Katherine abandons her crusading stance against the Moors

Katherine abandons her crusading stance against the Moors through a gradual moral and intellectual change, not a loss of faith. As a girl she understood war against Muslim powers as sacred duty and Spain’s alliance with England as its necessary instrument. Years later, grief and the compassion of a Moorish physician unsettle that certainty; after victory over the Scots, she turns her changed conviction into policy by ordering restraint and offering peace. The decisive change is not that she ceases to believe in God, but that she no longer accepts religious difference as grounds for persecution or endless war.

From crusading duty to inherited certainty

Katherine’s early view of war is bound to the political and religious world in which she was raised. She believes that England must reliably ally with Spain so that the two kingdoms can resist France and carry the defense of Christendom against the Moors. In her childhood conception, the campaign does not end with the defeat of the Muslim powers nearest Spain: it must reach Africa and the Ottoman Empire, and continue eastward. The imagined scale of that mission is almost limitless. Even Cristóbal Colón, she fears, cannot tell her where the world ends or whether the Saracen kingdoms do.

Her memory of Granada makes the ambition concrete. She recalls watching Muslim inhabitants leave the city with their belongings loaded on mules, women weeping and men bowed, while the Christian flag flew over the red fort and bells rang for Mass where horns had once called worshippers to prayer. The scene presents victory not as an abstraction but as the displacement of a population. Yet the child’s question is about the war’s recurrence: if the defeated are driven away, might they return and fight again? Her early answer is still shaped by the crusading framework; she fears an enemy that has no end. Later, she will recognize that the framework itself perpetuates the conflict it claims to resolve.

Grief and the limits of inherited explanations

The change gathers force after the death of her infant son. In the summer of 1511, Katherine remains unable to reconcile herself to the loss, but begins to see that neither negligence nor a hidden personal crime explains it. Her faith returns, yet not as a restoration of every belief she inherited. She rejects the idea that a merciful God would take a beloved child as punishment for sin, and understands that she had been wrong to blame herself. The distinction matters: faith survives, while the certainty that suffering can be read as divine judgment does not.

As she emerges from grief, Katherine describes herself as examining her body after a fall, looking for lasting damage. She finds that her belief in her parents has been injured. For the first time, she allows that they could have been wrong. Her reassessment is grounded in particular experiences of her own: the carelessly written marriage contract that left her poor in widowhood; her abandonment in a foreign country despite the appearance of an urgent summons home; and her having to seek medical help in secret. These circumstances turn filial disillusionment into a wider reconsideration of the policies her parents represented.

The physician and a changed view of the Moors

Katherine’s memory of the Moorish physician provides the most intimate challenge to her inherited categories. He treated her with compassion when she was at her lowest, and she cannot reconcile that kindness with the claim that his people are barbarians or savages. She still regards his faith as mistaken, and can imagine sending a priest to argue for his soul, but she no longer takes religious difference to make him spiritually dead or fit only for destruction. His tenderness becomes evidence that a person she had been taught to classify as an enemy possesses reason, feeling, and moral seriousness.

That recognition extends beyond the physician. Katherine concludes that Moors, like Christians, are fallible, hopeful, and faithful to their own creed. Her judgment does not depend on declaring the two religions identical; rather, it refuses to let disagreement erase the humanity of those who hold another belief. The change also brings her to criticize the political and intellectual consequences of Spain’s religious policy. She condemns the expulsion of Jews and Moors and the loss of their skills, learning, and scholarship, recalling that her mother admired learning while driving learned people from the realm. The woman she had regarded as a defender of justice, Katherine now believes, had also acted unjustly.

From private conviction to public restraint

Katherine’s change becomes an explicit political ethic during the campaign against the Scots. Faced with the prospect of pursuing a defeated enemy, she first imagines the logic of total victory: the country could be laid waste and its people crushed for a generation. Her parents, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, would have pressed the advantage. But she stops herself and recognizes that their example was wrong. A victory that destroys a country leaves conditions in which hatred and retaliation can grow; the children of the defeated would eventually take up arms against her own children.

She applies the lesson she has drawn from the history of the Moors: driving an enemy away wins a battle, not an end to conflict. As she puts it, “War does not answer war, war does not finish war. The only ending is peace.” She orders a messenger to thank Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, for the victory and instruct him to allow the Scottish soldiers to surrender their arms and go in peace. She will write to the Scottish queen and offer peace if she will be a good sister and neighbor. Katherine presents mercy not as weakness after victory but as the means of making victory durable, rather than turning it into permission for further savagery.

The scope and significance of the change

Katherine’s repudiation of crusading does not amount to abandoning Christianity. She retains her faith, but no longer believes that it authorizes a crusade against the Moors or any other people, or persecution for skin color or belief. Her conviction that her mother is not infallible also separates religious faith from parental authority: she no longer believes that her mother and God necessarily think as one. Although she still loves her mother, she no longer worships her. The shift marks a coming of age in which inherited certainty gives way to judgment formed through grief, experience, and encounter with another person.

The novel joins that private change to a practical choice about power. Katherine does not merely revise her opinion of the Moors; she recognizes a recurring structure in which conquest produces displacement, displacement preserves hostility, and the next generation inherits the war. Her decision to spare the Scots gives that insight an immediate political expression. The arc overturns the childhood image of an endless crusade: where Katherine once feared that the enemy had no end, she comes to understand that war itself will not end through victory alone.