No English queen has drawn more ire than the vilified Queen Isabella. Weir, at long last, delivers the definitive biography of one of the most controversial members of English royalty.
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 1 January 2012
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The Battle of the Queens
The first half of the thirteenth century is dominated by two women, as proud and ambitious as they were beautiful, yet different in all other qualities. Isabella is flamboyant and passionate, a medieval Helen of Troy - wife to King John and mother to Henry III...Blanche of Castile is the serene and virtuous Queen of France, wife of Louis VIII and mother of Louis IX...The two women hated each other on sight. Isabella would stop at nothing, not even murder, in her passion to destroy the French Queen.
PreSchool-Grade 2 One Sukkot, Bubbe Isabella builds a sukkah and decorates it with leaves and branches, colored cloth, apples, grapes, corn, and pumpkins. Each night she wishes for someone to sit with her and share her freshly baked lemon cake. However, the only guests she receives are a caterpillar, a moth, a squirrel, a raccoon, a deer, and a bear that accidentally smashes the cake.
With fifteen-century Spain rent with intrigue and threatened by civil war, Isabella became the pawn of her ambitious, half-crazed mother and a virtual prisoner at the licentious court of her half-brother, Henry IV. Was she, at sixteen, fated to be the victim of the Queen's revenge, the Archbishop's ambition and the lust of Don Pedro Giron, one of the most notorious lechers in Castile? Numbed with grief and fear, Isabella yet remained steadfast in her determination to marry Ferdinand, the handsome young Prince of Aragon, her only true betrothed
Married to Ferdinand after continual fears and disappointments, Isabella triumphed over every dangers, convinced of her true destiny. With the might of Portugal humbled, the Court of the Sovereigns saw the rise of Torquemada, the establishment of the dreaded Inquisition, and the coming of Columbus, who left the woman he loved to make a dream reality. Ambitious and unfaithful, Ferdinand longed to lead his troops against the Moorish strongholds. Isabella knew a united Spain and a glorious future could be theirs, but they must only share it together...
