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Isabel of Castile, Miss Second Millennium of the millennium of Christopher Columbus Continent Peoples (CCCP)
The Catholic Queen of Castile, Isabel, the most important human being in the history of the world, the most powerful and extraordinary monarch the world had ever known, was born on Thursday, April 22 1451, the same year that Mahmet II, the terror of Europ e, became Sultan of Turkey. The Infanta Isabel was the daughter of King Don Juan II of Castile and the Queen consort Do\'f1 a Isabel of Portugal, his second wife. The Infanta was the second in line of the royal succession after her half brother Enrique, the son of King Juan II and his first wife Queen Maria of Aragón. The Infante Enrique died of th e bubonic plague which had arrived to Europe one hundred years earlier.
Queen Isabel died on a Tuesday, November 26, 1504, at the age of 53. She was lain in a small coffin, which can be seen next to Ferdinando s in the crypt of the sacristy of the Royal Chapel close to the Gothic Cathedral of Granada and in the same city of the Muslim Kingdom she had conquered; where the Alhambra complex of Palaces of the Moors, the Catholic Monarchs and her grandson s, the Holy Roman Emperor Carlos I, are located.
In the half millennium since her existence, tons of written history have become available which would take several lifetimes to read. Her chronicler, Fernando del Pulgar summarized it in the following words: " What many men and great lords did not manage to do in their lifetimes, a single woman did in a short time through work and governance".
The Anglos have tried to minimize her by calling her "Isabella, queen consort of Ferdinand V of Aragon". But, the Catholic Queen of Spain, Isabel was tougher and stronger than any absolute monarch or dictator in history. Her work in a single season of 14 92 can be summarized as: January, the introduction of the Spanish Inquisition and the conquest of the Kingdom of Granada; March, the conversion and expulsion of the Jews, and April, she sent Christopher Columbus to discover the new world!
Princess Isabel was three years old when she heard of the fall of Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire founded by Constantine, a Roman Emperor, a millennium earlier. She was taught from the classics everything, including the secret of secrets which the philosopher Aristotle made to Alexander the Great: "To value practical wisdom above virtue and to give the appearance of virtue". This principle Queen Isabel was to apply well during the Re conquest of Spain from the Moors.
On October 19, 1469 Isabel (Isabella), nineteen years old, heiress to the throne of Castile, married Ferdinando (Ferdinand), son and heir of Juan II of Aragón. Both were cousins members of the House of Trast\'e1 mara, rulers of Spain and Italy. Isabel, as an older teenager, was beginning to make decisions which would carry her to the status of being the most important woman in the history of the western world. Isabel thought herself to be descendant of Trojan nobl es, and a second Helen of Troy. Isabel refused English, French and Portuguese suitors for Ferdinando, as Helen of Troy is described in the Iliad and the Odyssey of refusing Ulysses and other Greek kings and princes for Menelaus, King of Sparta, the riches t and most powerful Greek suitor. Isabels vision was unmatched by her contemporaries. The future of Castile, her kingdom, the entire Iberian Peninsula, Europe, America and eventually the entire world, depended of that decision.
The kingdoms of Castile and Aragó n have been under a civil war for 20 years 1460 to 1480. Isabel understood that her kingdom did not stand a chance before enemies such as the powerful neighbors of France, Navarre, Portugal and Granada, the Moorish Kingdom of the South, combined. Dur ing the war of Roses in England, the Catholic kings allied with the Red Rose and the Tudors.
When Isabel married at the tender age of 19 years old, on October 19, 1469, she founded Spain. She was named "Catholic Monarch" by Pope Alexander VI. She was the dominant ruler of the union. Castile, her kingdom, was three times as large as Aragó n, centrally located, and had seven of the eight million inhabitants of the united kingdom. The Catholic Monarchs were not gods but claimed that their power to rule came dir ectly from God. The Castilian language also became predominant over Galician, Basque, Navarrese and Catalan. Castilian became an instrument of the Spanish Empire, just as Latin became an instrument of empire for Rome, and as in the twentieth Century the A nglos used English to become the predominant language of the British and American Empires.
The Holy Catholic Queen Do\'f1 a Isabel, Queen of Castile, descendant of Visigothic Kings, who stem from Troy as Roman Kings, descendant from Noah and Ferdinando King of Aragón, descendant of the ancient Byzantine Imperial House of Paleologus, had one child, her daughter Juana of Castile and Aragón, who married Philip Habsburg of Austria, believed to be the 119 th male descent from Adam via the Kings of Scythia, Sicambri an d Francs, among them, Ottpert, Second Duke of Germany and First Count of Habsburg of Austria. Thus, Carlos, Isabels grandson, was a human being whose ancestors were first rank sovereign families.
Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator from October 1, 1936 until November 12, 1975 when he died, after 39 years of rule, imitated Queen Isabel as the absolute ruler of Spain, the unifier of the country and the champion of the Faith.
When Jesus Christ challenged the divine authority of the emperor: "Give to Caesar what is Caesars and to God what is God s", and later the Christians proclaimed Jesus Christ , God, the son of God, a conflict aroused between duty to God and duty to a state ruled by a Cleopatra like god-emperor. As the Christian Church became organized, Church and King were rivals.
Pope Gregory VII in his dispute with King Henry IV decided the predominance of the Pope. The dispute consisted in the right to nominate bishops. Gregory VII excommunicated Henry IV in 1076. Henry IV challenged the authority o f the Pope. The Pope decided whether a king went to heaven or hell. The king fought the Pope and took Rome. The Pope died soon after, in 1085. But the predominance of the Church over the kingdom was influenced by the education of the priests which invaria bly included the classics. The Kings were warring feudal lords, mostly uneducated. A typical comparison are the contemporaries Thomas Aquinos and the King of Naples Frederick II. This situation continued uninterrupted for a millennium throughout the middl e ages.
Ten years after the death of Pope Gregory VII, in 1095, Pope Urban II declared the first crusade for the liberation of Jerusalem and to free the tomb of Jesus Christ. This was accomplished in 1099 two weeks prior to Pope Urban II s death. Between 1095 and 1204 there will be four of such crusades. They were all under the spiritual leadership of the Pope.
It was not until the Renaissance and the Reformation that the Great Schism of Christiandom occurred and the Pope was no longer the figure around whom the world rotated. There will no longer be an earthly intermediary between a human being and God. Lutheranism was created; multiple Protestant Sects followed. The Pope, thereafter, became a prince among the many Italian princes.
Isabel established a national monarchy which will become the predominant form of government in Europe ending with the powerful empires of Napoleon, the Kaiser , the Tsar and the Fuhrer. They all envisioned and tried Isabels idea of world empire.
Only the commercial republics of t he end of the twentieth century would accomplish world domination through their powerful multinational corporations, backed by powerful armies and weapons. The introduction of technology, the internet, the world wide web, would be considered the first time that a world domination has been realized or attempted in such a wide scale covering virtually all the continents of the earth.
The closest that Queen Isabel came to such world domination of informatics can be appreciated today in her Royal Archives of In dias of Seville. The data stored there would be the equivalent of the data stored in a gigantic world corporation such a Microsoft. The difference is that it took months to years for the data to be stored from the Americas to the Royal Archives and even today it may take months to years to retrieve the data.