“Dogs of God” is a captivating historical narrative that unifies the zenith of late medievalism with the stunning realities of the newly discovered global world. I wish that sixty years ago, when I was in high school, works like our book at hand had replaced the flat textual narratives of times, dates, and places. James Reston, Jr, son of the legendary journalist Scotty Reston, is a master at connecting the dots. In “Dogs of God” he brings together all the major themes of the perfect storm that was fifteenth century Spain—the final recapture of lands seized by the Moslems centuries before, the unification of the kingdoms into the modern state of Spain, the personalities and vision of Ferdinand and Isabella, the intensification of the Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews, and the apocalyptic vision of the crown that led to the exploration of Christopher Columbus toward a new route to the Orient.But his synthesis does not stop with 1492; this is not a dead history, but one which reaches into contemporary life, even beyond the book’s 2005 publishing date. In the past decade or more there has been considerable debate in the United States over an accurate moral assessment of the treatment of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. We see predictors of the present-day conflict over what, exactly, to celebrate on October 12—Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day—in Reston’s descriptions of Columbus’s conduct and interpretation of his discoveries. The renewal of a Crusade mentality under Ferdinand ended a period of tranquil coexistence with Muslims in Western Europe, a sea change which we live with in the present day. The Church endorsed antisemitism of the Ferdinand-Isabella regime was a major boost to a hatred that never seems to die.The charismatic center of this work is the marriage and reign of Ferdinand, king of Aragon, and Isabella, queen of Castile. Their marriage and reign [1469-1503] united the two largest kingdoms of what would become modern Spain. Isabella is portrayed as a charismatic queen, an independent and forceful figure whose intense religiosity, for better and worse, impacted Spanish identity and policy. In later years, her religion became increasingly visionary and apocalyptic, leading to more extreme policies regarding national Catholic purity at the expense of the lives and fortunes of Jews, Muslims, and heretics, while at the same time creating the impulse to spread Christianity to the East in the person of Christopher Columbus.Ferdinand was an effective king who devoted a quarter century to military campaigns fending off advances from both Portugal to the west and France from the north. His most protracted campaign was the disintegration of Islamic occupation in the south. Given that the Moors had invaded Iberia eight centuries earlier, it is not clear precisely why Ferdinand felt intensely compelled to break the enduring Islamic presence while aggressively threatened on other fronts. Conceivably, the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 had stoked the old Crusade zeal of three centuries earlier in the Western Church. Ferdinand contented himself with breaking the Islamic physical hold of Spanish lands. His treatment of conquered Moors was, for the most part, temperate, and he permitted conquered Moors to receive Christian baptism.Isabella, for her part, would fall to the influence of the Inquisition, which tolerated neither heresy nor the baptism of Jews and Moors on the grounds that such conversions were advantageous and insincere. The queen, who came to see her reign in messianic color as agent of the conversion of the world to Christ, appropriated the Inquisition to this end. The author notes another reason: the Inquisition was empowered to impound the estates and holdings of suspects, and thus Inquisitorial aggressiveness became an important source of revenue for royal coffers drained by exhaustive military ventures. The tragic expulsion of Jews from Spain, followed later by the expulsion of Moors, was the sad fruit of this religious extremism.The royal couple was disturbed by the navigational successes of their enemies the Portuguese, who were well on their way to India via the route around the tip of Africa. This strategic and economic concern, coupled with the queen’s messianic vision, opened the door to Christopher Columbus and his plans for a westward expedition to Asia. Reston’s treatment of Columbus is rich and intriguing. Columbus was a man with a vision but no backers. His proposal to cross the Atlantic was not a gamble, scientifically speaking. He had already explored the Azores, the Canary Islands, and Iceland. His study of maps dating to ancient times was exhaustive. He was aware of corpses which had washed ashore in colder climes, with features entirely distinct from those of Europeans. Problems there would be, but not with the geography.Reston treats of the first journey and return in considerable detail, and he captures much of the irony of this venture, including the importation of syphilis to Europe by Columbus’s crew. No one, it seems, knew quite what to make of the discoverer’s four cross-Atlantic voyages, as Hispaniola bore no resemblance to the richness of the East described by Marco Polo and others. Columbus found no gold; those who followed would harvest the riches of the New World. And, for those who followed, there would be need for boundaries and markers.Appropriately enough, Reston’s last chapter is “The Division of the World.” The major exploratory players, Spain and Portugal, took their counsel from the pope in 1493, who happened to be the corrupt Alexander VI. Alexander’s famous “line of demarcation,” a north-south boundary just west of the Azores, has puzzled generations of school children who did not realize that Alexander thought he was dividing Portugal’s African/East Asia riches from Spain’s yet undetermined holdings claimed by Columbus. Alexander could hardly have known that he was ushering in what Reston calls in his final words, “The Age of Empire.”