Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  She moved on to Toledo, where Isabella gave birth to Juana in November 1479, though she typically managed to make sure that childbirth did not interrupt business. Ferdinand had spent the previous four months in his new kingdoms in Aragon and appeared in Toledo with an elephant that had been given to him by visitors from Cyprus.22 He and his wife were now both solidly in charge of their realms and able to celebrate, eleven years after their marriage, the achievement of jointly ruling over most of Spain. Ferdinand gave himself over to partying and received a rare reprimand from his wife. Isabella was in the last few weeks of her pregnancy and obviously thought he should devote more time to government.23 In a world where officials could expect to labour for only six hours a day,24 Isabella herself was already proving to be a hard-working monarch and had called a gathering of the Cortes in Toledo for just a month after Juana’s birth. When not riding off to visit the far-flung corners of her lands, she held open courts on Tuesdays and Fridays, where petitioners could come directly to her and Ferdinand. Her interest in the minutiae of government, especially at her exchequer, was a sign of a controlling, somewhat obsessive nature. A tight rein was kept on spending, with her household never accounting for more than 15 per cent of income and Isabella herself25 chastising officials when the food bill grew too large. Debts troubled her and, even on her death-bed, she would fret about what she owed.

  It was at the Toledo Cortes that Isabella first set about unifying Castile’s laws in a single collection of volumes, and her concern for the efficient administration of justice would also see two permanent courts set up in Valladolid and, much later, Granada. Above all, though, it was her clever choice of officials that allowed her to build a newly efficient central administration. A dozen of these officials, mostly from the new class of university-trained letrados, became her most important advisers and sat on the royal council – with the occasional Grandee or bishop also in attendance. Many were conversos. The most loyal officials often came from her days as a princess and were kept close by through the early decades of her reign. They included the round, ruddy-faced and thickly bearded Gutierre de Cárdenas – the man who had held her sword when she first made her bid for power – and the small but cheerful Chacón, who had filled her head with stories of Joan of Arc as a child. The latter would be succeeded by the equally loyal Cabrera. The two men ran a court of anywhere between 400 and 1,000 people (which was larger than her husband’s). Isabella’s central corps of household officials and priests doubled to 430 and she kept a book with the names of men they thought could be useful, referring to it when she and Ferdinand had to choose candidates for official posts.26 With the only challenger to her throne safely dealt with, these men could now turn their energies to tightening her control over Castile.

  It was not until late 1480, however, that her rival finally donned her nun’s habit, and on 11 January 1481 the younger Isabella was transported across the border. Her mother had fretted over visiting rights during the treaty negotiations, and asked for a clause that would allow the girl to be temporarily swapped for another of her children, but had effectively given her daughter away for the next twenty-eight months in order to ensure her own security as queen and that of her son as heir.27 Once La Beltraneja had chosen the Santa Clara order’s convent in Coimbra (one of only five convents that Isabella deemed safe enough, because they were ‘said to be the most cloistered ones’), the queen sent ambassadors to check that she really was there. In his rose-tinted version of events, Isabella’s faithful Pulgar makes it look as though they went to reassure La Beltraneja that she could change her mind and wait to marry Juan if she preferred. But the truth of her situation was contained in a chilling phrase uttered by the ambassadors. ‘You are now tied,’ they said. Isabella would continue to fret over her rival’s status for years to come, harrying popes to make sure she stayed in her convent and reminding each new Portuguese king about the terms of their agreement – to which would eventually be added a further stipulation, that La Beltraneja be prevented from ever marrying. Just as she had once urged her supporters to ‘make war with fire and blood, taking, devastating and destroying’ the towns that backed her rival, so she would go on to ensure that her annihilation of La Beltraneja was absolute.28

  With La Beltraneja safely cloistered, Isabella was able to follow her husband into Aragon. Seven years had gone by since she made her bold bid for the crown. Now it was securely hers. The civil war had left her with little time for her husband’s kingdom. But now they moved east, crossing the frontier and bearing with them little Juan. The young prince was sworn in as heir by the Aragonese court that April, replacing his elder sister. Isabella also had her first encounter with one of the Aragonese crown’s greatest cities, Barcelona – with which she had carried on her own love affair, at a distance, since marrying Ferdinand. The plague had hit both the city and Catalonia hard, halving the population and allowing the city of Valencia to overtake it as the principal trading post on the Mediterranean. Barcelona’s recent squabbles with Juan the Great had drained its resources further. The once great city surrounded by grand monasteries was ‘almost dead compared to how it had been before’, said Münzer, while the Italian diplomat and writer Andrea Navagero found its streets surprisingly empty and not a single vessel in its famous shipyard.29 Relations with Ferdinand had also not always been easy and the city’s councillors saw Isabella as a crucial ally in their dealings with their new king. The queen did her best to mitigate what she saw as the weak point of the Aragonese crown – its constant obligation to strike deals with the Cortes of its individual kingdoms. It was a system that she naturally mistrusted because it was too resistant to royal power and, she thought, encouraged rebellion. ‘Aragon isn’t ours. It must be reconquered,’ she would reportedly say in a fit of pique with its heel-dragging Cortes.30 Ferdinand’s kingdoms also had their own separate laws, with the German traveller Nicholas von Popplau amazed to hear that in Catalonia lords preserved the right to sleep with their vassals’ wives on their wedding nights – ‘which is most unChristian’.31

  Isabella had, however, exchanged frequent letters with Barcelona’s authorities and pledged to be their ‘advocate and protector’. The feeling of joy was mutual as, breaking with custom, city officials met her outside the Sant Antoni gate before she processed through its underpopulated streets and squares under a scarlet palio or canopy. From an elaborate stage, a child representing the city’s patron saint, Eulalia, begged her to help Barcelona recover from the effects of the ruinous war it had fought with Ferdinand’s father. ‘The queen was received in that city with the greatest glory and celebrations ever seen for a monarch in the past, with the Catalans wanting to stand out above others,’ said Zurita.32 A fountain squirting jets of wine kept many city folk happy. Three hundred burning torches lit Isabella’s way as she was accompanied to a nearby monastery at the end of the lavish ceremonies. This did not mean, however, that she enjoyed the same powers in Aragon as her husband had in Castile. Ferdinand would go on to name her as his ‘other me’ and the ‘co-regent, governor [and] administrator’ of his lands, but these were powers that she rarely exercised.33

  When they travelled back to Castile in November 1481, the Barcelona council’s representative Juan Bernardo Marimón went with them. Isabella was now pregnant with twins and Marimón deemed her ‘a little bit tired by the road and the pregnancy’,34 but her spirits picked up when they visited the little prince. ‘I was delighted to see him, and the queen seemed even more so to be showing him to me,’ he said. They spent Lent and Easter in Medina del Campo, the trading town that Isabella enjoyed so much, watching the religious processions and counting the troops who began to gather there for a campaign against the Moors of Granada. In May its huge central plaza and neighbouring streets filled up with merchants and buyers from around Iberia and other parts of Europe, trading everythingfrom wool, cloth, silk and sewing materials to spices, shoes, weapons and books. Isabella also found herself increasingly busy dealing with a problem that had come to her atte
ntion during her stay in Seville. Castile might be safe, but it was not yet pure.

  19

  The Inquisition – Populism and Purity

  Seville, Winter 1480

  Isabella had already warned Seville’s municipal authorities to prepare a sufficient supply of shackles and chains, as well as making sure there was enough space in dungeons, jails and elsewhere for the expected wave of new prisoners in the city. Now there were also guards on the gates of Seville to catch those trying to escape a previously unknown kind of terror brought by a new kind of religious tribunal that she and her husband had invented – the royal-led, or state, Inquisition. ‘If you find any examples of such people who leave or want to abandon the places where they live in order to leave our kingdoms, do not protect or defend them, but rather arrest them,’ she ordered. Seville had already suffered the ravages both of Isabella’s overly harsh system of justice and of the plague. But this was the biggest exodus yet. Many of the merchants’ houses along Genova street, as well as some near the Minjohar gate and in the San Bernardo parish or other areas where the so-called new Christians, or conversos, lived were empty. As many as 3,000 homes were abandoned, with one observer excitedly claiming that the city was ‘almost uninhabited’.1

  During her time in Seville Isabella had heard vivid stories about how people from the converso families that had converted from Judaism over the previous century were secretly and obstinately holding on to their old faith. The Dominican prior Alonso de Hojeda had been especially vociferous, repeating many of the slanders that had been poured into the ears of previous Castilian monarchs. Groups of secret Jews were holding their clandestine meetings right there in the city, under her royal nose, he insisted. They continued to light candles and dress in clean clothes on the Sabbath, refused to eat pork and prepared for death by turning in their bed to face the wall. They also secretly buried their dead in Christian soil but according to Jewish rites. ‘I have been told,’ wrote Isabella, ‘that there are certain graveyards beside the monasteries of St Bernard, the Holy Trinity and St Augustine in which the conversos of the city used to bury their dead, and that they were buried with Jewish rites and ceremonies, seeking out virgin land, in Jewish clothing, with their arms laid straight and not in a cross, insulting and casting opprobrium on our ancient Catholic faith.’ Ifthat was true, as she obviously believed, then measures would have to be taken and the dead dug up. ‘Proceed according to law … If you decide that these yards and graves should be confiscated and given to my treasury, it is my desire that the prior and friars of St Dominic of Porta-Coeli, of the Order of Preachers, should be given the yard of St Bernard, with all the stones and brick from the tombs therein,’ she said.2 The rotting corpses and bones of the dead heretics could be publicly burned.

  There can be little doubt that a small number of secret Jews continued to practise their faith clandestinely. Many more had not yet shed all their family traditions or been properly taught the rules and codes of the new religion. In previous decades, however, any sensible inquiry had always concluded that cases of ‘judaisers’ (the catch-all term for those who observed some form of Jewish ritual or customs) were few and far between.3 A significant number of conversos still remained subtly but recognisably different in their linguistic tics, culinary practices and other cultural habits. Many still lived in or near the old Jewish neighbourhoods, especially in big cities with large converso populations, and were sometimes talked about, even by themselves, as a distinct ‘nation’, ‘race’ or ‘breed’ within Spain. Some had close relatives who were still Jews. But that did not make them heretics. Some converso families – especially the elites – had intermarried with old Christians. Others had entered high-profile professions as notaries, judges, priests or public officials. Indeed, by the end of the fifteenth century most of the noble families of Castile and Aragon had Jewish blood running through their veins. Some felt pride in that. ‘Is there any more noble a people than the Jews?’ mused Diego de Valera, a converso who was also one of Isabella’s most loyal chroniclers.4 Even Isabella’s husband, Ferdinand, was rumoured to have Jewish blood,5 allegedly via a mysterious Jewish great-great-grandmother from Guadalcanal, near Seville, called doña Paloma. And many of their senior officials, like Andrés de Cabrera or Isabella’s outspoken confessor Alonso de Burgos, were also from new Christian families. The vast majority of conversos – whose numbers are hard to assess, but accounted for up to one in fifteen Spaniards – were properly integrated into the Catholic church, not least because they were spurned by the Jews. They may not all have followed the church’s rules to the letter, but at a time of widespread ignorance about proper Christian behaviour, few people did. Radical friars and embittered rivals continued to whip up popular hatred, however, and outbreaks of violence were increasingly frequent. The conflict between old and new Christians had become a major social problem, at least in the cities. Yet where previous monarchs had spotted the economic envy or racial prejudice that drove converso-haters, Isabella saw serious reasons for concern. ‘We couldn’t have done anything less, given the things they told us in Andalusia,’ Ferdinand would explain later.6

  The church had long had a mechanism for dealing with heresy. Papal or ‘medieval’ inquisitions could be, and had been, activated by the pope whenever necessary in a particular bishopric or entire country. One had long existed in Aragon, with the master general of the Dominicans naming the inquisitors, though it was low-key and was not very interested in conversos. The pope’s nuncio in Castile, Nicolò Franco, had arrived in 1475 with instructions to use the traditional inquisition to find out if the conversos really were a problem, but Isabella sought something more robust and severe. She wanted a state-backed inquisition, with royal appointees in charge, so that she could throw both the church’s moral might and the violence of the state against this threat to Spain’s Christian purity. Pope Sixtus IV signed a bull allowing Isabella and her husband to appoint inquisitors that was dated 1478. It sat unused until September 1480, when she and Ferdinand appointed the first two inquisitors and ordered them to seek out heretics in Seville.7

  The choice of city was by no means random. At the end of the previous century Seville had boasted what was almost certainly the world’s largest city population of Jews, with twenty-three synagogues and up to 35,000 people in its Jewish quarter. The pogroms that spread across Spain in 1391 had seen the worst massacre of all in Seville, with up to 4,000 people murdered.8 ‘They killed a multitude,’ reported a well-informed Jewish source.9 ‘Many of the Jews in Spain left the faith of Moses, and especially in Seville, where most of them abandoned their self-respect,’ another Jewish writer, who saw conversion as cowardice, confirmed.10 As a result Seville was now home to the biggest group of conversos in Castile, who accounted for well over a third of the city’s population.11 The Spanish Inquisition, as it would be known, made them its first target.

  Isabella’s old confessor from Segovia, the Dominican prior Tomás de Torquemada, whose ‘heart and soul were alight with inspiration … to pursue the depraved heresy’, had long been trying to persuade her that this new form of inquisition was necessary. Already, at the beginning of her reign, he had warned her against heretics and had been explicit about the need to keep Christians away from the corrupting influence of Jews and Moors, wanting them forced into ghettos – a measure that Isabella also adopted in 1480.12 ‘Your royal highness should threaten punishments if the Jews and Moors are not moved apart so that they do not live among Christians, and order that they wear their identifying symbols,’ he urged her in a memorandum he is thought to have written in 1478.13 They were ideas he had been whispering into her ear ever since they first met when she was a teenage girl in Segovia. ‘She swore to him in the name of our Lord that, if God handed her the royal state, she would order proceedings against the crime of heresy and that it should be the main task,’ Zurita said.14 But opposition came from Isabella’s trusted confessor, Talavera, who thought any failings among the conversos were down to poor teaching, and from
senior churchmen like Cardinal Mendoza, who merely disliked the idea of state control over a religious matter.15

  Isabella stood back while Talavera tried to rectify this through preaching, but her patience snapped when she was shown a manuscript written by a judaising converso who argued for a syncretic religion mixing the best of Christianity with the best of Judaism. This, he said, would avoid the idolatry and corruption of the established church. A furious Isabella took it to Talavera in Valladolid. ‘It was your royal hand that brought it to me in this, our monastery,’ he said in his own written answer to the manuscript.16 The author’s claim to speak for all conversos was an obvious falsehood, but he had put into writing what a small number of them must have thought. It was the most obvious proof that heresy really existed – however limited in extent – and Talavera scribbled a rapid, angry response to it, damning the author while also taking pre-emptive swipes at the new state inquisition that now looked inevitable. ‘This detestable and most horrible of all crimes is reserved for ecclesiastical jurisdiction,’ he claimed. Isabella took no notice.

  The fiercely anti-semitic17 chronicler Andrés Bernáldez, who was a parish priest in the nearby town of Palacios as well as chaplain to the archbishop of Seville, listed the conversos’ crimes as running from observing Passover to seducing nuns. ‘The conversos observed the faith very badly,’ he said.18