The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic — Volume 2

In the closing years of the 15th century, two formidable monarchs redrew the map of the Western world. This second volume of William Hickling Prescott's masterly history traces how Ferdinand and Isabella consolidated their power through the instrument that would define their legacy: the Spanish Inquisition. Prescott renders with remarkable clarity the claustrophobic political theater of their court, where Jewish converts lived in terror of the tribunals, where Catalan serfs rose in bloody revolt against their feudal lords, and where the queen herself struggled to maintain order amid resistance from nobility and church alike. But this is also the volume where the machinery of conquest turns toward Granada, where the final campaign against the Nasrid kingdom begins its slow and grinding march. Prescott wrote with access to unpublished Spanish archives, and his prose carries the weight of primary documents seen freshly for the first time. This is history written as narrative drama, the birth of modern Spain told through the lives of those who lived and died in its making.