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Church, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory and Jerome.
        This was Classical Lite, a mélange of authors who, with the exception of Augustine, are now largely forgotten, at least as literature. But then they were highly valued – as was Catherine's achievement in mastering them. She 'loves good literature, which she has studied with success since childhood', wrote the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, who later got to know her well. But what excited his admiration most was the fact that she had done all this as a woman. She 'is astonishingly well read', he wrote on another occasion, 'far beyond what would be surprising in a woman'.
        What are also surprising, however, are the gaps in Catherine's education. She, like her siblings, was taught to dance and she performed confidently in public. Otherwise, there are no signs of musical skills or training, either instrumental or vocal. She was familiar with one of the great cycles of chivalric romance – if the presence in her mother's library of three well-thumbed volumes, in Spanish, of the tales of King Arthur and the Round Table is anything to go by. But it seems unlikely that she had read anything of the poetry of Courtly Love, and it is practically certain that she had never joined in its fancifully erotic games. Now, for a Christian Humanist, like Erasmus, the omission of such trivialities from Catherine's education was a positive virtue. But then Erasmus never had to make his way in royal Courts. Catherine and her sisters did: they were destined to have to woo husbands, to win friends and to influence people. In all of these, the Courtly arts, music, poetry and the game of love were the favoured instruments – especially for a lady. Isabella's daughters were sent out utterly untrained in them. Was it because Isabella herself was too mannish, or at least too successful a woman in a man's world, to care about such things? Was it because Isabella's entourage, perpetually on the move and almost always at war, was too much of a camp and too little of a Court for a Court culture to develop? Or was it, finally, because Spain was too isolated from the European mainstream?
        If it were the last, the puzzle of Catherine's education deepens. For it was, precisely, the mission of Catherine and her sisters to end Spanish isolation. They were to marry foreign princes and, deploying the superior education which they had been given for the purpose, to bend their husbands and their husbands' lands to the service of Spanish interests. That at least was the theory. The practice was less impressive. For not only were these girls entirely lacking in Courtly skills, they were also sent out, as consorts to foreign rulers, with no training in foreign languages. They could speak Spanish, which scarcely anyone spoke abroad, and Latin, which only the clergy and diplomats did. But their education did not equip them to converse in the languages of their husbands. It was not an education for effective pillow-talk. 2

3. Power weddings

    18  April 1490 must have been a day of high excitement for Catherine, Maria and Juana. Isabella, their eldest sister, was being betrothed to Prince Alfonso of Portugal in Seville and the little girls formed part of the royal party. Catherine was aged five when she received this first lesson in the reality of royal marriages. Other lessons were soon to follow. 1
        For the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, took the customary view that a royal marriage existed not for the personal satisfaction of the participants but as a means to a political end. Historians call this use of family connexions to achieve political goals 'dynasticism'. And Ferdinand and Isabella carried it, as they did all forms of policy, to a high level of strategic sophistication. Like their foreign policy, from which it was indeed barely distinguishable, their dynastic policy had two principal aims. Within the Iberian peninsula, they wanted to consolidate their power by bringing