Mary of Burgundy was genuinely mourned when she died after a hunting accident at the age of twenty-five. Despite her short life, she left a noteworthy cultural legacy. She loved hunting with falcons and was the first woman ruler in Europe whose official seal showed her on horseback holding a falcon. Her most distinctive legacy to posterity is as Europe's only female ruler with a beer (Duchesse de Bourgogne) named for one of the last native rulers of a land unusually rich in breweries. Its current label adapts a portrait of her (with a falcon) that was commissioned by her widower three years after her death, itself an unusual distinction, Much later, the chivalric Maximilian reshaped his youthful adventures in the Low Countries into an illustrated fairy tale about a hero entitled the White King (Weisskunig).50 Mary of Burgundy also left her two surviving children a sizable political legacy as the Burgundians became the Habsburgs. In 1494, faced with increasing responsibilities in the empire, Maximilian handed a stable state to their sixteen-year-old son Philip. Two years later Maximilian approved his children's marriages to the son and second daughter of Spain's Catholic kings, Ferdinand and Isabel. The long-term consequences after the Spanish legacy passed to their Burgundian-Habsburg heirs proved far more important than anyone imagined at the time.
Spain's transition to Habsburg rule demonstrated in acute form the risks of female inheritance in an age of joint rulership. Isabel the Catholic had to change her official heir several times because her only son died childless in 1497 and both her oldest daughter and her first grandson also died by 1501. In 1504 Castile's succession therefore fell to Juana, another married daughter whose Habsburg husband already governed Europe's largest nonmonarchical state and was desperately eager to claim royal rank through his wife. Upon learning of Isabel's death, the so-called Burgundian theater-state staged a remarkably elaborate funeral service for her at Brussels. Jean Molinet, the official Burgundian chronicler, praised the Castilian ruler as a female crusader, a “very Catholic queen who besieged the strongholds and fortresses of the Moors in the absence of her husband: she received magnificently all embassies sent to her and gave elegant replies without using a spokesman such that everyone admired her prudence and noble countenance.” He also explained that the archduke spent fifty thousand florins on this ceremony “because Lady Jeanne was the one who will succeed to these kingdoms.” At its conclusion, the herald of the Order of the Golden Fleece named husband and wife as joint successors to the dead monarch, then formally invested Philip with a sword of state. In a complete reversal of her mother's central role at her own official proclamation thirty years before, Castile's new heiress remained a passive spectator as royal authority was ceremonially transferred to her husband.51
Like his father, Ferdinand of Aragon outlived a royal heiress; but unlike him, his authority in his wife's kingdom ended with her death. Isabel did what she could to protect her husband's position through a lengthy final testament which envisaged the possibility that her oldest surviving child would be either unwilling or unable to rule. But in the end there was no legal alternative to repeating the same formal proclamation that Isabel's followers had devised thirty years before, jointly acclaiming Castile's new proprietary heiress “and her legitimate husband.” The royal couple took over a year to reach Castile, whereupon Ferdinand relinquished his regency, remarried, and retired to his hereditary possessions.
Castile's new regime would not be a joint monarchy. Instead, its proprietary monarch became the exact antithesis of her mother by refusing to exercise any political responsibilities. Juana's self-erasure as sovereign became evident during her brief appearance in July 1506 before Castile's first parliament or Cortes held under its new rulers. The diputados, all of whom had experienced thirty years of Isabel's government, asked her daughter four specific questions. First, did she intend to govern her kingdoms? Second, would her husband reign jointly with her? Third, would she please dress like a Spanish lady? Fourth, would she please appoint Spanish women in her household? Only their third request received an encouraging answer; she promised to dress differently. However, she refused their fourth request “because of her husband's temperament [naturaleza].” Juana's responses to their two main questions reflect her experience when her husband had publicly claimed Castile's crown without associating her. She now refused to exercise any authority because “the Flemings do not have the custom of permitting women to govern.” Her remark was patently false, although she may not have been aware that her husband had inherited his lands from a mother who had governed them alone before her marriage.52
Seen in the context of female sovereignty, Juana the Mad deserves her sad nickname. Spaniards were probably fortunate that her overbearing husband died within a few months of his arrival, but they were unfortunate that his politically catatonic widow survived him by almost half a century. By failing to participate in any rituals of government, she became the only reigning monarch in European history considered a political cipher by her husband, her father, and her son, all of whom governed successively in her name. Significantly, her magnificent tombstone in the new royal chapel in Granada was made without her knowledge at least two decades before her actual death, and she was never told when her husband's corpse was moved there.
Spain's resulting constitutional quagmire had various official consequences. The British Museum possesses a seal of Philip and Juana with the husband in primary position on the left; it was used on a document four years after his death, with his name erased. Although Juana's was a phantom reign, her name generally precedes her son's name on thousands of official Spanish documents—none of which she signed during the last forty-eight years of her life. Almost a year after her death, the official cession of the kingdom of Sicily to Philip II was still drawn jointly in the names of Charles and Juana.53
Spanish coinage reveals even greater confusion. Juana's husband died too soon to issue coins, but her de facto abdication in combination with her de jure title created major problems. During her father's regency, a real minted in Granada proclaimed “Ferdinand and Juana, by God's Grace King and Queen of Castile, León, and Aragon.” After news of Ferdinand's death reached Brussels in 1516, his grandson immediately had Spanish coins struck there, imitating the earliest coins of Ferdinand and Isabel, but with the important difference that his mother's name preceded his. Next year, in a document which never mentioned Juana, the papacy officially acknowledged Charles I as the Catholic king of Castile and Aragon. Afterward, the names of both mother and son appear on all Spanish coins; most inscriptions name her first. In Aragon, a gigantic one-hundred-ducat piece, more a medal than a coin, shows her in the primary position on the left, facing her son, with both wearing crowns (see fig. 5). In their Italian possessions, Juana's name usually comes first, but in their American possessions, her son's name precedes hers.54
In assessing the overall political record of late medieval female sovereigns, one must remember the failures as well as the successes, Juana the Mad as well as her mother, Isabel the Catholic, while realizing that their contemporary Catherine of Navarre offers a more typical example than either of them. A royal heiress meant a change of dynasty, especially when her husband outlived her, which happened about half the time, partly because their husbands were often younger. The advent of female monarchs eroded political autonomy in some of Europe's smallest and weakest kingdoms, such as Sicily, Norway, Cyprus, and Navarre. Nevertheless, probably because opening royal successions to legitimate children of both sexes increased the possibilities of direct inheritance from one generation to another, only France unambiguously prohibited women from inheriting a royal throne.
The most common feature among these fifteen late medieval female monarchs was that, apart from two childless widows with no hereditary claim to their former husband's kingdom—Margaret of Denmark in Norway and Catherine of Venice in Cyprus—they were heiresses who were married during most, if not all, of their reigns. Like queens, husbands of royal heiresses were expected to play a political role in a spouse's kingdom. But whereas queens mig
ht be a temporary regent for an absent husband or an underage son, husbands were expected to perform most—but never all—of the work of governing their wife's kingdom. This general practice was best described in 1683 by Diego Dormer, an Aragonese with little knowledge of northern Europe. He argued that throughout Spain, including Urraca's reign in twelfth-century Castile and León and Isabel's reign three centuries later, husbands of heiresses had invariably governed their wife's kingdoms. But Dormer had to admit that this situation was not universal, and he lamented the “much greater unreasonableness and more unjust and dishonest pretensions of both Queen Juanas of Naples, who excluded some of their husbands from the title and rule of their kingdom.”55 Although the practice would have a final revival a few years later during England's so-called Glorious Revolution, expecting husbands of royal heiresses to govern their wife's kingdom had already become the exception rather than the rule when Dormer printed these remarks.
How did this come to pass?
4
Female Regents Promote Female Rule, 1500–1630
A woman is never as respected and feared as a man, no matter what rank she holds.
—Mary of Hungary, resigning as regent, 1555
A considerable gulf separated the political authority of female regents from that of female monarchs. A regent, whether male or female, always governed on behalf of an authentic sovereign who was unable to exercise authority personally because of physical absence, youthfulness (the age of legal majority was fourteen or higher), or generally recognized incompetence. For this reason, the authority of regents was by definition delegated and temporary: young monarchs would mature, absent monarchs would return, and even monarchs declared mentally incompetent might, like George III of England, be restored to sufficient health to resume their duties. Like their male counterparts, some female sovereigns were therefore replaced by regents when under the age of majority, absent, or proclaimed incompetent. All three situations happened more than once; but overall, women were far more likely to become regents than to require regents. It was usually a monarch's closest female kin, most often mothers of underaged kings or wives of absent kings, who commonly filled such temporary voids in sovereign authority; but the most important long-serving female regents in early modern Europe also include sisters, aunts, nieces, daughters, and even a grandmother of male sovereigns.
No regent had the propaganda possibilities that coinage offered to monarchs, nor did regents claim to govern by divine right. Nevertheless, regents who served for lengthy periods often found other methods to buttress their political stature. It is a central contention of this book that the gradual acceptance of women rulers in Europe during its long transition from politically subordinated female monarchs with crowned husbands to female monarchs who governed alone even when married was greatly assisted by various printed, painted, sculpted, and engraved endorsements of women's capacities for ruling, and that the most audacious of these were sponsored or commissioned not by female monarchs (whose sovereignty was permanent and divinely ordained) but by eight female regents, each of whom governed a major state for at least five years between 1507 and 1633. Among them, the two who patronized the most extreme written and painted promotions of female rule were those with the most experience in governing France—the most important kingdom in Europe to prohibit any trace of female inheritance rights.
Female regents had been common throughout the Middle Ages, and a few of them had served for lengthy periods. The wife of one chronically absent fifteenth-century Aragonese monarch governed his kingdom for over twenty consecutive years. However, the political visibility of women regents increased after 1500. Several high-profile women now became regents for indefinite periods because of their political skills, especially in the Low Countries—a densely populated, wealthy region which lacked monarchical status, although it presently includes two hereditary monarchies and a hereditary grand duchy. After mistakenly assuring Castilian deputies in 1506 that “the Flemings do not permit women to govern,” Isabel's heir would live long enough to see her husband's hereditary lands governed for over forty years by his sister and one of his nieces. Four women governed the Habsburg Netherlands without a male associate for more than half the time between 1507 and 1633, and each of them sponsored some novel cultural promotion of female rule. In 1529 the first treatise arguing women's general superiority to men was dedicated to Margaret of Austria, who governed her native lands for over twenty years. Afterwards, her niece and former ward, Mary of Hungary, governed this region for twenty-four years. She became Europe's first living female ruler since Cleopatra to commission a life-size statue of herself, and her exceptional capacities as ruler became the central feature of her state funeral. A few years later, Mary's niece Margaret of Parma, who governed the region while her husband remained in Italy, commissioned the first medal honoring a woman's rule. Much later, a fourth Habsburg princess, Philip II's oldest daughter, governed this region for twelve years while dressed as a Franciscan nun.
In the mid-sixteenth century two other Habsburg princesses, the younger sister and a niece of the veteran regent Mary of Hungary, each served five years as regents of Spain and Portugal, and both women left significant cultural legacies. Soon afterward, during the final phase of her long de facto regency in France, Catherine de Medici sponsored the most impressive sixteenth-century treatise defending the principle of female rule. Exactly a half century later, Marie de Medici, another ambitious Tuscan princess who served many years as de jure regent of France, commissioned Europe's most famous artist to create the most elaborate cycle of pictorial propaganda glorifying a woman's political career. In terms of political propaganda, the cultural innovations associated with Europe's early modern female regents far surpassed those of its female sovereigns.
A Self-Fashioned Female Regent
After his only legitimate son, Philip, died in Spain in 1506, Emperor Maximilian I ignored suggestions from the Flemish Estates-General that Philip's widow become regent.1 Instead, he named his twice-widowed daughter Margaret to govern her native lands. Maximilian was already aware of her diplomatic skills and her ability to select talented and dedicated officials when he named her guardian of his grandchildren and regent of Burgundy. His grandson, who became Charles I of Spain and Emperor Charles V, thus had extensive but contradictory experiences with women rulers during a lifetime (1500–1558) when he dominated European politics. Raised in the Low Countries by an extremely capable aunt, he stripped her of her authority upon reaching his majority at age fourteen. Two years later he acquired a distant Spanish crown that technically belonged to his mother, and for almost forty years they officially ruled jointly, although she remained completely inactive.
Because he needed to govern important states that were distant from each other, Charles required regents. He often selected women: his early experience of a clever aunt apparently outweighed having a politically inert mother. One of Margaret's protégés, Mercurino Gattinara, soon persuaded Charles to restore much of her authority. By 1519 she was once again “regent and governor” with “authority, faculty, and full power” over finance, justice, and military affairs in the Low Countries. After Margaret died in 1530, he chose his younger sister Mary, the widowed queen of Hungary, to replace her. Charles V remains enormously popular in his native region, where he spent barely four and a half years after 1517. Although theoretically supervised by absent male relatives, both female regents were in practice autonomous and gave as much advice as they received.
Margaret of Austria was both politically successful and culturally self-fashioning to an unusual extent. Her regency began with a notable diplomatic triumph for her father by negotiating the League of Cambrai in 1508: Maximilian used it to invade Italy and almost destroyed the Venetian Republic. It ended with another diplomatic success on behalf of her nephew when Margaret negotiated the so-called Ladies Peace of 1529 with her former sister-in-law, the dowager French regent; it produced several years of peace during the interminable Habsburg–Valois wars. A t
rue Renaissance princess, Margaret was the first woman ruler in Europe to compose poems; she also created a personal motto about the benefits of adversity, Fortune infortune fort une. She supervised two major building projects: a new official residence in her capital city of Mechelen and a magnificent mausoleum for herself and her second husband in her Savoyard dowry lands. Her commissions continue to interest historians of art. Musicologists have published facsimile editions of her private collections, while her numerous manuscripts and books have been reconstructed from her private inventory. With good reason, a study of her personal possessions is entitled “Life with art and influence through art.”2
Margaret sat for portraits as an adolescent and later commissioned them as a regent. No fewer than five depictions of her at the age of fourteen survive, all by unknown artists. Afterward, Margaret considered a court painter a political necessity for anyone governing this talent-rich area, and Bernard van Orley created what became her official portrait, at least ten copies of which went to relatives and courtiers in the 1520s. Recognizable versions also survive in many other forms, including a tapestry, an illuminated manuscript, a stained-glass window in a cathedral, and even a small-scale carving used as a game piece. Margaret kept no copy of this official portrait in her exquisitely furnished palace at Mechelen alongside her numerous portraits of relatives and prominent contemporary figures, but she did keep one of her prenuptial teenage portraits.3
The Rise of Female Kings in Europe, 1300-1800 Page 12