Isabel’s will is religious. She is a woman incarnate of an idea: passionately eager to make all her realm, all the world flesh of her purpose. This means that her design must be practicable, also. Kingship is acceptance of the immanence of God. Isabel thinks she understands, looking over the turmoiled centuries of Spain: those of the Reconquest from Moor and Arab. She knows that the _mind_ of these shifting wars was of this world and for the spoils of the earth. She knows that the Cid at times fought Christian, and that Saint Ferdinand could not have won Seville without the aid of the Moslems of Granada. God used mundane weapons for His purpose. No archangel did He send to drive Târik and Al-Mansor from Santiago, but mercenary treacherous knights who knew of the Infidel that he had gold, rather than that he spat upon the Cross. And unto this day, the Moor is respected in Castile! He is learnèd, liberal: he has fought well and lived well. Isabel accepts the strange ways of her Lord. She, too, must use mundane weapons. Ferdinand is ambitious: let his lust be a weapon. He is sharp, swift, hard like Toledo steel: no king of France can outwit him, no Italian cardinal withstand him. Isabel cherishes the good tool. A more conscious tool is Columbus. His ships have blundered on a new rich continent. His fortune has foundered: he is in chains--as were the older prophets. But the wealth is Spain’s! His mariners are bullies--worldly tools of the Lord: yet even by them the Indian can be saved. Even by them and their greed, Rome can bring grace to the Indies. Isabel accepts the immanence of God, in the lusts of her servants. She is a tall, fair woman. In the camp, in the castles that raise her constant journeys across Spain--Córdoba, Valladolid, Medina, Burgos--she lives the frugal life of the campaigner. She has paid for her forced night rides: the heaviest price, perhaps, is the feebleness of her children, none of whom survives to inherit or give an heir to Spain, save the mad second daughter, mother of Carlos the Great. The queen’s splendors are reserved for display that shall bespeak her greatness to the world. When she enters Avila or Seville, it is upon a tide of gold and rubies. But when the doors shut upon her castle and the drawbridge rises, when she is alone with her family or her confessor, the jewels and the cloth of gold are gone: a woman, resolute and stark like the Castilian mountains, looks within herself for God’s next message.