Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Borgia began working on the man who was both a senior figure in the family and the weak link in its support for Enrique, the bishop of Sigüenza, Pedro González de Mendoza. Slippery, arrogant and ambitious, the bishop had his eyes set on personal grandeur. He wanted what Borgia already had – a cardinal’s red, wide-brimmed and tasselled galero hat. He had assiduously attended Enrique’s court, waiting for Pacheco to deliver on a promise to lobby for him with the previous pope.16 But the new pope favoured Juan the Great more, so now he was ready to switch sides.

  Ferdinand and Borgia eventually met Mendoza in Valencia, a city that had been in a state of almost permanent fiestas – first for Borgia and then for Ferdinand, though the collapse of a stand of seats during a bullfight had spoiled the latter. The city, presumably, had greeted both with the raucous displays of fireworks for which it was already known.17 Mendoza tried to outdo them both on his arrival with a spectacular procession preceded by two black Africans banging huge drums and a noisy band of trumpeters and other drummers. In exchange for his cardinal’s hat and a promise from Ferdinand that his family would be allowed to hold on to Castilian lands that had once belonged to the Aragonese Trastámara clan, the bishop appears to have secretly pledged the Mendozas’ allegiance to Isabella – at least when Enrique died. Borgia, who had been given powers to appoint two Spanish cardinals, also seems to have promised not to give the other one to the Mendozas’ traditional rival, the archbishop of Toledo. Mendoza now began publicly to express doubts ‘about whether Princess Juana was the king’s daughter, given the dissolute lifestyle of her mother, the queen’. The Mendozas, who had looked after the queen through her first illegitimate pregnancy, probably knew that she was pregnant with Pedro de Castilla’s child once more.18

  These were dizzying days in Valencia. Soon the city found itself celebrating again, the cathedral bells ringing out because of news that had arrived from Barcelona. After a decade of rebellion, the barceloneses had accepted Juan the Great as their king once more. Isabella was overjoyed, though her jarring letter of congratulations to her father-in-law showed a personal idea of victory as a form of vengeance and humiliation. ‘This provides you with revenge over all those who do not wish you to prosper,’ she said.19

  Borgia’s magnificent cavalcade, now boosted by the splendour of the Mendozas, travelled towards Madrid late in 1472. The proud, spendthrift archbishop of Toledo was not about to be outdone and the impact of Borgia’s stay at his palace in Alcalá de Henares was felt for miles around. Flocks of sheep and herds of cattle were driven into the town to be slaughtered and consumed. Turkeys, geese and other poultry arrived in such quantities that Palencia joked that, ‘in the villages and towns around, there wasn’t a single cock who did not look out desolately the next morning at the empty steps of the hen-house’. He worried that the Catalans and Valencians who accompanied Borgia would take away a poor impression. ‘They are the most sober of Spaniards, and this will give Castilians a reputation for gluttony,’ he wrote.20

  Borgia encouraged his hosts to spend wantonly. ‘I will not go into all the things that the Cardinal did, or failed to do, in spite of the dignity required of such high rank,’ wrote Palencia, before listing them anyway. Top of the list were: ‘His love of luxury and other uncontrolled passions … [and] the puffed-up pomposity’. It was remarkably easy for Borgia to raise vast sums. He simply sold titles, honours and remission from sins. ‘They knew that Spaniards are more attached to the titles of things than to their real substance, and so willingly spend to obtain ambitious honours … the clergy [who had come] from Rome were prodigious granting things in exchange for money, thereby debasing ancient integrity,’ grumbled Palencia. Money, not reform, was top of Borgia’s agenda as he pursued his main aim of funding a war against the Turks. ‘Nothing was refused for money; by sacrificing a large sum one could obtain whatever one wanted and the remission of sins or the gifting of unwarranted honours was proportional to the amount given. Those who had never been learned, were awarded doctorates, jettisoning all the rigour of examinations.’ A typical bull issued by Borgia promised to restore the recipient ‘to the state of purity and innocence in which you were when you were baptised’. Isabella was among the buyers.21

  More importantly, Borgia arrived with instructions to sort out the Castilian inheritance crisis, which threatened to keep an important part of Christendom engaged in civil war rather than fighting Muslim encroachment. He was able to persuade Enrique to appoint him as mediator. But Borgia hit two immovable rocks. One was the archbishop, who hated the Mendozas and looked on with envy at the new cardinal from their ranks. The other was the combination of Isabella and Ferdinand, who did not trust Pacheco or those who continually plotted to take power away from the monarchy. So Borgia headed slowly home. He had failed to resolve the problem, but crucially had helped push the Mendozas towards Isabella.22

  With progress stalled in Castile, Isabella had little reason for complaint when Ferdinand rushed off to help his father, who had followed his victory in Catalonia with an attempt at recovering the borderlands of Roussillon and Cerdagne from France. She urged Ferdinand on, even writing to Barcelona’s city council that she herself would go to Roussillon to help her seventy-four-year-old father-in-law, ‘considering his age’. The queen’s élan helped win her supporters in the Catalan port city, which wrote back thanking her for her enthusiasm. When Ferdinand arrived to help rescue his father from the besieged city of Perpignan, the French army melted away. ‘This is the start of his emperorship over [the whole of] Spain,’ wrote one admirer,23 echoing the belief that he would soon rule both Castile and Aragon.

  The chaos in Castile grew with ‘deaths, robberies, arsons, insults, uprisings, armed challenges, rapes, mobs and damage that are carried out in daily abundance’, according to Pulgar. In southern Andalusia a virtual civil war had broken out as nobles fought each other for power and similar battles were being fought across the country. ‘There is no more Castile [to fight over]. If there was, then there would be even more war.’ Pulgar saw little hope for the future and, like other Castilians, prayed for someone to deliver his country. ‘If God does not miraculously decide to rebuild this ruined temple [of Castile], don’t hope for any other solution, but rather [fear] that things will get much worse.’ Rumours of terrible omens continued to spread. Two wolves had run through the streets of Seville, it was said, with one making its way into the church of Santa Catalina and drooling spittle all over the priest’s robes before being chased out and killed with spears. It could mean no good.24

  Palencia blamed the king’s weakness and Pacheco’s meddling for the chaos. He told Isabella as much when he travelled to Salamanca to inform her and the archbishop about the chaotic situation in Seville, where nobody seemed in full control of Castile’s biggest city. ‘She understood the gravity of the situation,’ he reported. But he was shocked when she announced she was ready to go to Seville without Ferdinand and sort out the city’s problems herself. ‘I did not hide from her the many difficulties and obstacles that her plan would encounter, chiefly that a woman was not appropriate for the manly action required under such circumstances,’ he said.25 He was not ready to accept an emerging truth, that Isabella felt no need to rely on her husband and was fully prepared to act on her own.

  Things came to a head, meanwhile, between the devious Alarcón and the irascible Friar Alonso de Burgos. Alarcón’s arrogance had found an equal and opposing force in Burgos’s uncontrollable temper. Meetings involving the two men quickly turned into shouting matches. ‘The palace was aflame with rivalries and mutterings by one side or another,’ reported Palencia. They were brought before Isabella, where they got into such a violent argument that they began beating each other with their sticks. ‘They were hitting each other so furiously that it was impossible to separate them,’ reported Palencia. Isabella and her ladies had to shout for help and soon her manservants came rushing in to separate the sorcerer and the friar. Isabella was furious. ‘She gave vent to her rage by banning Fria
r Alonso from her chamber for several days and ordering that Alarcón be thrown out of the palace,’ said Palencia. The archbishop was upset but obliged to accept.26

  Palencia’s descriptions of Isabella revealed the way he, the archbishop and many others now saw the relationship between the princess and her husband. He called Isabella ‘wife of the Prince Ferdinand and legitimate heiress to these kingdoms’. She was, in other words, wife first and heiress second. In the absence of Ferdinand, they expected her to take the advice of other men. Ferdinand does not seem to have been so concerned. The royal family of Aragon had a long tradition of women, especially wives, filling in for absent kings and serving as their deputies, or ‘lieutenant generals’, in one of their several kingdoms. As a young man he had watched his formidable, self-confident mother Juana Enríquez wield power successfully as her husband’s ‘queen lieutenant’ in troublesome Catalonia. He must already have realised that Isabella was equally capable of managing her affairs without him. As if to confirm his confidence in their arrangement, a cryptic message had arrived from his wife over the summer. ‘The Castile business is now in the hands of the princes,’ it said. Ferdinand was, however, in no hurry to go back. He planned to wait until Christmas, but in late November news reached him of radical changes.27

  While Ferdinand was away, Isabella’s situation in Castile slowly began to improve. The city of Aranda de Duero declared for her and she spent time there as negotiations progressed with a new leading player, Andrés de Cabrera, one of Enrique’s senior officials and the man who had been given charge of the alcázares – or fortresses – in Madrid and Segovia. This gave him control of the royal jewels and treasury, first kept in Madrid and then moved to Segovia early in 1471 in a lengthy mule train. Cabrera’s wife Beatriz de Bobadilla had been one of those ladies-in-waiting who abandoned Isabella as soon as she made it clear she was about to marry Ferdinand. But their friendship went back many years, and she became the conduit through which Isabella now managed an extraordinary triumph, striking against Pacheco and showing that she could seize an opportunity when she saw one. Cabrera and Pacheco had fallen out after Enrique first had Madrid’s alcázar transferred into the latter’s power and then ordered that the same happen in Segovia. Pacheco then encouraged Segovia’s old Christians to attack the city’s conversos, apparently as a way of loosening Cabrera’s grip on the city. This would sow chaos and force Cabrera, himself a converso, to take sides. But Pacheco’s attempt to use the seething resentment of old Christians as a tool for seizing control of the royal treasury backfired, with Cabrera winning the day and forcing Pacheco to flee the city in May 1473.28

  This confrontation between two of Enrique’s senior counsellors suited Isabella, who had been wooing Cabrera for the better part of a year, with her negotiator Alfonso de Quintanilla riding over the mountains separating Segovia and her base in Alcalá de Henares thirty-six times. In mid-June he signed an agreement pledging to keep the city (and the royal treasure) under his personal control if Isabella and Enrique agreed to meet there and talk about reconciliation. He also made an explicit pledge of support to Isabella herself. If Enrique did not appear then he would ‘serve and follow her with this city, its alcázar and all else that I am able to’. Isabella had, in effect, just gained control of Castile’s valuable royal treasure.29 Enrique had little choice. He could lose the treasure and face a fresh rebellion from an important sector of the nobility or play along.

  Three days after Christmas 1473, Isabella rode across the freezing meseta from Aranda de Duero towards Segovia with Beatriz de Bobadilla. It was a long, tiring and cold ride. It had taken months of negotiating, and a few more adhesions to Isabella’s cause, but the following day she finally met her half-brother for the first time in almost five years. Isabella found Enrique overjoyed to see her as he once more proved his dislike of conflict. ‘After lunch he went to see her in a chamber where he ordered that she be served with the finest things that he has here, and there was great joy with the Lady. They spoke at length,’ reported the archbishop of Toledo in a letter to Juan the Great. ‘Another day he came to see her and they dined with great service and pleasure, and the lady Princess danced and he sang before her, and they enjoyed themselves long into the night, and there was impatience for the Prince to arrive; and the next day he took her around the city so that all could see her, taking her reign. This news is spreading joy across the whole kingdom.’ It was New Year’s Eve, 1473, and for the first time in seven years ordinary people learned that Castile’s royal family was at peace with itself.30

  The following day Ferdinand, who was staying near by, was invited into the city, and was amazed by the reception. It was his first ever meeting with the king. There had been ‘good fellowship and understanding’, he boasted to the councils of Valencia and Barcelona. ‘Everyone was terribly pleased,’ wrote the archbishop. ‘The lord Prince danced in his [the king’s] presence, which caused such delight that it would take too long to explain.’31 The early days of 1474 invited Castilians to imagine, once more, that their future was peace, not civil war.

  Isabella and her husband had received advice on how to deal with Enrique, starting with his taste buds. ‘When he is with his close advisers and with music, let him be and don’t attempt to do anything with him,’ read the instructions from one of her father-in-law’s allies, Vázquez de Acuña. ‘And when he comes out, they should have his food ready, almojábana cakes filled with soft cheese, butter and cheeses from Buitrago, buñuelo cakes (full of cream or cabello de ángel), pastries and similar foods, and with that they will have him as they want.’ Early in the new year the three of them rode through the streets of Segovia together before going to an Epiphany feast at the Cabrera household, where a Milanese merchant was impressed to find a woman, Beatriz de Bobadilla, in charge. The seating was carefully arranged by rank, with Enrique placed on a slightly higher platform than Isabella and Ferdinand. When the feast was over they went off to a separate room to listen to music.32

  A confusing period of negotiations, during which Isabella appeared to be about to regain the position of heiress, saw the archbishop of Toledo finally break with the princess and her husband. ‘The archbishop was not in the slightest bit happy with the [two] princes, as the cardinal [Mendoza] had come to serve them and they gave him anything he wanted in such a way that he was known to govern over them,’ reported one letter-writer. Then in October, Pacheco died, leaving a void that proved impossible to fill. Enrique IV had lost his right-hand man and friend. ‘He was sadder about this than he ever had been for anything else,’ one observer reported. Others were delighted at his passing. ‘What gluttony and hunger you had in this world for accumulating lands!’ wrote del Castillo. Isabella saw an historic change in the configuration of power and wrote to Ferdinand, who had left again for Aragon. ‘The queen and others who write to me, are urging me to go there as fast as possible,’ he told his father in a letter from Zaragoza in November.33

  Palencia blamed the grandiose and powerful alchemist Alarcón for the archbishop’s increasingly erratic behaviour, especially after he teamed up with another trickster called Beato whom he claimed to have seen float above the ground. The two men duped young girls into taking part in mysterious initiation ceremonies, Palencia claimed. ‘The prelate’s faith in him meant that he added lies to lies, increasing the archbishop’s dementia,’ he reported.34

  Soon even Pacheco’s death would seem a relatively minor event. Enrique’s failing health was not helped by his sadness. The king took to the forests near Madrid to hunt, at ease once more with wild animals and nature. But he was visibly exhausted. He had been suffering intense stomach pains, provoking rumours of poison.35 By 11 December 1474, he was in bed at Madrid’s Alcázar fortress and it became increasingly clear that the king was dying. His confessors reportedly leaned in close, waiting for him to pronounce the name of his heiress – but he either did not say or, out of fear for their lives, they later refused to broadcast his words. According to one version of his death, he beg
ged the doctors for more time. ‘Won’t your knowledge allow me to live two more hours?’ he asked. ‘No,’ they replied. Half an hour later he passed away.

  On paper, at least, the crown now belonged to little Juana, still referred to by doubters as ‘the queen’s daughter’ rather than ‘the princess’. The ceremony in front of Cardinal Albi at the Lozoya Valley had made that perfectly clear. Enrique’s oversized, dishevelled corpse was carried off on rough wooden boards, with no attempt made to embalm him. Even in death he somehow avoided the royal pomp that he so disliked during his life. The ever spiteful Palencia mocked his modest funeral as ‘miserable and abject’. The body, dug up for inspection in the twentieth century, was buried in his everyday clothes and leather gaiters. The unusually broad hip bones and large, rounded skull confirm the physical oddness of a gentle king whose hatred of conflict and excessive kindness had, cruelly, made him a terrible ruler. Among all the turmoil and complaining, however, Castile’s economy had boomed and civil war had been avoided for the eight previous years. Isabella had watched and learned. She did not share Enrique’s emollient spirit or weakness for half-measures. Nor did she plan to make the same mistakes.36

  10

  Queen

  Plaza Mayor, Segovia, 13 December 1474

  Isabella was a picture of grief. The day after her half-brother’s death she was the chief mourner at Segovia’s cathedral, then just opposite the Alcázar, as the city marked the passing of a king who had ruled for twenty years. She had donned the strict black outfit of mourning. Some later claimed that she wept. Isabella may, indeed, have spilt a few tears of genuine sorrow. She and her half-brother had always enjoyed one another’s company, even if there had been few opportunities to do so. Her later memories of being treated cruelly in his house centred on Queen Juana, not on Enrique himself. ‘She was upset and saddened, and with good reason, because she not only esteemed him as her brother, but also considered him like a father,’ reported one observer.1