by Hugh Thomas
Her education and that of her brother Alfonso were, first, entrusted to Lope de Barrientos, a Dominican who became a tolerant bishop of Segovia. Later, in her schoolroom, there was the learned Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, bishop of Palencia, who had been his monarch’s representative in Rome. He was a theorist who had expounded the idea of the supremacy of the Castilian monarchy in Europe; his Historia Hispánica claimed that, in classical times, Castile had been not only preponderant over Portugal, Navarre, and Granada, but also over France and England. His high-flown assertions about the role of his country, as well as of the monarchy, must have influenced his pupil.
From the words of one or the other of these tutors, Isabel came to admire, too, the memory of Joan of Arc. When she married, she was presented with a chronicle about the famous maid of Orléans by an anonymous poet, which encouraged Isabel to dream that she, too, might one day recover her ancestors’ lost kingdoms—in her case, Granada.
Soon she and her brother Alfonso went to court to live in the suite of Queen Juana at Segovia (the Queen Mother, Queen Isabel, now scarcely coherent, remained another forty years at Arévalo).18 Despite the charms of Segovia, then being reconstructed by royal patronage, that must have been a difficult time for her; for the Queen, if beautiful, was undisciplined and unpredictable.19 The King, Enrique, pretended to adopt Moorish customs, Christianity was mocked, the war against Islam discounted. The memory of that wild court surely influenced Isabel’s later austerity. Various marriages were suggested for her, all with political consequences: the Duke of Guyenne, brother of the King of France, an association that would have been helpful in respect of policy toward Navarre; the elderly King Afonso of Portugal, which would have removed any risk of war in the west; perhaps Richard, Duke of York, Shakespeare’s future murderous monarch Richard III; the powerful nobleman Pedro Girón, brother of the Marquis of Villena, who had the authority to bring much of the landed aristocracy into submission to the Crown. But what about the promising heir to the throne of Aragon, Isabel’s second cousin, Fernando, who himself had a good claim to the throne of Castile and with whom a marriage might mean a union of Spanish crowns?
In the meantime, Isabel’s cause as queen-to-be was propagated by the enemies of her half-brother, the King. Civil war between two groups of Castilian noblemen began on a low level, and in 1468, after Isabel’s full brother Alfonso died in her presence at Cardeñosa, near Ávila, she became the candidate of King Enrique’s enemies to the throne. They chose her because they thought they could dictate to her. She, on the other hand, seems to have been determined to win the Castilian crown at all costs and would make whatever compromise was necessary to ensure that.
The next few years in Isabel’s life are complex, comprehensible perhaps only to a genealogist, a notary, or a gossip. Yet we must make an effort to understand what transpired, since these events explain the rest of Isabel’s life. It was a story played out in Old Castile, in towns such as Segovia, Madrigal de las Altas Torres, with its high winds, in Arévalo, Ocaña, and, to some extent, Madrid, city of the future.
King Enrique was a singular individual, perhaps homosexual, periodically impotent (his first marriage to Blanca of Navarre had been annulled for that reason). He was impulsive, procrastinatory, occasionally creative, often lazy. But he was no fool.20 By the aristocrats he was thought to be manageable. The dominant churchman of the realm, the turbulent Archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso Carrillo de Acuña, wanted Isabel proclaimed queen there and then, while the friend of the King since their childhood and the most powerful nobleman, Juan Pacheco, the Marquis of Villena and “majordomo” of the country, merely wanted her named heiress. Carrillo hoped that Isabel would eventually marry Fernando of Aragon. But Pacheco’s candidate for her hand was Afonso of Portugal, and he and Enrique worked out an elaborate scheme to that end.21 In the end, Isabel accepted being named the heiress, not the queen; and hesitated further about her marriage—as well she might, since she was barely seventeen years old.
King Enrique accepted Isabel as his heiress, being persuaded for a time that, though young, she was a more convincing candidate for a throne than his own daughter Juana, then aged five, nicknamed “La Beltraneja” after Beltrán, Duke of Alburquerque, “the good knight” (el buen caballero), for there were grounds for thinking that he might have been her true father.22 There followed a ceremony of reconciliation of all parties at the Jeronymite monastery of Guisando, in the foothills of the Gredos Mountains. Isabel, now formally Princess of Asturias, went to live at the spa of Ocaña, near Toledo, with its delicious waters, a stronghold of Pacheco, where the King, too, had spent much of his time.
The Infanta already had that essential mechanism for political power, a well-chosen household. This was headed by her lady-in-waiting’s husband, Gonzalo Chacón, once a steward to Álvaro de Luna, the longtime first minister of King Juan I; and his cousin, Gutierre de Cárdenas,23 the court majordomo, who had skillfully emerged from the household of Archbishop Carrillo. Ocaña was the headquarters of Cárdenas, for his palace was there, its columns surmounted by representations of shells and coats of arms, still visible today, and it was there that Isabel lodged. Both Cárdenas and Chacón were in 1469 young men, determined to achieve the glittering prizes of success in public life.
The learned Alonso de Palencia,24 historian and humanist, an excellent Latinist, already fifty, was Isabel’s secretary. His treatise on how to win military victories was much read by would-be soldiers. He had worked for the equally erudite converso Bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena, and, when in Italy, had met the brightest and best of his generation. One historian hails him as the “nearest to a full Italian humanist that Spain produced” at that time.25 The distinction of Isabel’s advisers was an explanation for her success as a queen. Beatriz de Bobadilla, later Marquesa of Moya, and Mencía de la Torre were her chief ladies.
King Enrique gave Isabel the market city of Medina del Campo to provide her with an income, and authority over the mint at Ávila as well.26
Isabel decided on Fernando of Aragon as a husband. He was the only male member of the royal house of Trastámara, to which she herself belonged, and was, by most judgments, her heir. He was both brave and personable. She had not met him, but she saw the benefits for Castile of such a match. Probably a marriage with him would at least ensure her own control of the kingdom. Union with Aragon-Cataluña would also strengthen Castile rather than commit her to support adventures in the Atlantic, as would surely have occurred had Isabel married the King of Portugal.
The court of Aragon had worked for this solution. Indeed, the betrothal was a triumph for them, above all, despite the fact that the union depended for its legality on a document forged by Antonio Veneris, the papal representative in Spain, allowing Fernando to marry someone who was within the third degree of cousinage with him. A secret document preliminary to the wedding was signed in January 1469. Isabel was less than eighteen, Fernando only sixteen.27
Aragon meant much more than the inland region of that name. It implied also Cataluña, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands, as well as Sicily and Sardinia. Aragon had a constitutional system in which order and liberty were remarkably well balanced and in whose elaboration merchants had played a part. Barcelona had a good postal service, and there were important professional organizations. The parliament, or Cortes, of the Aragonese territories was powerful, while the chief justice in Aragon was an independent magistrate who played an important part in maintaining the law. The parliamentarians of Cataluña were concerned with political liberty. King Alfonso the Magnanimous, the uncle of Fernando, who had reigned before Fernando’s father, had ensured Aragonese control of southern Italy, though his long absences from Spain had weakened his standing there.28
At first sight the kingdom of Aragon thus seemed more dynamic as well as more diverse than Castile. But Cataluña was in economic decline. The prosperous days when she had dominated the eastern Mediterranean were over, even if Valencia’s developing commerce partly compensated for the
change. Further, Castile had markets in northern Europe, such as Flanders and England, through successful wool exports. These brought prosperity to the Cantabrian coast, especially to ports such as Corunna, Santander, Laredo, and San Sebastián, whose merchants had, in the late thirteenth century, devised a society, “the Brotherhood of the Marshes,”29 to protect their interests. The fairs at Medina del Campo, the merchants of Burgos, the sea captains and traders in Seville were every year more well known outside Spain.30 The Cortes in Castile was certainly less powerful than that in Aragon; the Crown depended less on it, for it had alternative sources of money. That Cortes was inadequate as a legislative power,31 yet despite that Castile was growing richer.
The King, hearing of the marriage plans of his half-sister Isabel, said he would detain her if she did not leave such a decision to him. It was a reasonable reaction. But her reply was to arrange for Archbishop Carrillo to send troops to escort her to Valladolid, where she knew herself to be safe in the palace of Juan de Vivero, who was married to a cousin of Fernando and was a nephew of the Archbishop, and had himself once been royal treasurer. From there she sent Fray (Friar) Alonso de Palencia and Gutierre de Cárdenas to seek out Fernando of Aragon. The prince required no persuading to return with them to Castile, which he did romantically and without guards, though bruised by a stone thrown at him and his party in Burgo de Osma.32
In Dueñas, a town belonging to Pedro de Acuña, Count of Buendía, a brother of Archbishop Carrillo, between the cities of Valladolid and Palencia on the frontier of Old and New Castile, Cárdenas presented Fernando to Isabel on October 14, 1469, with the words “This is he, this is he” (Ese es, ese es), a phrase that figured thereafter on his coat of arms, in the form of linked S’s. The two were mutually impressed, a notary recorded their pledges, and Isabel wrote to her brother, King Enrique: “By my letters and messengers, I now notify your highness of my determined will concerning my marriage.” She was devoted to Fernando thereafter, and resented his continual infidelities.33 He, too, seemed enthusiastic: “I beg your ladyship that your letters come more often because, on my life, they are very late in arriving.”34 The Archbishop presided at the wedding in Vivero’s palace in Valladolid. Few national figures were present except for Fadrique Enríquez, the Admiral of Castile, Fernando’s uncle. Two of Fernando’s illegitimate children, Alonso and Juana de Aragón, were also there.35 Fray Pero López de Alcalá read out the questionable bull of Pope Pius II excluding any sin of consanguinity; another, genuine, document eventually came from Rome.
The fact that Castile accounted for, say, 4 million people and Aragon probably less than a million gave Isabel an advantage in dealing with Fernando.36 But all the same this was a marriage warmly supported by King Juan II of Aragon and his friends among the aristocrats and churchmen of his country.37
Fernando of Aragon had been born in 1452, a year after Isabel, in a house of the family of Sada at Sos, in the high Pyrenees in Aragon, where his mother, Juana Enríquez, his father’s second wife, had gone for the birth because of the air. Noblemen of Aragon would in those days often travel for the summer to that valley, and the remains of their palaces can still be seen. The historian Hernando del Pulgar said of the young Fernando: “He had so singular a grace that everyone who talked to him wanted to serve him.”38 A modern historian wrote that he was “the most genial of the political rulers of the Renaissance.”39 He seemed affable, deft, and gallant. But his motto was: “Like an anvil, I keep silent because of the times.” In comparison to his father, he was frugal, and so some thought him mean. He liked hunting, gambling, and jousting, and above all, women.40
As with Isabel, we can see from portraits what he looked like: in the Real Monasterio de las Huelgas in Burgos, he appears rather dark in complexion. In the Prado, in the picture known as Our Lady of the Catholic Monarchs, we see him praying, and in the Colegiata de Santa María Daroca, we observe him with his son, the precocious Infante Juan.41
Fernando was a second cousin of Isabel’s, on the paternal side, for Aragon had been ruled for nearly a hundred years by a junior branch of the Castilian Trastámaras, and he and his family still owned large Castilian properties. All his life had been spent in the zones of power. He had been his father’s deputy in Cataluña when aged only nine, and he became lieutenant of that realm at sixteen. These were years of civil war. Fernando became used to making decisions in conjunction with his strong-minded mother, Juana Enríquez, sister of the Admiral of Castile.42 But that lady died of cancer, and the young prince, in tears, told the notables of Valencia: “Lords, you all know with what hardships my lady mother has sustained the war to keep Catalonia within the house of Aragón. I see my father old, and myself very young. Therefore, I commend myself to you and place myself in your hands, and ask you to consider me your son.”
This prince knew that his marriage might lead to the union of the realms of Aragon (with Valencia and Cataluña) and Castile, and he relished the thought of it. His grandfather on his paternal side, King Fernando, called “of Antequera” because of his victory against the Moors there, had predicted and desired it.
Fernando gave much thought as to how innovations effective in Aragon or Cataluña might be introduced into Castile. But he undertook, with regard to any authority that he might exercise in Castile, to respect traditional arrangements and to sign everything jointly with Isabel.
After her wise marriage, Isabel sent a conciliatory embassy to her brother, King Enrique, assuring him of her and Fernando’s loyalty. But they were suspect and the royal couple had to withdraw from Valladolid, for that city was soon besieged by a noble loyal to the Crown, the Count of Benavente. In 1470, it seemed that they held only Medina del Campo and Ávila, and even there they seemed insecure. Enrique disinherited Isabel and again declared his daughter, Juana, his heir. He tore up the compromise of Guisando. Moving to Medina del Río Seco, the seat of the Enríquez family, Isabel wrote a denunciation of the King in March 1471. Riots broke out in many cities, both sides seeming for a time to lose control of their territories to rebellious noblemen.
These troubles were repaired in 1473 after discussions in which one agent of Isabel’s, her treasurer, the painstaking Alonso de Quintanilla,43 is said to have paid thirty-six visits to the court of King Enrique at Alcalá. Others who distinguished themselves by their prudence included Andrés de Cabrera,44 the commander of the Alcázar (fortress) in Segovia, who was now married to Isabel’s friend Beatriz de Bobadilla. Another peacemaker was Pedro González de Mendoza, the young cardinal bishop of Calahorra, who (under papal pressure) changed sides, with the rest of the Mendoza family, to begin twenty years of service to Isabel.45 At all events, the King and his half-sister spent Epiphany together in 1474 in the remodeled Alcázar of Segovia. Enrique sang, Isabel danced.46 But it was their last celebration, for less than a year later, in December, King Enrique died suddenly in the then small town of Madrid.
When Isabel received the news, still at Segovia, she audaciously went first in mourning (white serge) to Mass at the church of San Martín. She left for the Alcázar and then repaired the next morning to the smaller, closer church of San Miguel, dazzlingly dressed in gold and, on a platform, was proclaimed Queen of Castile.47 She took an oath; her little court (Andrés de Cabrera, Gonzalo Chacón, Gutierre de Cárdenas, and Alonso de Palencia) knelt, as did the municipal council of Segovia, which then formed the only guarantee of her grasp on national power. Cárdenas rode in front of a procession with a naked sword to recall that royal authority could punish evil-doers.48
The young historian Hernán Pulgar, who had been taught in the school for royal secretaries, meantime busied himself by listing queens who had come to the throne in Castile since the eighth century (he could not have done the same for Aragon since the Salic Law there deprived women of any right to rule). The Queen could also congratulate herself that the royal treasury was still in the Alcázar in Segovia and was therefore in the hands of her close friends the Cabreras. Fernando, who was in Aragon at the time of Enriqu
e’s death, hastened to Segovia, and after some apparent disagreements, his advisers and Isabel’s worked out an understanding between the two of them, which was signed on January 15, 1475.
By this, the Crown of Castile was vested in the Queen. But it was agreed that Fernando and Isabel could jointly issue decrees, and approve coins and sign papers. Fernando’s name was to precede that of the Queen in state documents, but her coat of arms would come first. Homage would be sworn to her, castles would be obedient to her, she alone would appoint officials in Castile, and though Fernando could, like her, apportion revenues, she alone would concede grants. The Queen would name commanders of fortresses, though her husband, because of his apparent prowess in war, would name those to command armies. All orders of Fernando in relation to war would automatically be valid, but not otherwise. The two would administer justice jointly when they were together but could do so separately when apart for both kingdoms, though they would always take care to be mindful of the Council of the Realm, the influential committee then composed of noblemen, clergy, and a few educated laymen, or letrados. The two would be jointly considered kings of Castile, León, and Sicily and princes of Aragon. Should Fernando die, Isabel would inherit the Crown of Aragon, despite the fact that women never as a rule reigned there. It was also understood that should Isabel die, her eldest son (or daughter) would succeed, not Fernando.