Civil war, meanwhile, dragged on. Battles were few and far between and, by the standards of other confrontations in Europe, remarkably low in casualties. With royal authority now either completely absent or contested, the kingdom descended into a series of mostly local feuds. Some were old rivalries come back to life, others reflected the new conflict between the king and the Grandees or the growing intolerance towards conversos, while rogue elements and ambitious nobles stole or claimed whatever they could. Anti-converso rioting broke out in Toledo, which had long been a focus of rivalry between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Christians, with both sides taking up arms and fire consuming part of the city. Two converso leaders were hanged by the mob. ‘They opposed the church and so it was ordered that they be hung by their feet, head down,’ a crier called out as their naked bodies were paraded around the city. Nobles switched this way and that, some trying to stay on both sides at once. Pacheco was the master of this. ‘With one foot planted on the shoulder of one king and the other foot planted on the shoulder of the other king he pisses over us all,’ a fellow noble complained.14
A battle at Olmedo in August 1467 produced a narrow but inconclusive victory for Enrique. It was, by the standards of this messy, still inchoate war, a big battle – but only forty-five soldiers died. The archbishop of Toledo, leading Alfonso’s army, was wounded. A month later Alfonso turned the tide, riding into Segovia almost without a fight after traitors opened the gates to his troops. The shockwaves soon reached the San Martín palace. A frightened Queen Juana dashed for the cathedral and then for the fortified safety of the mighty Alcázar, a fairytale fortress with pointed towers which crowned an unassailable spur jutting out over the confluence of the Eresma and Clamores rivers. But the sixteen-year-old Isabella found, for almost the first time, that she had to make her own decision. Would she go with Juana, or back her brother against her half-brother? This does not seem to have been too difficult to resolve. Isabella’s loyalty lay firmly with her childhood companion from Arévalo rather than with the weak, if kindly, half-brother who was twenty-six years her senior. ‘I stayed in my palace, against the queen’s will, in order to leave her dishonest custody that was bad for my honour and dangerous for my life,’ Isabella explained later in life, adding more than a touch of righteous drama. Her meeting with Alfonso, who appeared later at the San Martín palace, was a happy one, according to the chroniclers – ‘both were contented, with joyous faces’.15
Backing Alfonso was a life-changing decision, though she could not know it. It was also brave. No one knew how the civil war would end, or who would suffer most. But, for the first time, Isabella now also showed her mettle. She would go with her brother, but only on certain conditions. These she spelled out quite clearly. Alfonso’s most important counsellors, including Pacheco and the archbishop of Toledo, were to sign a document agreeing that she would not be forced into a marriage she did not want. She also demanded that she be allowed to return to her mother’s house in Arévalo.16 She had lived with Juana in Enrique’s court for six years, but the modest dowager’s palace and the mudéjar towers of Arévalo were her real home.
Enrique had lost Segovia, his favourite city. It was too much. He began negotiating once more with Pacheco and his allies, who demanded that Queen Juana be handed over to them. This was the end of Juana’s political career and she responded by living up to the reputation already attributed to her. She began an enduring relationship with Pedro de Castilla, nephew of the man whose charge she was put into – the notoriously untrustworthy archbishop of Seville, Alfonso de Fonseca. Now Juana really did fall pregnant by her lover Pedro de Castilla. She tried to hide the pregnancy under a special wire contraption, but there was no point. A son, Andrés, was born. She did not stop there, for a second son would be called Apóstol. Such brazenly scandalous behaviour would fuel Isabella’s later furious assault on her half-sister-in-law’s reputation, but Enrique did not seem too upset and continued to send his wife gifts, including a silver service and even a bed.17
Isabella, meanwhile, was enjoying her return to Arévalo. When Alfonso turned fourteen on 17 December 1467, they celebrated the birthday in their mother’s house, with Isabella organising the mummery and dressing up as one of the muses. She asked Gómez Manrique, the great court poet, to write the verses that she and her ladies acted out for her brother. They remained there for several months, but an outbreak of plague saw Alfonso, accompanied by Isabella and a body of troops, flee Arévalo at the end of June 1468.18
They stopped for the night at the village of Cardeñosa, where Alfonso was served breaded trout. That night he slept badly and the following morning was unable to talk. Isabella stayed by his bedside for part of the next four days. As the hours went by, and doctors tried to bleed him, it became clear that her brother was dying. Isabella had time to discuss with Pacheco and the archbishop of Toledo what should happen next. She herself wrote letters on 4 July. ‘According to what the doctors say, and as a result of the sins of this kingdom, his life is in such great danger that he is unlikely to survive,’ she said. ‘And you all know that in the moment that the Lord decides to take his life, succession of the kingdoms and royal lands of Castile and León will, as his legitimate heiress and successor, pass to me.’19
5
Bulls
Toros de Guisando, 19 September 1468
It was a cool, clear day in the open land at the foot of the Cerro de Guisando, a first, gentle rampart rising towards the southern side of central Spain’s soaring Gredos mountains. Four giant, granite bulls stood among what, given the time of year, must have been a parched landscape of yellowed grass and bush, the trees still full leaved and a snaking line of greenery marking the course of a narrow, gently gurgling stream. This was a special place. A handful of contemplative Jeronymite monks had chosen to take refuge from the world in a small, rustic monastery on a wooded hillside near by. No one knew what the mysterious, long-backed bulls were doing here, or who had so carefully and laboriously carved them out of massive blocks of raw granite. Their presence spoke of physical power and centuries of unwritten history. It was an appropriate place for Isabella to seal an historic agreement.
The princess rode a handsomely garnished mule. It was led by the archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso Carrillo, who walked unwillingly and suspiciously ahead of her as they approached the king. The bellicose archbishop had come with 200 of his own lancers. But this meeting was not about war. It was about bringing peace to a kingdom that had lived in a state of anguished uncertainty for three years. It was a peace that Isabella had chosen and which, despite her youth and dependence on others, bore the stamp of self-confidence and assertiveness that some already found unsettling in a person of her sex and age.
Enrique arrived with far greater pomp, accompanied by more than a thousand horsemen. The fanfares blasted out by his trumpeters must have sent the terrified local wildlife scurrying into holes, lairs and thickets, or flocks of startled birds flying into the distance. The show of might was real, since Enrique had the power to destroy Isabella and her supporters. Some wished he would. But he, too, preferred peace, even if that meant bending to the will of the young woman approaching him on her splendid mule. He was tired of trouble and, anyway, had long shaped his behaviour around the avoidance of conflict, armed or otherwise. Isabella dismounted. She approached Enrique, bent down and made to kiss his hand. It was a public sign of obedience, designed to be seen by all. Enrique, following both custom and a pre-agreed script, signalled that it was not necessary. The message was clear. Isabella was not going to challenge Enrique for his crown, but she was not to be humiliated.1
There were three other acts to this public performance in September, 1468, that would change the history of Spain. First of all a letter written by Enrique was read out. In it, he recognised that Isabella was now the rightful heir to his throne. Enrique then asked all those present to swear recognition of Isabella’s position as heiress, while the papal nuncio Antonio Giacomo Venier freed them from their previous oath of allegi
ance to La Beltranaja. His words bore the authority of the pope himself. All those present then pledged loyalty to Enrique. Carrillo, at his own insistence, was the last to do so.2
The obstinate archbishop had tried hard to dissuade Isabella from making this agreement with Enrique, arguing against it right up until the night before. Carrillo was primate of Spain and a formidable warrior priest who wore a bright scarlet cloak with a white cross over his armour when leading his men into battle. His archbishopric brought with it huge temporal power, with 19,000 vassals in its extensive lands, as well as twenty-one castles and an army of 2,000 men. He was also an inveterate plotter and occasional ally of Aragon’s King Juan the Great. Yet Isabella had held firm against one of the most powerful men in Castile, effectively rejecting the military might he and the extended Carrillo clan offered. In order to soften the archbishop’s sense of humiliation and calm his notoriously bad temper she had, after morning mass, signed a written pledge that she would make sure Enrique and his men did not punish Carrillo or his men for their loyalty to her. This decision, and the others she had taken during negotiations over the agreement, provided those involved with a first glimpse of the strong personality of the young woman whom fate had suddenly thrust into the front line of Castilian affairs.3
Isabella may have uttered a private prayer that morning during mass. In later years she would, through her propagandists, claim that it was this: ‘If I do have this right, give me the sense and energy, with the help of Your arm, to pursue and achieve it and bring peace to this kingdom.’4 The ‘sense and energy’ provide a useful guide to how Isabella saw herself, at least in retrospect. Modesty about her abilities did not rank as a major concern. The ‘arm’ she referred to belonged to the entity she thought had led her to this position, God. Divine help or, rather, divine approval of her actions was to become a common stance in Isabella’s life. That underpinned her self-confidence and made false – or even real – humility unnecessary. A usefully circular argument was shaping in her head. If she had been appointed the future queen of Castile, that was God’s choice. And if God had chosen her to do his work, then she only had to abide by his tenets in order for him to approve of her actions, which were divinely sanctioned. In the wrong hands, that could be a recipe for tyranny. The only problem, indeed, was knowing exactly what those tenets were. The judgement day that came after death was, she knew, both real and frightening. For guidance on that, she turned away from worldly churchmen like the archbishop to a series of stern friars, several of them also her confessors, who shunned mundane pleasures and embraced the strictest versions of Christian morality. During her sojourns in Segovia she had already encountered one of them, the sulphurous prior of Spain’s oldest Dominican monastery, the Convento of Santa Cruz – Tomás de Torquemada. He had clear ideas about the ills that afflicted the kingdom. They included the Jews, those conversos who he believed were still secret Jews, soothsayers, simony in the church and corrupt or inept city officials.5 The kingdom was sick, he told her, and needed purifying. Only strong medicine would achieve that.
There were a few notable absences at the Guisando bulls. Neither six-year-old Juana la Beltraneja, who had been stripped of her rightful place as heiress, nor her mother Queen Juana were there. Their protectors from the powerful Mendoza family, who often acted more like jailers, protested vehemently against the agreement. A few weeks earlier, Queen Juana had been the protagonist of a fairytale flight from the town of Alaejos. She was now unable to hide the fact that she was seven months pregnant by her lover Pedro de Castilla, yet her presence had been needed at court as negotiations over her daughter’s future progressed. Enrique sent for her in mid-August, but she claimed to need a bigger, better escort befitting her queenly status. Reports about what happened next are as colourful and unreliable as the undoubtedly accurate reason (that she now really had cuckolded the king) for her decision to flee. According to one account, a few nights later she was lowered down the town’s walls in a basket, which toppled over as it neared the ground. The heavily pregnant Juana, who survived the fall relatively unscathed, was scooped up by Pedro de Castilla and a young friend who had been waiting with horses. They rode off through the dark and eventually installed themselves in Buitrago, a town held by the Mendozas.6
Juana had placed herself in mortal danger with this liaison. Women who strayed could be killed by their husbands, fathers, brothers or cousins to save the family honour. A court in the southern city of Murcia, for example, had pardoned a man called Diego del Poyo for murdering his wife after she slept with another man. ‘Given the reputation of that bad woman, he had very good reasons for doing so,’ it said. But Enrique displayed neither the interest nor the malice needed to pursue his wife. Perhaps he really had encouraged her to take lovers in the past and was afraid she would now speak out. Or perhaps he felt guilty about breaking the most important political and sentimental bond of their marriage – little Juana, whose paternity he had publicly claimed as his, whatever the biological truth. The queen’s behaviour may, in fact, have been convenient for him as it was an impediment to her defending herself and her daughter. Juana’s baby boy, Andrés, would not be born until November. The situation was so extraordinary that Castile’s law code simply did not contemplate the possibility of a pregnant, adulterous queen.7
The agreement struck at Guisando came after a rapid volte-face by Isabella. Some of her supporters had assumed, on Alfonso’s death, that she would proclaim herself queen. Isabella herself had, after all, sent out letters while waiting for her brother to die, stating that this was her intention. Immediately after his death, however, her letters had become less assertive about a direct claim on the throne. ‘I am the legitimate heiress,’ she wrote to the authorities in Murcia, a pro-Alfonso city. ‘Hold this city for me as you held it for my brother the king.’ They were also to send counsellors, however, to help decide what should happen next. Murcia responded with an elaborate funeral ceremony, banning townspeople from singing, playing music or wearing gaudy clothes. The city’s dignitaries sat by an empty, ceremonial death-bed before dressing themselves in coarse woollen cloth and carrying a coffin through the streets to the main church. The torchlit procession – accompanied by the sound of wailing – included five ceremonial shields, one of which was carried by representatives of the city’s Jews and another by its Moors. Castile’s cities and the local oligarchies who ran them formed a political stratum of their own, much like the nobles or the church. Those that had backed Alfonso remained largely expectant, waiting to see what would happen. Murcia set up a provisional council while Jerez chose ‘not to raise the flag of a king or a queen until all are in agreement’.8
Realism had quickly forced Isabella into avoiding a head-on confrontation with her half-brother. Now aged seventeen, she was in the hands of the same puppeteer nobles who had manipulated her brother to their own ends. With no money of her own and no guarantee that the rebels would automatically transfer their support to a woman, she chose caution, good sense and – within the limitations of her difficult situation – the most independent route possible. From now on she would limit her claim to that of ‘princess and legitimate heir in these kingdoms of Castile and León’. She would be heiress to King Enrique – though, with typical and inconsistent obstinacy, she would always insist that her brother Alfonso had been the rightful king.9
Instead of proudly, if foolishly, challenging her half-brother for the crown, Isabella elected to fight a different sort of battle. She wanted to be able to choose her own husband. It was a sign of her precocious political awareness that she so quickly identified this as the crucial issue for all involved. Her most powerful backer, the archbishop of Toledo, was in cahoots with Juan the Great of Aragon, who had already identified Isabella as the ideal bride for his son and heir, Ferdinand. But Pacheco, who did much of the negotiating for Enrique, secretly hoped to marry his own daughter Beatriz to Ferdinand, thereby advancing his family’s status even further. Once more, he now sought to divide, confuse and come out top
. The best way to end the rebellion, he told Enrique, was to recognise Isabella as his heiress, then marry her off to a foreign prince and send her away to a distant court.10 All Enrique needed to do was ensure that he maintained the right to decide on her husband.
Isabella soon became aware of the rivalries between the nobles for control over her and, above all, the choice of her future husband. Pacheco warned her against the archbishop, who also happened to be his uncle, whom he deemed ‘obstinate by nature and stiff-necked’. The latter, meanwhile, warned her that his nephew was secretly planning to marry her off to Afonso of Portugal. While all around her plotted ways to wed her to their favourite contender, Isabella told her half-brother that she was happy for him to search for a husband for her, but the last word would have to be hers. And the agreement must be in writing. ‘She must marry whoever the king decides on, with the volition of the lady princess and by agreement with the council [made up] of the archbishop [of Seville], the Master [of the Santiago order, Pacheco] and the Count [of Plasencia, Álvaro de Stúñiga],’ one version of the agreement states.11 That allowed Isabella, Enrique and Pacheco’s gang of Grandees to walk away each convinced that they, and they alone, would eventually decide on Isabella’s husband.
The change of heiress from Juana to Isabella was much more than a question of oaths and pledges. Isabella insisted that she be given the full rights and properties due to an heir to Castile’s throne. That meant she became princess of Asturias, the traditional title held by the heir. With the title came lands and income. She was also given rights over the cities of Avila, Ubeda, Alcaraz and Huete, and the towns of Molina, Medina del Campo and Escalona and the income from them. Isabella’s new position made her, at least in theory, financially independent and gave her a personal power base. All this had formed part of the negotiations done by messengers and proxies, with last-minute alterations made after Isabella and Enrique had installed themselves in two nearby towns, Cebreros and Cadalso, that were near to the Guisando bulls.12
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