The belief in perpetual holy war against Muslim powers

The belief in perpetual holy war against Muslim powers is first presented as a sacred and seemingly unquestionable inheritance: Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon teach Catalina that Christian rule must advance against the Moors until God ends the struggle. It gives her childhood convictions a political purpose, directing her toward a royal marriage meant to bind England to Spain’s crusading project. Over time, however, the belief is tested against forced religious conformity, personal compassion, and the recurrence of violence. Catalina ultimately concludes that war cannot end war and chooses mercy after victory rather than another generation of vengeance.

Origins in faith and kingship

For Catalina, holy war is not initially a policy among others but part of the order of the world. She understands herself as the daughter of monarchs celebrated as defenders of the Christian faith, and believes that her own future has been ordained by God and commanded by her mother. Isabella’s authority makes religious duty and maternal instruction seem inseparable: what her mother wills appears to Catalina as what God wills. The expectation that she will become Queen of England therefore carries a mission as well as a title.

That conviction is dramatized during the siege of Granada, when the army’s generals advise retreat because the camp has been devastated and lacks shelter. Isabella refuses to accept retreat as the right response. She argues that the enemy would take pleasure in the Christians’ withdrawal, but makes the decisive claim that advancing against the Moors is God’s will and turning back is not. Ferdinand II of Aragon supports her judgment. To the watching child, military resolve confirms a religious principle: perseverance in the war is proof of faith, while retreat risks appearing to defy divine purpose.

Isabella also teaches Catalina to interpret victory and defeat within a larger sacred timeline. When Catalina fears for a Christian champion facing a formidable opponent, her mother tells her that the outcome of the contest cannot alter the ultimate victory of God. The soldiers may live or die, and the immediate challenge may be won or lost; their obligation is to act in faith. This view makes the struggle appear permanent without making each individual battle decisive. Defeat can be endured because the final triumph is believed to be assured.

A lifelong political assignment

As a child, Catalina watches the Christian conquest transform Granada, the Nasrid stronghold. The visible signs of Christian victory—the departure of Muslim families, the Christian flag above the fortress, and church bells replacing the sound of Muslim prayer—give the abstract doctrine a human and political setting. Isabella later tells Catalina that the war will return in different forms and that she must be ready to fight wherever it comes. She describes her daughter as a fighting princess and assigns her a role in England: she is to defend her husband’s lands and keep them allied with Spain.

The marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales, is consequently understood as an instrument of the crusading project as well as a dynastic obligation. Catalina believes that an enduring alliance with England can counter rival powers and provide wealth and ships for a campaign extending beyond Spain, across Africa and toward the East. Her private marital duty is folded into this public vision: producing an heir and securing the alliance are, in her mind, ways of serving God. The belief thus reaches from the battlefield into the royal bedchamber, binding a princess’s body and future to a political war she has been taught will never cease.

Catalina’s expectation of endless conflict is explicit when she wonders whether defeated opponents will simply return. Isabella answers that the struggle will last until the end of time and that Catalina must be prepared for it in Wales just as Spain must be prepared at home. Even the possibility of peace initially seems to Catalina less like an alternative than a failure to understand the nature of the conflict. When a king suggests that believers need not be enemies merely because they call God by different names, she rejects the thought and repeats her mother’s account of an eternal battle between Good and Evil.

Victory, coercion, and contradiction

The conquest also reveals the contradiction between Christian victory and the ideal of just rule. Catalina recognizes that the rulers benefit from the knowledge, medicine, mathematics, architecture, gardens, and waterworks developed by the people they have defeated. The beauty and practical wisdom of Moorish society complicate the victors’ claim to unquestioned superiority. Yet the new regime insists on religious conformity: Muslim worship is silenced, people are pressured to convert or leave, and dissent is threatened with the Spanish Inquisition.

The promise of convivencia makes that contradiction especially stark. Boabdil’s people were promised safety under Christian rule, and the promise suggested that Muslims, Christians, and Jews might live together with dignity. Within three months, Catalina reflects, the promise has been betrayed: Jews are expelled, Muslims are threatened, and religious uniformity is made a condition of belonging to one nation. Isabella’s government presents coercion as the means of unifying the realm, but the result exposes the distance between a crusade conducted in the name of faith and the justice its rulers profess. The doctrine that war is divinely required can authorize not only fighting an enemy but also denying the defeated the security once promised to them.

Catalina’s change of judgment

Catalina’s convictions begin to change through encounters that make it harder to treat Muslims as a single, spiritually condemned enemy. The kindness of a Moorish physician, shown to her when she is vulnerable, forces her to revise her judgment of his people. She recognizes in him compassion and tenderness, and comes to see Muslims as people who are fallible, hopeful, and faithful to their own creed. Her faith in God remains firm, but her assumption that her parents’ judgments are inseparable from God’s will is shaken.

This reconsideration also reaches back to Isabella’s policies. Catalina connects the expulsion of Jews and Muslims with the loss of learning, medicine, and scholarship, and judges that a ruler who admired knowledge nevertheless banished those who possessed it. She can no longer regard her mother as infallible or regard persecution as a necessary consequence of devotion. Though she continues to love Isabella, she no longer believes that her mother and God always think as one. The change is not a rejection of faith; it is a separation of faith from the assumption that religious conviction sanctifies every act of state violence.

From endless war to peace

Catalina’s mature rejection of perpetual war becomes a political decision after an English victory over the Scots. She considers the logic she inherited: a defeated country could be devastated so thoroughly that it would remain powerless for a generation. But she sees that such destruction would leave misery and resentment, and that the survivors’ children could become the next generation of enemies. Applying the lesson of Spain’s war against the Moors, she concludes that victory can win a battle without ending the conflict that produced it.

She therefore orders that the Scottish soldiers be allowed to surrender their arms and depart in peace, and says she will offer peace to the Scottish queen if she will be a good neighbor. The decision gives her changed belief practical force: instead of treating mercy as weakness or a pause before renewed conflict, she tries to make victory the beginning of a lasting settlement. The idea of holy war once taught Catalina to see herself as a soldier whose duty could continue until the end of the world. Her final judgment reverses that inheritance. A war carried forward by vengeance perpetuates itself; only peace can end it.