Christian holy war and the perpetual struggle against the Moors

Christian holy war and the perpetual struggle against the Moors is first presented as a sacred, seemingly unending obligation inherited by Catalina from her parents, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon. It shapes the purpose assigned to her marriage and her future rule in England, but the novel eventually subjects that creed to the consequences of its own logic: Katherine comes to believe that victory cannot end war, and that peace requires refusing to perpetuate the cycle.

Inherited Mission and Dynastic Alliance

Catalina’s childhood understanding of her place in the world joins religious conviction to royal identity. Her parents are celebrated as defenders of the faith and leaders of Christendom; she sees herself as their daughter and as a princess destined to become Queen of England. Her expectation that she will rule is bound to the conviction that divine will and her mother’s command point in the same direction. The struggle against Muslim powers therefore enters her life not as an abstract doctrine but as part of the duty she believes she was born to perform.

That duty gives her marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales, an international purpose. Catalina regards intimacy and the production of an heir as means of securing an unbreakable alliance between Spain and England. In her political vision, England’s wealth and ships would help Spain confront France, extend the crusade against Muslim powers in Africa and the Ottoman Empire, and carry the conflict farther east. The imagined campaign has no clear boundary: defeating one enemy would not complete the mission, since the struggle could continue toward India and beyond. Catalina fears that the kingdoms she regards as adversaries might stretch to the end of the world. Marriage, inheritance, and religious war thus become parts of a single plan for strengthening Christendom.

Her mother makes the plan explicit when the family watches Muslims leave Granada after its conquest. Isabella tells Catalina to be ready to fight wherever the conflict returns, and casts her English placement alongside the dynastic marriages of her sisters as a means of defending their husbands’ lands and keeping them allied to Spain. Catalina is not simply to represent her homeland: she is expected to make England ready and keep it safe. The episode reveals how the language of spiritual duty authorizes a political program of marriage, alliance, and military preparedness.

The Promise of Perpetual War

The scene at Granada makes the creed’s human and political stakes visible. Muslims depart under Christian rule; Catalina sees the changed banners and religious observances as signs of victory, but asks what will happen if those driven away return. Isabella answers that the struggle will recur until God ends it. In this early account, the prospect of renewed conflict does not discredit the crusade. It confirms that Catalina must remain vigilant, and that a princess’s duty is to prepare for an enemy who may appear again in another place or generation.

The doctrine also links private conduct to public strategy. Catalina understands her marriage to Arthur as service to the Christian alliance, while the effort to establish her later marriage to Henry depends on claims about whether her first marriage was consummated and whether a papal dispensation is needed because of affinity. The account does not make those legal questions equivalent to warfare; rather, it shows how dynastic marriage, religious authority, and the future security of kingdoms operate within the same political world. Catalina’s body and marital status are treated as consequential to the alliance she has been raised to protect.

Her coronation as Queen Katherine gives that obligation a new form. Anointed and crowned beside Henry, she understands her queenship as divinely appointed rule over England. When Henry later invests her as regent, governor of the realm, and captain general of the forces assigned to home defense, she regards the office as the opportunity to exercise authority in her own country. Her first declared priority is to defeat the Scots. The inherited image of the militant queen has become not just an expectation of her parents but a claim to political agency in her own right.

Victory and the Rejection of Retaliation

The decisive change comes after a great victory against the Scots. Katherine initially thinks as a commander trained by her parents’ example: with the opposing king dead and the country exposed, she could devastate it and leave it unable to challenge England for a generation. She recognizes that this is the response her father would take and her mother would already have ordered. Instead, she judges their method wrong. Her change is not a denial that a battle has been won or that England has faced danger; it is a rejection of the assumption that military advantage should be used to ensure another generation’s defeat.

Katherine reasons that devastation would leave poverty and disease, while the survivors and their children would eventually fight back. Each victory would set the conditions for another war, and each act of hatred would reproduce the next. She applies that judgment to her parents’ campaign against the Moors: driving them overseas won a battle, she concludes, but did not end the larger conflict. The crusade and the answering jihad remain bound in a cycle that military triumph alone cannot resolve. Her formulation, “War does not answer war, war does not finish war. The only ending is peace,” reverses the certainty with which she once accepted perpetual struggle as God’s work.

That recognition immediately changes her policy. Katherine sends for a messenger and orders that the Scots be allowed to surrender their arms and depart in peace. She also says she will write to the Scots queen, offering peace if they will live as good neighbors. Rather than treating victory as permission for further destruction, she seeks to turn it into a durable settlement. Her decision is both moral and strategic: she wants to prevent the defeated from becoming the next generation’s avengers and to end the pattern by which one battle prepares another.

Meaning and Limits of the Transformation

The novel’s treatment of holy war is therefore an argument about what victory can accomplish. Catalina’s early faith makes endless struggle appear inevitable and virtuous; her later experience teaches Katherine to distinguish winning a battle from securing peace. The change does not erase the political responsibilities of queenship. As regent and commander, she must still protect her realm, but she can choose what to do with military power once an enemy has been beaten. The grant of mercy becomes an exercise of rule rather than a retreat from it.

Her conclusion also marks a break with the parents whose convictions formed her. She does not deny their skill or the force of their religious identity; she rejects the consequences of carrying their methods forward without limit. By setting the Moorish conflict beside the English-Scottish one, the novel makes the danger of perpetual war legible across generations and rival faiths. Katherine’s answer is not that conflict has never had causes, but that vengeance cannot be its solution. The once-constant princess, raised to stand ready for war wherever it returns, becomes a ruler who recognizes that refusing the next act of retaliation may be the only way to prevent another war.