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There was no one measure that added more to Isabel’s material power than her policy towards the religious orders of knighthood. These three great orders, Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcantara, had grown out of the long crusade against the Moors; devout celibate soldiers receiving in community vast grants of territory which they wrested from the infidel. By the time of Isabel they had grown to be a scandal, for the grandmasters disposed of revenues and forces as large as those of the crown, and were practically independent of it. Isabel’s treatment of them was diplomatic and wise as usual. As each mastership fell vacant she granted it to her husband; and thus the three most dangerous rivals to the royal authority were made thenceforward appanages of the crown, to which the territories were afterwards appropriated.^[29]

The Queen’s activity and strength of body and mind must have been marvellous. We hear of her travelling vast distances, almost incessantly in the saddle, visiting remote parts of her husband’s and her own dominions for State business, to settle disputed points, to inspect fortifications, to animate ecclesiastical or municipal bodies, and to suppress threatened disorder. No difficulty seemed to dismay her, no opposition to deflect her from the exalted purpose she had in view. For it must not be supposed that this strenuous activity was sporadic and without a central object which inspired it all. In this supreme object the key to Isabel’s life must be sought. Isabel’s mother was mad: after the death of her husband she had sunk into the gloomy devotional lunacy which afflicted in after years so many of her descendants; and in the impressionable years of Isabel’s youth, passed in the isolated castle of Arevalo, the whole atmosphere of her life had been one of mystic religious exaltation.