Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  One of the greatest problems for a biographer writing about Isabella is separating out the role of husband and wife, though this is often a pointless task. If one of Isabella’s most important early decisions was to marry Ferdinand and another was to share power as near equals, then she also deserves credit for her husband’s actions. His triumphs were hers (just as hers were his) and must add to, rather than subtract from, her individual achievements. Their failures and excesses must also be shared, but the couple’s early discovery that two people whose partnership is grounded in absolute trust and confidence in each other’s abilities can do much more than one person on their own is key to understanding Isabella’s reign. This was fifteenth-century love – mostly a question of respect – at its best. In Isabella’s case it was accompanied by a possessive, jealous passion for her husband that was a further mark of her intense, single-minded character.

  Another difficulty in divining the truth about Isabella’s life is her embrace of propaganda. She intuitively understood, as Machiavelli would put it, that ‘to govern is to make believe’. She also wanted to ensure that her version of history – in which she appears as a sainted figure, delivering tough, redeeming love to a lost nation – would triumph. For this, Isabella counted on a group of tame chroniclers who not only depended on her for their livelihoods but often had to present their work for approval. This biographer has tried to use these chronicles judiciously, taking into account their authors’ prejudices without ignoring the fact that they were often witnesses to the most important moments in Isabella’s career. Where possible these have been contrasted against more impartial observers, be they letter writers, foreign visitors or the dry but revealing church, state and municipal records which Spanish scholars continue to mine.

  For many Roman Catholics, Isabella’s ability to cleanse her own country – including weeding out much of the church corruption that would drive people elsewhere into the arms of Protestantism – was crucial in turning Spain into a bulwark against Lutheranism andheresy. Witch-hunts carried out by both Protestants and Catholics across the rest of Europe, they point out, proved just as cruel as and more murderous than her most terrifying invention, the Spanish Inquisition. Even today her more fervent supporters campaign for her beatification. Among the reasons they give is that Columbus’s voyage to the Americas, a venture that saw entire populations wiped out, delivered so many converts to Christianity.

  A black legend, built around the Inquisition and bolstered by both Protestant disdain and Italian envy, shaped the vision of a queen who laid the foundations of the world’s first global empire and prepared Spain to become Europe’s dominant power for much of the sixteenth century. In Spain, an opposite process of glorification happened. Isabella became a model of every possible virtue and a ready symbol for religious conservatives and authoritarians (‘The inspiration for our Africa policy’ says a plaque put up by dictator General Francisco Franco’s regime in 1951, in the small convent room in Madrigal de Las Altas Torres where she was born 500 years previously). That black legend, together with Spain’s later dramatic decline, has helped to marginalise her in the dominant narratives of European history. Sexual prurience, meanwhile, has kept her out of literature and the popular imagination. Isabella could be a coquette, but she had no known or suspected lovers – carnal or otherwise. She stayed belligerently faithful to her wandering husband Ferdinand, struggling with her own jealousy while scorning women of lesser morality (and there were plenty). The heat of hidden love or lust did nothing to fire her reign. Passion was for God, her husband and her country. Her story is not about sex. It is about power.

  1

  No Man Ever Held Such Power

  The Stúñiga family’s house, Valladolid, 3 June 1453

  Castile’s greatest man rose at dawn, heard mass and took holy communion. Then Álvaro de Luna picked at a plate of bitter cherries and washed down with wine the few that his tightened, fearful throat allowed him to swallow. Outside, the streets of Valladolid were beginning to absorb the first rays of the harsh Castilian summer sun. The sixty-three-year-old noble who had governed the kingdom for as long as many could remember knew this was his last meal. Soon they brought a mule to the house where he was being kept prisoner in this wealthy city of silversmiths and merchants. With a black cape over his shoulders and his hat in place, they led him up the busy commercial street known as La Costanilla, over a small, smelly tributary of the River Esgueva and into the main plaza. ‘This is the justice that our Lord King orders for this cruel tyrant and usurper of the royal crown, as punishment for his wickedness and service, ordering that his head be chopped off!’ shouted the crier – nervously forgetting to say disservice. Luna’s sharp mind produced a quick, sardonic riposte. ‘Well said,’ he quipped. ‘This is how I am being paid for my service.’1

  Even at this early hour a large crowd jostled to view the morbid procession through one of the kingdom’s biggest cities – which lay amid grain fields and rough pastures in the broad, thin-aired flatlands of Spain’s high, central meseta. Windows were packed with onlookers. For years Luna had ruled in the name of the true monarch, Juan II, accruing not just power but also vast wealth. His lands, and those of the mighty Santiago military order that he led, stretched across the length and breadth of Castile. Juan had hero-worshipped and loved him when he was a child king. ‘No man … ever reached so high, or held such power, or was so loved by his king,’ wrote a contemporary chronicler called ‘the Hawksman’.2 Few, he might have added, were so hated by their enemies. These had spread a scurrilous rumour that the relationship between the young man who was appointed a page to the three-year-old monarch when he himself was eighteen had developed into something sexual and improper. As soon as Juan was old enough to rule on his own Luna became his privado, or favourite, exercising royal power in the monarch’s name. Now that he was heading to his death, the city’s people were both thrilled and appalled to witness the eternally enticing drama of a great man’s downfall. Torches burned on two large crucifixes each side of a stage covered in black cloth where the executioner awaited. There was no axe or heavy sword for a swift death. The executioner had brought, instead, a puñal – a sharp-tipped, sometimes blunt-edged, dagger. ‘I beg you to check that it is sharp,’ said Luna, as he paced nervously around the stage. He had brought his own cord to bind his hands, but wanted to know what the iron hoop attached to a wooden stand was for. The executioner informed him that it was to display his head, just as soon as it had been detached from his body. ‘Do what you will!’ he retorted. The collar of his blue, pressed-woollen doublet, lined with the luxurious, steel-grey fur of Arctic foxes, was loosened and he was forced to lie on the stage. The executioner begged his forgiveness, then plunged the puñal into his neck and hacked off his head.

  Two royal Isabellas were not far from Valladolid on that dramatic summer’s day in 1453, probably in their recently built palace home forty miles away in the walled town of Madrigal de Las Altas Torres – an unpretentious square of narrow, two-storey buildings around a large courtyard. One of them was King Juan’s daughter Isabella, the future queen of Castile, aged just two. The little girl with light auburn hair, greenish-blue eyes and unusually pale skin was too young to know what was happening. But her mother, Isabella of Portugal, was immensely pleased by the bloody spectacle being enacted in Valladolid. The queen consort, who was Juan’s second wife, had helped orchestrate the downfall of the man who kept them apart for much of their six-year marriage. Other Grandees were also pleased. They had come to hate not just Luna’s power, but also the way he justified it as a mere continuation of the king’s own rightful and absolute supremacy over all his people. They did not like him preaching that the king was so far above the Grandees themselves. They believed that they should also have a major say in the running of the kingdom, and a bigger slice of its wealth. Luna’s crime had been not his control of the king but his failure to share. The common folk of Valladolid were in two minds about his death. A silver tray placed in front of th
e stage for contributions to his funeral costs soon filled up with coins, bearing the king’s figure or his lion and castle symbols. King Juan himself could not bear to be in the city for the death of the man whom he had adored as a child and trusted as a monarch. He stayed away, while others carried out his orders.3

  Juan’s forty-seven-year reign had started with his strapping English mother, Catherine of Lancaster, acting as co-regent for the toddler monarch. The six-foot-tall, increasingly obese daughter of John of Gaunt was a compulsive eater and drinker. Her imposing stature, ruddy cheeks, manly walk and continually expanding frame had a startling impact on those who saw her.4 Men were not used to being towered over in such a fashion. But Catherine died, her muscles withering away, when Juan was just thirteen. Her death only increased the orphaned boy’s emotional dependence on Luna. Catherine’s main contributions to her husband’s Trastámara dynasty were the very English complexion and light-coloured eyes passed on to her granddaughter.

  Isabella’s father was tall, sturdy, clever and deeply cultured. ‘He spoke and understood Latin; he read very well; he liked books and stories a great deal. He took great pleasure in listening to poems and was a fine critic of them,’ said Fernan Pérez de Guzmán, one of Castile’s many talented poets. He was, however, a feeble king who preferred hunting or listening to music to the business of government, submitting to Luna’s orders ‘more obediently and humbly than any son ever did to his father’. There were huge obstacles to overcome, especially with the troublesome neighbouring kingdom of Aragon, which was now ruled by an uppity branch of the Trastámara family. Aragon occupied a large, triangular wedge of Iberia, including most of its east coast and the two great maritime trading cities of Barcelona and Valencia, as well as owning Sicily and Sardinia. Its ruling family, especially a group of young sibling princes known as the infantes of Aragon, claimed numerous lands in Castile. But Castile was wealthier, more populous and mightier. Luna eventually defeated the infantes, though the most successful of them – the wily, ruthless and long-lived future king of Aragon, Juan the Great – remained a thorn in Castile’s side for decades to come.

  After Juan II’s first wife had died, leaving him with a lone son and heir called Enrique, a new marriage had been arranged to Isabella of Portugal. The court’s many warrior poets were impressed by the nineteen-year-old granddaughter of Portugal’s King João I. She was beautiful, sweet-natured and demure. Iñigo López de Mendoza, Marquess of Santillana and the greatest poet of the time, deemed her ‘genteel person and face’ worthy of a Giotto fresco. This apparent coyness hid a strength of character and willingness to enter the political fray that Luna would come to rue. Juan was forty-two when he remarried, and the young woman who stepped into his bed excited him enormously. ‘The result was very different to that expected, as the monarch became passionate about the sweet young lady and began to enjoy with great freedom the honest [sexual] treatment of his beautiful wife,’ said the acerbic royal official Alfonso de Palencia, one of the great chroniclers of Isabella’s later reign.5 Some worried that this infatuation was bad for his health. He was already considered ‘close to old age’, but reportedly partook of ‘uninterrupted pleasures’ with his young wife. His counsellors fretted that she would wear him out. That may have been one of the excuses used for keeping Juan away from her. For much of the time Isabella remained in the drab little palace in Madrigal de Las Altas Torres with her court of Portuguese ladies, while affairs of state kept her husband constantly on the move. The vast, open skies of the Castilian meseta – the highest region in Europe, after Switzerland – and the busy traffic of storks and other birdlife migrating to and from Africa must have provided little consolation to a woman used to the greenery and seascapes of Portugal. At one stage the queen saw her husband just twice in two years. It was in Madrigal de Las Altas Torres – famous for the uniquely Iberian mudéjar style of architecture that blended Arabic decorative and structural work with Romanesque and Gothic shapes – that her daughter Isabella had been born on 22 April 1451.6 The appearance of a second heir to the throne, after her twenty-six-year-old half-brother Enrique, was celebrated, but there must have been disappointment about the child’s sex. A second son would have been much better for the safe continuity of the Trastámara family dynasty. One duly appeared nineteen months later, when Isabella’s brother Alfonso was born.

  Isabella of Portugal was of haughty, noble stock and was about the only person apart from Luna with private access to the king. ‘The young lady found opportunities to counsel him in secret, which was good for both the king’s own honour and the security of the throne,’ observed a royal chronicler. When he began to have second thoughts about acting against his favourite, she both pushed him to keep going and enlisted Grandee support. It was a sign of the forceful, proud and tenacious side of the royal Portuguese women who would serve as little Isabella’s role models. The downfall of Luna brought only temporary relief. Juan soon fell ill, but not badly enough to give up his infatuation with his young wife. ‘Nobody dared to warn him of the threat to his life posed by his uncontrolled passions … weakened, but a slave to sensuality and daily given over to the caresses of a young and beautiful wife,’ recorded Palencia.7

  Unpractised as he was, Isabella’s father found ruling his lands without Luna more difficult than he had expected. He may have enjoyed more time with his wife, but his stamina was waning. A year later he also died and her half-brother Enrique was on the throne. Little Isabella’s reaction is not recorded, though in his will her father had carefully named her third in succession to his crown, after Enrique and her young full sibling Alfonso. Nobody expected that she would ever become queen. She would, in any case, hold her position in the line of succession only until the new king Enrique could produce his own offspring.

  2

  The Impotent

  The Royal Court of Castile 1454–1461

  The king’s sperm was disappointing. Physicians had brought Enrique IV to orgasm by masturbating him themselves. The result was considered ‘watery and sterile’, if good enough to make an attempt at artificial insemination. Enrique’s second wife Juana of Portugal was given a thin gold tube with which to introduce the semen that her husband had produced into her vagina. ‘It was to see if [via the tube] she could receive the semen, but she could not,’ a German doctor who travelled to Castile’s court, Hieronymus Münzer, reported later. A respected and wealthy Jewish doctor called Samaya, who had been a royal physician for decades, oversaw the extraordinary procedure. History’s first recorded experiment in attempted human artificial insemination was a sign of just how desperate Isabella of Castile’s half-brother was to produce an heir to his crown.1 The problems he was experiencing were enough to generate a cruel nickname that served, also, as a metaphor for his reign – he was Enrique ‘the Impotent’.

  At Isabella’s birth her half-brother Enrique had been married to Blanca, a princess from the independent kingdom of Navarre. Long-suffering Blanca had emerged from their wedding bed ‘in the same state she had arrived in, which worried everyone’, the son of a royal physician later wrote.2 Tradition demanded that the sheets be displayed afterwards, so the humiliation of the fifteen-year-old prince and his sixteen-year-old bride must have been public. Later attempts at sex had been equally disastrous and the thirteen-year marriage was discreetly annulled on the basis of non-consummation after a hearing at a church in the small Segovian town of Alcazarén in May 1453. ‘They can freely remarry … so that the prince can become a father and the princess a mother,’ declared the Vatican-appointed official Luis de Acuña. Enrique blamed bewitchment for their problems, with his lawyers claiming that the couple suffered ‘reciprocal impotence due to malign influences’. They also wanted the king’s subjects to know that the problem was temporary and specific, presenting the evidence gathered by an ‘honest priest’ who had interviewed a number of the king’s alleged lovers in Segovia. ‘With each of them he had carnal relations just like any other potent male and his virile member was firm and d
uly produced manly seed,’ the hearing was told. Enrique’s enemies muttered that he must be homosexual. Others said his problem was physiological, caused by an unfortunately shaped penis with a bulbous head and narrow base that made it hard to maintain an erection. He had been a sickly, strange-looking youth, perhaps because his parents were first cousins.3

  Isabella was moved even further away from the royal court when Enrique came to the throne in July 1454,4 travelling with her mother Isabella of Portugal and little brother Alfonso to the walled town of Arévalo, not far from Madrigal de Las Altas Torres. There, in a sleepy Castilian backwater, the younger Isabella spent seven happy years. The two-storey Arévalo house was smaller than the palace in Madrigal de Las Altas Torres, but it was generous by the standards of such a modest town. The skyline of Arévalo, as in Madrigal, was dominated by its walls, defensive turrets and square church towers. These were often wrought in mudéjar style, the brickwork laid out in pretty patterns or with uncut stones, pebbles and mud filling regular, oblong spaces between columns and rows of red bricks. An Arab-built bridge ran across pointed arches at the bottom of the steep slope down to the River Adaja. Although well watered, the town was far from the moderating force of the sea and, sitting above the steep valleys of two rivers, it was fully exposed to the harsh weather of the meseta plateau. Long, cold winters and short, baking-hot summers came almost back to back, separated only by brief autumns and springs. It was a tranquil and famously healthy place, surrounded by fields of cereal crops, vines and carefully tended pine woods, with vegetable gardens along the river banks.5 ‘The plague has rarely been known here, because of its clean and pure air,’ wrote a later chronicler of the town. The most exotic aspect of Arévalo was its unusually large population of mudéjar Muslims (as those living in Christian Castile were known) and of Jews, perhaps a quarter of the total. These had enthusiastically taken part in the town’s celebrations when Isabella’s half-brother Enrique came to the throne, with their play-acting preceding the general cry of ‘Castile! Castile for King Enrique!’ Young princesses were not supposed to mix with such people. Visitors from northern Europe who frowned on Castile’s unusual mix of religions complained that in some places Muslims were difficult to tell apart from Christians. Castilian visitors here, and to other towns with mudéjar Muslims, obviously suffered the same problems. Attempts to make them cut their hair differently and wear blue crescent symbols so that they would be recognisable to outsiders appear to have failed. But the Alis, Yussufs, Fatimas and Isaacs of Arévalo were easily identifiable to the townsfolk themselves, with clear differences in customs, dances, days of worship and the way they cooked their food using oil rather than pig fat or lard.6