Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Isabella also needed to impose her authority on two, often rival, focuses of non-royal power – the cities and the nobles. Among the latter, the Grandees remained a political power with huge wealth and even greater self-regard. An Italian visitor was startled to find them ‘living splendidly, in great luxury … they have abundant tables and ensure that they are served with such ceremony and reverence as if they were, each one of them, a king … In a word, they make sure they are adored.’4 Yet the Grandees and other nobles were self-interested and fickle, making them faster to jump ship and easier to manipulate than the cities. The Stúñigas had been among the first of La Beltraneja’s supporters to swap sides. But her rival’s two main backers were López Pacheco and the archbishop of Toledo. If Isabella could either win them over or defeat them, Castile would be hers. The Pacheco clan was one of the most powerful families in the land and Isabella decided to divide and rule, offering pardons to some in order to weaken López Pacheco himself. The first to come over was his cousin Juan Téllez Girón, Count of Urueña, who had sworn loyalty to Isabella by May 1476. Girón’s brother Rodrigo, head of the Calatrava military order (one of the big three military orders, along with Santiago and Alcántara), followed later that month.5

  She was not so generous with López Pacheco himself or with the archbishop, whom she clearly saw as in need of serious, public reprimand. They at first thought they could negotiate, ensuring they kept much of their power while transferring allegiance to her. That was the way things had been done under Enrique IV, when their families had swapped sides continuously – often receiving rewards in the form of more lands for doing so. But Isabella would have none of that. When they refused a straight surrender, she ordered an all-out attack on them and their possessions. Whereas her husband had concentrated on persuading López Pacheco’s men to turn against their leader, presumably using the usual mixture of bribery and threats, Isabella preferred the blunter instrument of war. ‘You may make war and do as much trouble and damage to the said Marquess of Villena [López Pacheco] and the others … whom you can freely kill or wound, without punishment, and arrest people on your own authority and throw them in jail,’ she informed her followers in Murcia. ‘I will not receive them [into my service] until they give up all that they have taken and occupied from the crown in this kingdom of mine.’ Her husband could use subtlety; Isabella wanted them crushed.6

  López Pacheco soon realised that he was on the losing side and formally recognised Isabella as queen. ‘He promised to serve them in public and private from then on with complete faithfulness and loyalty, be it against the Portuguese king, his niece [La Beltraneja], the French, their allies or anyone else,’ recorded Zurita. He also pledged to raise the pennants of Isabella and Ferdinand in all his towns and castles and swear to their daughter, the infanta Isabella, as legitimate heiress. Isabella pardoned him, but also punished. He was to lose control or possession of many of his properties (especially those which had already been taken from him by force). The Pacheco clan was still one of the great families of Castile, but the damage to its power and prestige was enormous.7 It was no longer a threat to the monarchy. With this exemplary punishment, Isabella struck a death-blow to the privado system that had worked so well for Álvaro de Luna and for López Pacheco’s father, Juan. Future power would be both more diffuse, exercised by a larger body of lesser officials, and more concentrated in the hands of the monarchs they served.

  The man who had expected to be Isabella’s privado, the surly Archbishop Carrillo, also eventually gave up. He did so less magnanimously and, true to character, grumbling about his lot and the respect he was due. Juan the Great tried to intercede on behalf of his old friend, but Ferdinand warned him off, saying that Isabella would not brook interference. She had been infuriated by the archbishop’s constant duplicity and obstinacy. The sixty-six-year-old churchman was as curmudgeonly as ever, but in September 1476 he finally recognised Isabella’s authority. He was pardoned, but he also agreed to allow the monarchs to review which properties and other gifts given to his family by Enrique IV must be handed back to the crown. The archbishop went on to sign a crucial document in which he recognised that Enrique IV had died ‘without leaving legitimate sons or daughters’, thereby confirming that La Beltraneja had lost her last major supporter in Castile. Isabella shunned the archbishop completely, stinging his pride further and provoking complaints that she was not respecting her part of the bargain.8

  In mid-September, a shepherd who lived in Toro informed one of Isabella’s captains that he regularly took his sheep in and out through the high, rough terrain that protected one side of it and never encountered a Portuguese sentry when he did so. The Portuguese obviously thought the ground there was too difficult for an assault, allowing the shepherd to lead seventy of Isabella’s men secretly into the city. They opened the gates and the Portuguese soldiers fled to Cantalapiedra after first making sure that María Sarmiento, the widow of the man who had originally declared the town’s support for Juana la Beltraneja, had locked herself inside its fortress with her men. A pleased Isabella was thus able to enter the town that her husband had failed to capture, while ordering the siege of the fortress to start. The capable Alfonso of Aragon was on hand to take charge of that and Isabella herself, according to Palencia, liked to sneak through the trenches and tunnels to the fortress walls in order to see how the siege was progressing as it was bombarded with large cannon balls and peppered with fire from catapults. ‘Doña Isabella … often went into the [waterless] moat to watch the fighting,’ he said.9 Soon a message came to her from María Sarmiento, asking to be forgiven her late husband’s sins and offering to surrender this and three other fortresses in her family’s power. A month after the attack, Toro was wholly in Isabella’s hands.

  As Isabella rushed from one side of her kingdoms to another, one journey in particular was suddenly so urgent that in early December 1476 she was prepared to ride through the slippery, snowy mountain passes into New Castile. A few weeks earlier the master of the Santiago military order, Rodrigo Manrique, had died. He had been a highly capable ally, defeating López Pacheco and the archbishop of Toledo in a battle for the fortress in the order’s town of Uclés. His death left a highly important position open – one that was traditionally filled, with permission from the pope and the monarch, by a vote among the thirteen knights who formed the order’s council. Whoever controlled the order – in Pacheco’s hands during Enrique IV’s time – controlled its vast lands and the income from them. Isabella took direct possession of the order’s headquarters in the town’s monastery and forced the council, where the two main candidates looked set to make war on each another, to accept her husband Ferdinand as temporary administrator. He could sort out the order’s internal problems first and then, if necessary, help appoint a new master. Tellingly, López Pacheco was one of those who acquiesced. The major, non-royal señorio lands of New Castile – belonging to the military orders, Pacheco’s family and the archbishop – were now obedient to her commands.10

  Isabella’s authority was becoming unquestionable and in order to prove that things had changed she and Ferdinand, who had joined her again, moved on to the region’s biggest city, Toledo. As the former capital of Christian, Visigothic Spain, Toledo held great symbolic importance. Perched on a steep, granite hill surrounded on three sides by the looping River Tagus, the city was famous for the gold, silver and jewels hidden inside large, heavy chests in its cathedral – and for the numerous priests who clambered up and down its steep streets. It remained one of the most important cities in Castile, with a population of some 30,000 people squeezed inside its walls. ‘In Spain Toledo is rich, Seville is big, Santiago [de Compostela] is strong and León beautiful,’ was a ditty picked up by the German traveller Hieronymus Münzer a few years later. Toledo conserved the walls and some of the gates built by the Moors before it was taken by the Christians, in one of the most significant moments of the Reconquista, in 1085. The sovereigns organised a brilliant formal entry designed
to provoke awe and prove that even here, in one of the most divided and troublesome cities in Isabella’s kingdoms, it was they who ultimately governed all. Isabella ordered the city’s authorities to dress up in their best and most colourful silks. Some had to dust off very old finery, but they were there waiting for Isabella and Ferdinand with a broad silk canopy as the couple rode up to the city’s Visagra gate. ‘The noise of the trumpets and drums and people, in their joy, was such that it seemed that heaven and earth shone with heartfelt joy,’ reported one witness, Bachiller Palma.11 As trumpets pealed and drums were banged, a young woman awaited them at the door of the Santa María cathedral, Spain’s senior church and resting place of many of its greatest kings. She wore a golden crown on her head to show that she represented the mother of Christ.12 It was the last Friday of January 1477, but the clouds parted and the sun shone. Isabella’s jewels, which were both adornment and a statement of power, dazzled dutifully.

  Two days later Isabella returned to the imposing Gothic cathedral, deemed the most beautiful in Spain, wearing a jewel-studded gold crown and a necklace of dark rubies that, according to legend, had once belonged to King Solomon. Before them, along a nave that Münzer measured at 200 paces, were carried Ferdinand’s battlefield trophies from Toro – the pendants of Portugal’s King Afonso and his standard-bearer’s armour. These were hung above the grave of King Juan I as a sign that Castilian honour had been restored after his historic defeat at Aljubarrota in 1385. ‘And so the fall and dishonour of King Juan was avenged,’ remarked Palma.13 The message was clear and simple. Isabella was restoring Castile to rightful glory – however imaginary that past glory might be. She would right the wrongs done to her ancestors, never mind how many centuries had gone by.

  The spectacle in Toledo was typical of Isabella’s embrace of any and every kind of propaganda as a way of driving this message home. This turned modest victories into great feats, acts of usurpation into statements of legitimacy and humdrum government into magisterial acts of royal wisdom. A usurper to the crown, after all, needed to persuade everyone that she was no such thing. Isabella excelled especially in her use of the written word, though this did not require her to put pen to paper herself, since the royal chroniclers who acted as paid-for publicists had long been on hand for that. But she was the first Spanish monarch to have access to the printing press, which reached Castile in the same year that she claimed the crown. This technological leap offered previously unknown opportunities for social and intellectual control. It allowed her to reshape the past, spin the present and produce a narrative of her life and reign that would last long into the future.

  The press was quickly put into use to broadcast the results of her first great law-making events, when she gathered together the Cortes in Madrigal in 1476 and then, four years later, in Toledo. These were important events at which she and Ferdinand stamped their authority on the kingdom and set in motion their quasi-absolutist government. The procuradores from the seventeen cities represented at the Cortes were too weak to resist Isabella and her husband, though the young monarchs were still keen to win their favour as a balance against the nobility. At both Madrigal and Toledo, they imposed their will, raising money, reforming their exchequer and extending the tentacles of royal power deep into Castile’s cities, villages and countryside through wider use of the often brutal Hermandad police force. The queen appointed chroniclers to write up versions of these meetings that would impress her new subjects. These ignored the fact that at Madrigal, for example, royal-appointed procuradores were fraudulently drafted in to represent the pro-Beltraneja cities of Madrid, Córdoba and Toro. Nor did they broadcast the news that, at the Toledo meeting, Isabella’s decision to reward her faithful backer Cabrera with lands belonging to Segovia had provoked public protests in that city. Instead, the chroniclers presented these meetings as moments of great national consensus, epitomised at Madrigal by the ceremonious swearing in of the monarchs’ daughter Isabella as heir to the throne. The meetings, they made out, were proof that the entire kingdom was now behind Isabella and backed the new style of government.14

  Isabella sought not just legitimacy but also fame. In the mindset of the time, it was only saints, successful kings, famous knights and the great figures of romance fiction – including Merlin and Arthur – who lived in the popular imagination for anything greater than their lifetimes. Isabella, like many monarchs, was determined to be one of them.

  It was via her chroniclers that Isabella did most to project her propaganda into the future writing of history. There was nothing new about such ‘royal’ chroniclers, who ranged from the respectably erudite to sensationalist scoundrels who ‘would rather relate what is bizarre and extraordinary than what is true … in their belief that their story will be regarded as inconsequential if they do not tell of things that are larger-than-life’, according to the poet Fernán Péréz de Guzmán. Isabella hiked their wages by 60 per cent and encouraged creative competition to see who would produce the most useful work.15

  Those who disappointed, like the cantankerous and self-opinionated Palencia, were eventually sidelined. Those who toed the line had jobs for life, board and lodging, access to documents, the ear of the monarch and guarantees of being published. There was only one price to pay. Their version of events had to be approved by Isabella or her officials. ‘I will go to your highness in accordance with the order you have sent me, and I will bring you what is written to this point, so that you can have it examined,’ the man who took over from Palencia, Hernando de Pulgar, assured her. Others read their work out aloud over the royal dinner table, while officials commented and corrected. It was not just the facts of her own reign that Isabella was keen to massage. Spanish history itself had to be shaped, or reshaped, to fit a narrative of lost glory followed by the renewal of Castile under her messianic leadership and that of her husband. Thus it was that Diego de Valera’s Short History of Spain (Crónica Abreviada de España), which included a ruthless character assassination of Enrique IV, became one of the first popular Spanish histories – with eight reprints between 1482 and 1500. Valera, who had served both Isabella’s father and Enrique, knew full well that his task was to be, as another of the queen’s chroniclers put it, ‘an earthly evangelist’ who would make her ‘immortal’. Of the chroniclers and historians whom she and Ferdinand hired, however, none quite equalled Giovanni Nanni, whose ‘Commentaries’ invented a whole line of ancient Spanish kings based on entirely fictitious texts.16 The royal family, nevertheless, quickly adopted them as proof of the monarchs’ (and Spain’s) long pedigree.

  Some historians believe that an entire royal department, or workshop, was set up to refine the dark arts of spin and propaganda, approving their carefully polished products before they went to press.17 It is more likely, however, that Isabella’s desire for royal control of information became a natural reflex for her authoritarian administration. Some chronicles were kept in the royal archive for decades before being heavily edited and published.

  Isabella’s first visit to Toledo not only achieved her aim of broadcasting this new narrative for Castile, but also brought the final pacification of the city. Officials were ordered to disband the armed guilds and rival leagues that had long been the source of bloody rivalries which periodically erupted into gang warfare, rioting and pillaging. ‘All the citizens were accomplices to wrongdoings and crimes, and the people’s hearts were perverted,’ said Palencia. Different factions had taken it in turns to run the city or be forced into exile and fight to get back. ‘In punishment for I don’t know what sins, this great city receives such great trials and can expect to receive even worse,’ Pulgar had written after one round of bloodletting. Isabella left behind her a message to those who thought the squabbling and fighting could continue: Juan de Córdoba, a city official in charge of a fortified bridge that passed high over the River Tagus, was hanged for disobedience.18

  While royal authority had been weak in the heartlands of Castile under Enrique IV, it had been almost non-exi
stent on some outer fringes of the kingdom, like distant Galicia, in the green and rainy north-west, and the borderlands with Portugal in Extremadura. Local nobles spent much of their time squabbling over land, offering only cursory acknowledgement to royal authority or siding directly with Portugal. That was anathema to Isabella. She wanted no weakness, half-measures or turning of blind eyes, showing her disgust by confiscating all property belonging to Fernando de Pareja, a key Galician noble who had backed the Portuguese king. In Extremadura, Isabella decided that the last rebels needed dealing with personally. As in Galicia, personal ambition and alliances with Portugal had overlapped, creating a dense thicket of thorny, interconnected problems. Her council warned her not to go, claiming that she would have few places to hide if things went wrong. ‘They said that neither the king nor the queen should go to those parts of Extremadura until the lands were pacified,’ Pulgar reported. Isabella’s reply was typically decisive and belligerent. ‘To continually hear how the Portuguese, as our adversaries, and [some] Castilians, as [local] tyrants, wage war in those parts and to suffer this in silence would not be the behaviour of a good monarch, because monarchs who wish to govern must also work … It seems to me that the king my Lord should go to those comarcas on the other side of the mountain passes [that is, to Cantalapiedra and the last few small fortresses holding out near Toro] and I should go to Extremadura, so that we can deal with both of these things.’ So Isabella set out anyway, taking draconian decisions where necessary. Where she decided that local nobles were untrustworthy, she simply ordered that their forts or hill-towers be pulled down. In the cities, she found the best strategy was to ally with the major families. In Cáceres she famously settled a dispute between two families who claimed control of the city by lottery, giving the winners life-long tenure.19