Katherine’s Crusading Mission

Katherine’s Crusading Mission is the religious and political program that first makes war seem to her a sacred duty and later becomes the measure of how far she has changed. She imagines England joined to Spain in a campaign against Muslim powers, with herself at its center; in time, grief and encounters with people she had been taught to regard as enemies lead her to reject crusade and persecution. The concept traces a sharp reversal: from treating war as service to God to insisting that peace must end the cycle of violence.

Formation of the Mission

Katherine of Aragon first understands her marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales, as part of a larger obligation. An English-Spanish alliance, in her view, is necessary to resist France and give Spain access to English wealth and ships. Those resources would support a Christian campaign against Muslim powers in Africa and the Ottoman Empire, with the struggle extending farther east if necessary. Her vision is not confined to a single battle or border: she fears that defeat will only displace the enemy, allowing the conflict to return elsewhere.

That conviction grows from her childhood in Spain. She remembers her mother, Isabella of Castile, warning that the Moors would threaten Christendom again, and recalls watching Muslim inhabitants leave Granada after its conquest. The Christian flag above the red fort and the departure of the city’s former residents make victory appear at once complete and provisional. Katherine wonders whether the defeated will return. The mission therefore joins dynastic policy to an enduring fear: England must help prevent a renewed danger, not merely celebrate a past victory.

England as a Crusading Power

As queen, Katherine gives this inherited conviction an English political purpose. When an older court figure urges her to keep England out of Europe’s wars, Katherine instead insists that England should lead a crusade across Europe and beyond. She presents the country not as a realm protected by distance and the sea, but as a power whose place in the world is to defend and extend the Church. She also refuses to let another person’s deathbed appeal determine her policy, declaring that she will defend England and exercise the queenship she has attained.

Her plans combine religious commitment with strategic calculation. Katherine expects Ferdinand II of Aragon to use English troops against France while pursuing his own aim of acquiring Navarre. She recognizes that English forces could serve her father’s interests, but resolves to direct the alliance toward her own purposes: supporting the Pope and protecting Venice from French conquest. She fears that a French victory there could expose the city to Muslim seizure. Venice’s trade, arsenal, and shipyards matter to her because control of them could shift the balance at sea. She also weighs the danger from Scotland, relying on intelligence about the border before judging that England can send its army abroad without leaving itself undefended.

The same program appears in a later proposal from Ferdinand II of Aragon for an expedition against Muslim states in Africa. Katherine brings the invitation to Henry VIII and encourages English lords to raise forces. She presents the campaign as a limited expedition in which Englishmen can join her father’s cause, while preventing Henry VIII from treating it as an opportunity to leave England at a moment when the succession is uncertain. English knights reach Cádiz, but the promised crusade never sails. The gap between the scale of Katherine’s vision and the expedition’s failure makes the mission a political aspiration as much as a military undertaking.

Grief and Reconsideration

Katherine’s conviction begins to fracture amid personal loss. After her infant dies, she initially struggles with grief and with the thought that the loss might be punishment. Over time she concludes that she had committed no sin to deserve it and that God’s care cannot be reconciled with the idea of a cruel divine punishment. This change does not immediately erase her faith; instead, it alters the grounds on which she interprets suffering and duty.

She also reconsiders the people her upbringing taught her to condemn. Remembering the compassion shown to her by a Moorish physician, she can no longer call his people barbarous simply because they follow another faith. She recognizes them as men and women who, like Christians, are fallible, hopeful, and faithful to their own beliefs. Her reflection widens into a critique of the policies associated with Isabella of Castile: the expulsion of Jews and Moors, and the loss of their knowledge and skills. She still loves her mother, but no longer believes that her mother and God must always share the same judgment. Katherine explicitly withdraws her support for a crusade against the Moors and for persecution or cruelty based on faith or skin color.

From Conquest to Peace

Katherine’s later response to military victory shows the practical consequence of that change. Faced with the defeat of the Scots, she considers the familiar course of exploiting victory to devastate the enemy and prevent resistance for a generation. Instead, she rejects the logic that one decisive victory can end a conflict. In her view, devastation would leave conditions for hatred and renewed war; the children of the defeated would eventually fight the children of the victors. She applies the lesson she draws from the long struggle between Christians and Muslims to England’s conflict with Scotland: war perpetuates the need for another war.

She orders that the Scottish soldiers be allowed to surrender their arms and leave in peace, and plans to offer the Scottish queen peace if she will act as a good neighbor. Victory, in this account, is to be made durable through restraint rather than extended into punishment. The choice does not erase the earlier crusading purpose, but reverses its central assumption. Katherine’s mission once demanded that Christian power push its enemies farther and farther away; her mature judgment is that neither conquest nor revenge can secure an end to conflict. The decisive measure of rule becomes the ability to turn victory into peace.