Читать книгу Queens of old Spain онлайн

73 страница из 97

But it was weary waiting. As we have seen, the energies of the sovereigns were absorbed in the war. Ferdinand, moreover, was desperately anxious to finish it successfully, and get to Aragonese problems that interested him more directly; the intended war with France and that world-wide combination he was already planning, by which not the strength of Spain alone but that of all Christendom should be at his bidding, to humble his rival and exalt Aragon in Italy, the Mediterranean and the East. It was too much to expect that Ferdinand would welcome very warmly any project for frittering away in another direction the strength of the nation he was hungering to use for his own ends. Isabel, on the other hand, would naturally be inclined to listen more sympathetically to such a project as that of Colon. Here was half a world to be won to Christianity under her flag, here was wealth illimitable to coerce the other half, and, above all, here was the fair-faced mystic with his lymphatic blue eyes, like her own, showing her how the riches that would fall to his share were all destined for a crusade even greater than that of Granada, the winning of the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel, and the fixing for ever of the sovereign banner of Castile upon the country hallowed by the footsteps of our Lord. To Isabel, therefore, more than to Ferdinand, must it be attributed, that when the campaign of 1486 was ended the Italian mariner was not dismissed, notwithstanding the unfavourable report of Talavera’s commission.