It seems that, no matter whether women are fighting for peace or for war, they must also battle against the assumption that they themselves are passive, weak or peculiar. History shows us that that isn’t true, and that, in the case of Isabella I and Ferdinand V, they could be relentlessly cruel: not only did the royal couple lead the Spanish conquest of the Islamic Kingdom of Granada in 1492, expelling both Jews and Muslims, they tortured those who remained and converted them to Christianity – in some cases burning them to death.