Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Isabella of Portugal went into severe decline after Juan’s death, reportedly shutting herself ‘in a dark room, condemning herself to silence’. Palencia talks of her ‘growing madness’. Her daughter was protective but seems to have responded to her mother’s derangement by growing a hard, protective skin and attaching herself to the simple, tidy certainties provided by religion, tradition and social hierarchy. The appearance in Arévalo of yet another Portuguese Isabella – the young infanta’s widowed grandmother Isabella de Barcelos – mitigated the pain and confusion of growing up with such a deep depressive. Barcelos was part of a self-confident Portuguese royal family that was enjoying the fruits of international conquest thanks to its intrepid explorers and navigators. Her Castilian son-in-law had esteemed her so highly that she became one of his counsellors. Her Portuguese family were all that little Isabella would eventually seek to be – noble, conquering and devout. Barcelos appears to have been the most influential of the women who oversaw Isabella’s early childhood, giving her an unshakeable sense of status and confidence in her own abilities. It was here, too, in the protected environment of the modest U-shaped palace with its closed patio and garden in Arévalo, that she developed a strong sisterly attachment to her childhood playmate Alfonso. The measure of Isabella’s overall happiness in Arévalo was the bitterness with which she later recalled their departure.7

  Young Isabella was surrounded by Portuguese retainers, but one of Luna’s men – Gonzalo Chacón, another propagandist8 for royal supremacy – was put in charge of her education. He may have reminded the young girl of her father’s reasons for executing Luna, which had included ‘usurping my royal pre-eminence’ and ignoring ‘royal superiority’.9 She must also have heard the local legends of how Arévalo had been the home of Hercules, who would star-gaze from here into the clear meseta night, or how a nearby palace had housed Spain’s Christian Gothic kings before the Muslim armies swept across the country in the eighth century.10 Castile’s poets and historians wrote wistfully about those virile, valiant and vice-free kings, claiming they were descendants of Hercules himself and awaiting the moment when God would allow their country to reclaim its natural glory. Castile’s fall from grace had been divine punishment for sins that, with the Moors still occupying the large southern kingdom of Granada, had not been fully purged. Where Juan II had failed, they hoped, Enrique might now succeed. Isabella may have enjoyed the romantic tales of Castile’s past, but she would not have seen them as an educational lesson for a future monarch. She was, after all, just a girl. Not only did she have two brothers, but in the unlikely event that she were to inherit Castile’s crown, a husband could be expected to govern for her.11

  Like his father Juan II, Enrique also relied on a privado to do the work of governing – in this case the greedy and ambitious Juan Pacheco, Marquess of Villena, who had ruled over him since he was a boy. Pacheco had ‘encouraged the prince’s lust, allowing him to fall into all kinds of lascivious behaviour and blindly following degenerates into depravity’,12 wrote one of his many detractors. Pacheco had been placed at Enrique’s side by Álvaro de Luna and came to imitate him in many respects, while also learning from his errors.13 Where Luna preached an early form of royal absolutism, with himself as the wielder of the monarch’s power, Pacheco claimed to be the leader of a faction of nobles who would help the king rule in a more collegiate and allegedly time-honoured fashion. His real interest was personal enrichment, using conspiracy, chaos and a constant reshuffling of alliances with the grasping Grandees as his main tools.

  Pacheco soon fixed a second marriage for Enrique. His new wife was another Iberian princess, Juana of Portugal. She was just sixteen, a noted beauty and, like so many other European princesses, a simple bargaining chip used to seal an alliance with her brother, King Afonso V. Some saw a marriage between beauty and beast. Enrique proclaimed that he wanted her to bear children who would ‘add greater authority to my royal status’, but he also took the precaution of abolishing the law that made royal wedding nights a public spectacle.14 A court wit joked that the king would never father a child and ‘laughed at that farcical marriage night, saying there were three things he wouldn’t bend over to pick up in the street: the king’s virility, the Marquess’s pronunciation [the stuttering Pacheco]15 and the Archbishop of Seville’s gravity’.16

  Enrique was twenty-six years older than his half-sister, Isabella. He was a kindly, shy and cultured man with a penchant for tragic ballads.17 A gifted singer and musician, collector of exotic animals and a superb horseman, he was temperamentally unsuited to the public role of a king. There was nothing he liked more than to hide himself away with his animals or lose himself deep inside a thick forest, accompanied by his loyal personal guard of mudéjar Muslims. A childhood accident had left him with a deformed nose, squashed flat on to his face, but he was tall, athletic and blue-eyed with a bushy beard and fair hair. To his admirers this made him look like a fierce lion. To his enemies he looked ‘like a monkey’.18 Enrique suffered a form of acromegaly or gigantism, which left him with outsized hands and feet along with an abnormally large head and thick facial features. His massive forehead stood above strangely staring eyes and wide, strong cheeks that flattened out as they descended into a long, unwieldy jaw.19 He was a king with no airs and limited self-esteem, who rejected the daily trappings of royalty. ‘He never allowed people to kiss his hand, and made little of himself … He dressed simply, in woollen cloth, with long tunics and hooded cloaks: royal insignias and ceremony were not to his taste,’ said Diego Enríquez del Castillo, his admiring official chronicler. A portrait by a German traveller showed him in a simple, hooded cloak and riding boots, two lynx-like felines at his feet and his head covered with a red cap. He was, in short, a gentle giant – intimidating but cripplingly overwhelmed by his own physical defects and only properly happy when out of public view. Nor was he terribly interested in his half-siblings, with Isabella seeing little of the king in the early years of her life.20

  Pacheco was an able, if self-serving, privado and together he and Enrique made a promising start. The end of the Hundred Years War in France brought increased trade and a small economic boom as they renewed Castile’s traditional French alliance.21 Enrique also poured money into a new war against the Moorish kingdom of Granada, which was as much a point of honour as it was an opportunity for territorial growth and personal enrichment for the crown, the lesser aristocracy and the families of the Grandees. It also offered wider prestige in a Europe traumatised by the loss of Constantinople to the Muslim Turks the year before Enrique came to the throne.

  His greatest problem was a powerful and wealthy faction of the Grandees. As Álvaro de Luna had stood on that stage waiting for his head to be hacked off in Valladolid a few years earlier, he had spotted one of Enrique’s gentleman grooms in the crowd. ‘Tell the prince to give better rewards to his servants than the king has ordered for me,’ he said. Enrique did exactly that, giving away to the Grandees and others much of his royal wealth – especially the income from the so-called realengo lands and towns that belonged directly to the crown. As their wealth and power grew, so his declined. Greedy Pacheco pulled the strings, took his cut and made sure his family rose above the rest. Enrique’s war on Granada, for which he raised a large army, was less adventurous than many liked. He preferred attrition to open warfare and set-piece battles. ‘He was pious rather than cruel and loved his people’s lives more than the spilling of blood, saying that a man’s life was priceless,’ according to del Castillo. ‘He preferred to inflict damage on his enemies little by little, rather than see his people killed or wounded.’22 This was a sensible strategy, but some thought it cowardly, especially as the Moors were refusing to pay the tributes that Castile normally demanded from Granada.

  All the time Pacheco and the other nobles schemed behind his back, encouraging chaos. In the wilder, northern fringes of his kingdom, in rainy Galicia and along the storm-swept Cantabrian seaboard, arch-priests, bishops, nobles and lesser gentlem
en fought each other for land or took control of royal territory with virtual impunity.23 Similar chaos ruled in the south-eastern frontier lands of Murcia, while Grandees and other local strongmen tussled with one another for power over southern Seville and much of Andalusia. And where royal power was weak and nobles were busy fighting one another, crime flourished, justice was absent and people were unhappy.

  Those looking for reasons to criticise Enrique found many, especially his lack of regal grandeur. ‘He covered that lovely hair with common hats, hoods or tasteless caps,’ said one of his chief detractors, Isabella’s future chronicler Alfonso de Palencia. ‘His great height was vulgarised … by clothes that were beneath his dignity and shoes that were even shabbier.’ We do not know what Isabella was told about her half-brother, but his slovenly, unregal appearance is unlikely to have impressed her proud Portuguese grandmother. There were even rumours that his commitment to Christianity was suspect and he was accused of allowing his Muslim personal guards to ‘snatch young men and women from their parents’ arms and corrupt them’.24 Muslim families liked to bring him delicacies as he travelled, pandering to the king’s sweet tooth. ‘They came out to meet him with figs, raisins, butter, milk and honey, which the king ate with delight, seated on the ground in the Moorish fashion. In this, as in all things, he adapted himself to their habits, and that made them feel stronger while, at the same time, the concerns of our own people grew and grew,’25 Palencia wrote with evident disdain. The Muslims in Enrique’s kingdoms, like Castile’s Jews, fell under his personal protection, which he maintained despite growing popular pressure against them both. A populist preacher called Friar Alonso de Espina whipped up hatred with invented tales about kidnapped Christian children having their hearts torn out by Jews, who burned them to ashes, mixed them with wine and drank them.26 The age-old ‘blood libel’ against the Jews – that they used the blood of murdered Christian children in secret rituals – which had been circulating around Europe for centuries despite attempts by various popes to quash it, thus made its way into Castile.27 ‘Just as the devil has a thousand ways of causing harm, so has the Jew, his son,’ Espina proclaimed.28

  Nobles seeking to stir up trouble also encouraged attacks29 on the large community of conversos or ‘new’ Christians, who were mostly descended from Jewish families that had converted en masse during outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence sixty years earlier. Here again, Friar Espina30 fanned the flames of hatred towards what, for blood reasons, some still saw as a group that formed part of the ‘Jewish race’.31 A fellow friar, Fernando de la Plaza, even claimed to have collected 100 foreskins from secret converso circumcision ceremonies.32 ‘Friar Fernando told the King that he did not have the foreskins in his possession, but that the matter was related to him by people of authority … but refused to mention their names, so that it was all found to be a lie,’ del Castillo said.33 As popular worry about ‘secret Jews’ grew, the converso head of the Jeronymite order, Friar Alfonso de Oropesa, was asked to investigate their existence in the archbishopric of Toledo. He concluded that the few cases of so-called ‘judaising’ (following Jewish rites and beliefs) were mostly due to ignorance, while complaints were largely the result of envy or the economic self-interest of so-called ‘old’ Christians.34

  As the years dragged on, Enrique’s power disintegrated and chaos spread. The lack of a direct heir did not help. Then, seven years after he had married Juana of Portugal, his wife finally became pregnant. No one expressed surprise, at least in public, at the king’s sudden ability to sire children. Perhaps the experiments in artificial insemination had worked. Castile celebrated, but for his half-sister Isabella this was one of the most traumatic moments of her life. If Juana was to give birth to a new heir, Enrique wanted any challengers kept close. Isabella and her little brother Alfonso, now aged ten and seven, were ordered to leave Arévalo and join his court. ‘Alfonso and I, who were just children at the time, were inhumanely and forcibly torn from our mother’s arms and taken into Queen Juana’s power,’ she complained later.35

  3

  The Queen’s Daughter

  Segovia, 1461–1464

  Queen Juana swore loudly and grabbed doña Guiomar de Castro, the rising star of Castile’s court and her husband’s formal lover, by the hair. With her other hand the queen picked up a chapín, the clog-like, wooden-soled platform shoes that she wore to paddle through muddy courtyards and that usefully added several inches to her normal height. Then she brought the heavy shoe crashing down on Guiomar’s head. ‘She hit her many times on the head and shoulders,’ one chronicler reported.1 Life at court, the ten-year-old Isabella would soon find, was considerably more eventful than it had been in sleepy, safe Arévalo.

  Isabella and Alfonso had waved goodbye to their mother and grandmother late in 1461, travelling the forty miles from Arévalo to Segovia through the bitter winter cold.2 It is impossible to know how her mother coped with the separation. In years to come Isabella would visit whenever she could, but in the short term the ten-year-old girl was in Queen Juana’s hands. Later in her life, Isabella would hold the queen up as a sort of evil stepmother figure, abusing the young girl who came to her court, though Enrique’s official chronicler del Castillo – whose role was to glorify his king as far as possible – claimed otherwise. ‘She was always treated with love and sisterliness,’ he wrote.3

  Segovia was a far bigger city than Arévalo, perched on a windswept hill with an impressive Roman aqueduct bearing water from hillside to hillside on rows of double arches ninety-five feet high. The change in atmosphere, from protected, childish naivety to a world of sophisticated political and sexual intrigue, was absolute. Isabella’s sister-in-law Juana had brought with her to the city’s San Martín palace a group of young, aristocratic Portuguese ladies-in-waiting famed for flirtatious behaviour and outlandish clothes.4 ‘Never before has such a group of girls so totally lacking in discipline been seen,’ the curmudgeonly chronicler Palencia reported.

  Their provocative dress titillated, an effect that was magnified even more by their provocative words. Giggling was a frequent part of their conversation … They gorged themselves day and night with greater abandon than if they had been in a tavern. Sleep took up the rest of their time, apart from that which they set aside for cosmetics and perfumes; and they made no secret of doing that, but went uncovered in public from their nipples down to their belly button, painting themselves with white make-up from their toes, ankles and shins to their upper thighs and groin so that, when they fell from their horses – as happened all too frequently – their limbs would shine with uniform whiteness.5

  Palencia’s unfettered misogyny and desire to destroy Enrique IV’s reputation undoubtedly made him exaggerate the plunging necklines and flirtatious behaviour of these teenage Portuguese damas, but neutral observers were also shocked. ‘The queen of Castile is here. And with her are many ladies in varying headgear: one wore a bonnet, the other a carmagnole jacket, another’s hair was loose, or in a hat, or done up with a piece of silk or a Moorish turban,’ one stunned Navarran noble reported. ‘Some carry daggers, others have swords or even lances, darts and Castilian capes. I, sir, have never seen so many outfits before.’

  Isabella soon discovered that life at Juana of Portugal’s court in the solid, if higgledy-piggledy San Martín palace, was boisterously competitive, but it was also fun. The queen loved partying and believed, like many, that a royal court should do so intensely. That made her an attractive social counterweight to her withdrawn, misanthropic husband – who kept one half of the palace for his own household. Courtly love, the theatrical and ritualistic game of conquest and rapture played out in royal courts across Europe, was an essential part of the entertainment and intrigue. It was, at least in theory, a safe form of recreation. Courtly love relied not on physical seduction, but on elaborate rituals and exaggerated declarations of infatuation. These were as much about posturing as about passion. Isabella saw plenty of it and, despite the routine condemnations of Juana’s infamo
us court by later chroniclers who were in her pay, never expressed dislike or disapproval. One of her envoys famously had to be carried out of an English banquet after fainting at the sight of the lady he was wooing. It was, too, a perfectly honourable pastime for married men and women. Isabella’s own heart raced fastest to tales of the mortal dangers faced by knights in battle, but poets and troubadours had long told tales of lovesickness and hopeless adoration, and she certainly did not complain of being the love focus for an outpouring of Spanish chivalric poetry later in her life.6