Hi everyone, welcome to Downsnow's History Hit. It's that time of the week when we share one of the best episodes of one of our family of podcasters, one is from Not Just The Tudors, Professor Susanna Lipscomb, the legend.

Talked to Teresa Eerenfight, she's a professor of history at Seattle University and Emma K. Hill, Maran, who's a barographer.

All of them were talking about Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's first wife, but it says Not Just The Tudors, and we're not just doing the Tudors, because we're talking about Catherine Aragon, largely before she came to England.

When she was the Spanish Infanta Catalina of Aragon, she was the daughter of Queen Isabella of Castile, one of the most influential women, one of those influential people in the chicken century Europe.

She witnessed the expulsion of the Jews, the final defeats of the Moors in Spain, the triumphal return of Christopher Columbus. This is big stuff. It was the prologue to quite her life.

Through watching her mother, through living through his events, she learned how to become a queen, and she would need every single lesson. She'd need every single piece of experience and royal training when she arrived in England, the rainy backwater.

To be married, the sign of the upstart Shooter family, Arthur, Henry VIII's older brother. This was a heck of a coup, Henry VII's managing to arrange this wedding with one of Europe's finest bloodlines.

So anyway, it's a fascinating tale. This is the backstory of Catherine of Aragon. Please go and check out not just the Tudors, wherever you get your pods.

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In the meantime, here is a glittering cast with Susanna Lipscomb, talking about Catalina of Aragon.

So I am delighted to be joined today by both of you because I think the subject of how Catalina of Aragon learnt to be queen and her early life is something that hasn't really been covered enough in the existing literature, although of course Tracy are going to be changing that very soon.

And both of you have published lots of articles about this that are really important. But let's have a chat about it. So Teresa, could you perhaps start us off by introducing us to Catherine's parents and to their joint monarchy?

For people who study Spain, Catherine's parents were one of the most famous marital couples in Spanish monarchical history.

And they were very close in age. She was one year older than he was. They were both groomed to be heads of state, to be a king and a queen. Isabel's pathway to it was a little more rocky than Fernando's because there was a sub-war there were various bearer other family members that wanted to get in the way of it.

But by the time they decided to marry and join themselves in a marriage and join their two realms, it was one of the most momentous decisions made in Spanish history because it united a variety of disparate places, language, culture, a whole array of different kinds of things all came together under their marriage.

They had five children, one son, four daughters, and Catherine of Eragon is the youngest of the five her oldest brother was supposed to inherit died young. And the other sister has went off to other kingdoms largely portugal to marry.

She wanted to marry the Archduke of the Netherlands who died young and she came back and ran just one of the first. So her family was royal through and through on both sides of the family. They're related. It's a connected family.

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