Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  The most important challenge left was now Andalusia, one of the youngest regions of the kingdom, reconquered from the Moors in a process that began early in the thirteenth century and home to almost a fifth of Castile’s population. It was a frontier region, with its south-eastern border stretching along the limits of the Moorish kingdom of Granada. It was also fertile and wealthy. Not only was Seville Christian Spain’s biggest city, but both Córdoba and Jaen were among the largest in the land. Two nobles, the Duke of Medina Sidonia and the Marquess of Cadiz, continued to dispute power in and around Seville. The former had nominally backed Isabella’s claim to the crown, but they were more interested in their own rivalry and played little part in the civil war. Once again, some counsellors thought Andalusia was far too big a task for Isabella to tackle on her own. ‘Some criticised the queen for going there before don Ferdinand, and predicted that a woman would not have sufficient resolve to deal with such grave matters, despite her abilities,’ wrote Palencia. But they had said much the same about Extremadura and Isabella’s successes had stoked her natural audacity. She set off, once more, without her husband.20

  17

  Rough Justice

  Seville, July 1477–October 1478

  The people of Seville were truly sorry. Now many of the city’s senior men, those who had not yet fled, stood before Isabella and begged for clemency. The queen sat impassively above them on a raised throne covered in gold cloth in one of the great rooms of the Royal Alcázar, the impressive fortress built by the Moors before the city had been captured more than two centuries earlier. The high clergy and senior officials sat in rows below Isabella as she prepared to hear the scared sevillanos make their excuses. The bishop of Cadiz, Alfonso de Solís, spoke on their behalf, admitting that they had indulged in murder, violence and robbery during Enrique IV’s reign, and afterwards, while the civil war dragged on during the first years of her reign. They were now glad that Isabella had arrived in July 1477 in order to impose order. The public executions of the worst offenders and the number of people who had fled before they could be caught were all proof of that. They just wished, they told her, that she would be less severe.1

  ‘These gentlemen and peoples of your city come here before your royal highness to inform you that there was as much joy when you arrived in these parts, as there is now terror and horror caused by the great rigour with which your ministers are executing justice, which has converted all their pleasure into sadness, all their joy into fear and all their delight into anguish,’ he said. Solís admitted that the law had sometimes been made a fool of in previous decades, but placed the blame on the constant warring in the city between the Duke of Medina Sidonia and the Marquess of Cadiz and their followers. ‘We cannot deny that, in those dissolute times, some killings, robberies, violent attacks and other excesses were committed by many people of this city and its lands, which were caused by the malice of the times and not dealt with by the king’s justice: and there are so many of these that we think there must be few homes in Seville that are free of sin, either by committing or covering it up,’ the bishop admitted. ‘But if at that time [the city] was about to lose itself through the lack of justice, now it is lost and fallen because of the great rigour of your judges and ministers: about which these people now appeal for your royal highness’s clemency and compassion, and with the tears and sobbing that you now hear they humble themselves before you … and ask that your royal stomach take pity on their pains, their exile, their poverty and their anguish and the trials that they suffer continuously, staying away from their homes out of fear of your justice.’ The bishop added a short lecture on the unchristian nature of excessive punishment. ‘Too much rigour in justice creates fear, fear creates upheaval and upheaval causes despair and sin,’ he said. ‘Excellent queen, taking the gentle doctrine of our Saviour and of saintly and good kings, moderate your justice and spill your mercy and tenderness on our land.’2

  Isabella does not seem to have been overly impressed, nor did she think this was a time for ‘gentle doctrine’. She had known Seville would be a tough city to tame (a German visitor called its inhabitants ‘rude, cheating and avaricious … but clever’) and had spent considerable time softening it up before her arrival. The tool she used for this was one that had only just fallen into her hands – the local militias known as the Hermandades, or brotherhoods. These policed roads and rural areas, but also raised money and men at time of war. Brotherhoods from individual cities (and their hinterlands) that backed Isabella had also sent militia units to help fight against Juana’s supporters. But now she shaped them into something very different – a nationwide network of police and magistrates that could become a tool for the imposition of royal authority. Previously the Hermandades could act only in the countryside or in villages of under fifty inhabitants. Now the Holy Brotherhood, as its nationwide network was called, could decide for itself what sorts of crimes it could tackle, almost wherever they were committed. It was also available to raise a national army, either to defend the monarch or to attack her enemies. Isabella was adapting an old Castilian institution, but the uses she wanted to put it to meant a huge expansion in her power over the lives of her subjects. This was the way she would change things, taking existing institutions and – often in the name of history and tradition – turning them into something both harder and sharper, trampling over customs and acquired rights if necessary, but appealing always to God and the greatness or purity of Castile.3 In the Hermandades, Isabella now had a crucial weapon that could be used to impose justice or, if she ever chose, tyranny.

  Membership was obligatory for all cities, and the crown had its own magistrates in each provincial brotherhood, which brought together the cities, towns and hamlets in each province. Some cities were clearly reluctant to join, seeing a threat both to their independence and, via the taxes needed to fund the brotherhoods, to their purses. Seville was one of them. In the months before Isabella’s arrival, several royal officials, including Palencia, who was appointed attorney general of the nationwide Holy Brotherhood, had been sent to make sure one was established in the city. The city’s strongman, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, reacted so angrily to the idea that he threatened to kill Isabella’s emissaries, two of whom hid. ‘He threatened Juan Rejón with the gallows, and Pedro del Algaba with cutting his throat,’ reported Palencia.4 When the city authorities finally agreed to set up their Hermandad, they were characteristically lackadaisical about it. Isabella wrote angrily, ordering them to stop dragging their feet. ‘We ordered you to set up the Hermandad in your city, its lands and the towns and hamlets of its archbishopric … to bring an end to the robberies, break-ins, deaths and other wickedness and damage done in my kingdoms … and so that the roads were safe,’ she wrote. ‘Now I have been informed that, however you have organised the said Hermandad, it has not been done as fully as it should have been … The failure to carry this out with diligence in the service of God, myself and in the general interest and carrying out of justice in that city amazes me … so I order all of you to organise the Hermandad as you have been instructed, without delay or any further excuses.’5

  The nationwide Holy Brotherhood was meant to last for two years. It eventually lasted for twenty-two. The justice it meted out was often rough. A Burgundian traveller was astonished to discover that the Hermandad preferred to execute people with lances or arrows rather than with the rope. ‘In Spain it is not usual to hang people; they tie wrongdoers who deserve death to a post and put a white paper target on their heart. Then the justices order that the best archers available shoot at them until they die; and if the wrongdoer knows that a friend of his is a specially good bowman then he asks the justices for him to shoot the arrows, in order to die as quickly as possible … And if they do not kill them this way, they lay them on the ground with their head on a block and cut it off with an axe.’6 Other travellers were surprised to find that a tall stone column with four arms at the top stood on the outskirts of many towns – permanently ready to hang pe
ople or display those executed by some other form. On his five months of travels Münzer twice came across the macabre sight of corpses dangling from these columns. ‘On leaving Almería we saw a column made of stones, with six Italian Christians hung from it by their feet, for sodomy,’ he wrote. A similar punishment had been meted out, for the same crime, in Madrid. ‘Two men were hanging, with their testicles tied to their necks,’ he said.7

  Isabella had first appeared outside Seville on 25 July on a boat that brought her downstream towards the twelve-sided Tower of Gold, whose façade of lime mortar mixed with straw glistened in the summer sunlight. It had been built 250 years earlier as a Moorish watchtower and was attached to the city’s Alcázar fortress by its own wall. A Gothic cathedral was being erected where the city’s main mosque had stood. Bits of this survived, including the slim minaret that was now known as La Giralda, and the Courtyard of Oranges, with its cypresses, palms, lemon, orange and citron trees. As the queen rode into the city, Seville’s citizens watched and, according to Palencia, wondered what tricks they could play on her to prevent effective rule and prolong the anarchy in which they thrived. This may have been the moment when, observing the finery in which the Duchess of Medina Sidonia had dressed herself in an unwise attempt to outshine the queen, Isabella complained that the people of Seville did not seem to love her very much. ‘They don’t seem very keen to see the Queen in Seville and Andalusia, as they already have so many [queens] of their own,’ she told Medina Sidonia, apparently referring to his wife. ‘No, there is only one in Castile and Andalusia, which is yourself. After God comes your majesty,’ the duke replied nervously.8

  Like other visitors, Isabella must have been impressed by the city, with its wide streets, its gardens and occasional palaces belonging to the local nobility. ‘The impression caused by the streets full of people and the magnificence of the Royal Alcázar … made her confess that she had never before imagined that the city would be so grand,’ reported Palencia, who was there.9 The Alcázar was wondrous, full of the best decorative masonry, stucco latticework and colourful ceramics from the city’s five centuries under Moorish rulers. One of Isabella’s predecessors, Pedro the Cruel, had been so enchanted by the palace that he had lavished money on it, enlarging the original building with the help of mudéjar artisans. Water was channelled through rooms, baths and patios were decorated with marble and gold, while a dense orchard of orange trees provided the scent of blossom in late spring and a refuge of cool shade in the summer months. Friezes in Gothic and Kufic script were a further reminder of the sometimes fragile coexistence of Christians and Muslims over seven centuries. A popular legend surrounding the Patio de las Doncellas, or Courtyard of the Maidens, claimed that the Moorish rulers had once demanded an annual tribute of one hundred Christian virgins.

  Seville lay in a fertile plain alongside the wide, navigable River Guadalquivir, whose waters rose and fell with the tide. ‘It was the biggest plain that I saw in Spain, fertile in olive oil, with unbeatable wines and all kinds of fruits,’ reported Münzer, who was impressed by the way fresh water was transported around a city that, having looked down on it from the Giralda, he declared to be twice the size of Nuremberg. ‘It has an aqueduct with 390 arches … And this water is of great use for watering its gardens, cleaning its squares and houses and for other purposes.’ The olives were the size of plums, he added, and – with the vines of Jerez a short distance away – the wine was better even than the sweet, fortified white malvasia of Italy.10

  According to Palencia, who had made Seville his adopted home, almost all the Grandees in Andalusia were now opposed to Isabella, seeing a threat to their traditional stranglehold on the cities. Medina Sidonia was one of those who ‘now preferred, like the other nobles, a victory by the Portuguese king, before seeing the supreme [royal] authority – grown in arrogance since the battle of Zamora – determined to exact revenge on those nobles who had held public titles’.11 The nobles wrote off Isabella’s campaign against them as an ill-advised example of ‘feminine resolve’, while Palencia himself accused her of madness for thinking she could evict the local strongmen from their cities. Those who doubted Isabella’s fortitude were in for a rude shock. Seville had been a city of loose laws and, occasionally, of direct lawlessness. The opportunities for getting away with everything from robbery to murder – sometimes in the names of the Grandees themselves – had been plentiful. ‘There were so many gangs that it was not safe to go out at night,’ Münzer was told. The city’s gravediggers reputedly doubled up as thuggish burglars and ‘would enter homes at night in masks and take away all the gold, crockery and anything else they could find. There wasn’t a single safe place in the city.’12 The list of those seeking justice in Seville was long. To clear up the backlog, Isabella ordered that all complaints be resolved in three sessions and punishment, where relevant, meted out immediately. Petitioners came to her in person at weekly Friday hearings where she sat on her throne and despatched cases as fast as she could. Death sentences were handed down and carried out. Property was taken and handed back to the rightful owners. For the first two months of her stay she imposed draconian measures, and some 4,000 people fled to Portugal or the Moorish kingdom of Granada. ‘The excessive severity brought about the flight not just of murderers, paid assassins and robbers, but also of their friends and accomplices,’ said Palencia.13 It was not just Seville, however, that felt the weight of Isabella’s strict justice, or the harsh discipline imposed by the Holy Brotherhood. ‘She was very determined that justice should be carried out, so much so that she was accused of applying more rigour than clemency; and that was something that she did to rectify the great corruption and criminality that she found in the kingdom when she came to the throne,’ explained her chief apologist, Fernando del Pulgar.14

  Far from loving their queen, the people of Seville grumbled. Gangs of city youths fought with the youngsters of the court, whom they called ganseros, or goose-herds, because of the flocks they had charge of. These hit back by labelling the local youths jaboneros, or soap-boys, because of their excessive and supposedly effeminate use of soap. This was a tradition handed to them by the Moors and which was kept going by the people of Triana, where a factory with huge vats of boiling olive oil, lye, lime and ashes produced the hard, white Castell soap that was exported to England, Flanders and elsewhere.15 Medina Sidonia became a focus for the discontents, but by 10 September – with Ferdinand and his troops on their way – he had agreed to hand over control of the Alcázar and the city’s other strategically important points to Isabella.16

  Isabella eventually declared a general pardon for all but the most serious crimes, including treason, murder, lèse-majesté and rape, shortly before Ferdinand arrived on 13 September 1477. Fewer people than expected turned out to see his arrival – which the acerbic Palencia ascribed to the fact that this coincided with the city’s siesta. Palencia himself had frantically lobbied Ferdinand to travel to Seville and correct what he saw as Isabella’s errors. ‘All Andalusians had placed their hope on his arrival ever since … they had found out just how little use to them a woman’s government was,’ he wrote.17 But when Ferdinand finally arrived, he was soon persuaded that his wife had been right. Those sevillanos who thought there would be a softening of royal justice were furious, now complaining that he was dominated by his wife. Even Palencia began moaning that what little good was being done was due to Isabella, not Ferdinand. In one incident between soap-boys and goose-herds, stones were thrown and insults shouted against Ferdinand. Rumours then spread that the Duke of Medina Sidonia had been involved and had been locked up. As angry sevillanos prepared to riot, several hundred mounted royal cavalry chargers were brought out to guard the palace door. But Isabella’s ferocious rule in Seville soon produced a second major victory that brought wild Andalusia further under the royal yoke. The Duke of Medina Sidonia’s rival – the Marquess of Cadiz – slipped secretly into Seville in August, begged forgiveness for having opposed his monarchs and gave them control of
Jerez and other strategically important fortified outposts.

  Isabella celebrated by boarding a boat on the wide, murky Guadalquivir and sailing down to its mouth fifty-five miles away with the aim of fulfilling an unrealised dream. They reached the flat, scrubby wetlands and sandy Atlantic beaches at the mouth of the river ‘to the great pleasure of the queen who, before she arrived, had wanted to see the ocean and, even, meant to sail out to the open sea, but was stopped by fears about seasickness and the suspicion that she might be pregnant’, reported Palencia.18 Medina Sidonia and Cadiz now vied with each other for the approval of the young monarchs, with the former handing back five more fortified places to the crown. A similar deal was struck in Córdoba, a city that was considered to be either the second or third largest (after Seville and, perhaps, Toledo) in Isabella’s kingdoms, where the factions led by Álvaro de Aguilar and the Count of Cabra had long been fighting for control. Rioting had broken out in the city a few years earlier, during Enrique’s reign, after a converso woman accidentally threw water out of a window on to a passing procession bearing a statue of the Virgin Mary. A local blacksmith claimed it had been urine, provoking two days of violence, as the mob murdered, raped, stole and burned conversos out of their homes.19

  Ferdinand, meanwhile, travelled to Madrid to ensure a further three-year extension of the Holy Brotherhood. A bored Isabella was ‘determined to do something useful’, according to Palencia, and busied herself mopping up some of the last resistance in Andalusia. This included the conquest of the rebel fortress at Utrera, on a hilltop eighteen miles from Seville. Isabella’s own personal guard led the attack. Several were killed or wounded and when the garrison finally surrendered, Isabella showed little mercy. Conscripts were allowed to go free, but others were hanged or decapitated on the queen’s orders and their bodies strung up along a road outside Seville ‘to serve as a lesson to the multitude’. By now even Palencia had little choice but to agree that Isabella was gaining a reputation for quashing opponents on her own. ‘The queen’s talent for dealing with the insolence of rebels during her husband’s absence was properly proven,’ he said.20