Disguised and penniless, Ferdinand crosses the hostile land and reaches the princess in Valladolid. He is seventeen: a lissom, romantic knight, the impact of whose bloods--Latin, Goth and Jew--has kindled a swift fire in his face. He sees this girl, tall and stately and one year his elder: her ruddy hair is a braided glow about her brow, the great blue eyes are a sky for the large rigor of her features. He enters the mansion of her love, to dwell forever within the sway of her will. For her will is Spain. He is brilliant, sharp, ubiquitous: but her will has place for him. Let him move from Italy to Peru: he will yet be within the will of Isabel. The married boy and girl are fettered by penury in Castile; and like a breath to move them wait the death of Henry. He dies when Isabel is twenty-three. Portugal marches eastward for Joanna. His great army is a shadow in León. Isabel’s faction dwindles. Ferdinand, wise consort, proposes peace with Portugal at the price of Zamora and other bastions of the west. Isabel refuses. She is pregnant. She makes long night journeys on horse, to her recalcitrant towns. She pleads before rough communes and proud _ricos hombres_. She spends her woman’s strength--she and Spain will suffer for it--but she does not entail her still shadowy queen’s power. She makes recruits. She has a good field general in her husband. Portugal loses heart before this hearty mother of unborn Spain. The stubborn towns of Castile rally to her. In 1479 Juan of Aragon dies: Ferdinand becomes king: Castile and Aragon at last are wedded with their monarchs. “Let there be Spain,” is the rhythm of Isabel’s thought. “We have not yet won Castile,” she tells her husband on the march to the long, last war for the conquest of Granada. From ages of invasion and dissent, Spain has become this throbbing swarm of aroused centrifugal impulse. Ideas, races, communities, men: a boiling tumult to be summed and stilled. Spain longs for peace: Spain longs to become Spain. From her multiverse of wills, she has willed a symbol: this person, fair and strong. She has willed Isabel who is the flesh of Spain’s will. Isabel is one possessed. Her vision, thought and sense move in one cycle. To her, physical love is not this tenderness between herself and her man: it is a joining of Aragon and Castile. To her, physical fecundity is not her woman’s flower: it is the providing by a queen of counters for dynastic matches. But she is deliberate and wise. She has more than her will and the weapon of her body. She has ideas for weapons. The modern State functioning under an almighty monarch, the medieval Church with its source in Rome and Christ, and for her people Justice: this is the triune tool whereby to weld the anarchies of Spain into her Spain at last.