial disclosed that after inducing the notary to attest a forged deed to a neighbour’s property, Yanez had murdered him to destroy the evidence of his plot. Confident that his enormous wealth and influence would save him, and calculating shrewdly on the Queen’s piety and her well-known ambition to drive the moors out of Spain, he confessed and offered her 40,000 ducats as a contribution towards the Holy War against the Infidels of Granada. Isabel was advised by some of her council to accept the large gift and pardon the criminal. But Isabel ‘preferred justice to money’ and one of the evils she had resolved to abolish was the bribing of officials, the common expedient of Jews and Conversos. The head of Yanez was struck off that same day. To avoid any imputation of mercenary motives, the Queen ordered the dead man’s property to be distributed among his sons although there were plenty of precedents to justify her in confiscating it, and she needed money. (Isabella of Spain by William Thomas Walsh)