Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  As the summer of 1489 drew to an end, Isabella grew increasingly worried. The fighting season was meant to come to a close soon, yet the siege of Baza was dragging into its sixth month and morale was plummeting. Couriers rode post, swapping horses as they tired in the heat, taking just ten hours to transport messages to her. With the besiegers themselves talking of giving up, Isabella, once more, urged them to fight on. Her message to them was straightforward. ‘If they agree to continue the siege of that city, as at the beginning all had agreed on, then she, with the help of God, would order that they were supplied with people, money, provisions and all that was necessary until the city fell,’ reported Pulgar.29 But she had to use threats to recruit more men from Seville and, as some of Ferdinand’s troops began to abandon him, she hurriedly issued instructions to imprison deserters. Poor harvests and bad weather, meanwhile, disrupted her supply chains. ‘There has been and is a great lack of goods in the camp,’ she wrote, as she ordered extra supplies be sent along the muddy, slow roads to Baza. These had to be delivered ‘before the water washes away the roads and makes it more difficult to transport things’.30

  Zagal’s men continued to hold out, however, and Isabella now decided it was time that she herself visited the front, arriving with her ladies and led by an escort of gentlemen – including a Genoese sailor called Christopher Columbus – and musicians. Her favourite daughter Isabella, by now a young lady herself and inseparable from her mother, rode with them.31

  In the atmosphere of religious crusade and increasing royal authority, dissent or criticism of a war that was draining Castile’s exchequer was dangerous, if not impossible. Direct criticism of Isabella or the war was either rarely made or done in secret or, at the least, almost never recorded on paper. Whereas court wits and popular poets had laughed at her predecessor, they now kept their tongues carefully guarded. The Hermandad and the Inquisition helped to set the new tone of controlled conformity. One of the few who publicly dared to criticise her in his satirical rhyming coplas was the poet Fernando de Vera, who soon found himself sentenced to death.32 In the office of a friendly escribano – or notary – in Jerez, Vera read his barbed poetry to a small group, who presumably laughed heartily at his bitter critique of the queen. He painted Castilians as sheep who were being regularly ‘fleeced’ by Isabella. ‘You have shorn so much wool that, if you felt like it, you could make a blanket to cover the whole of Spain,’ he declaimed. ‘Either you are trying to fool us, or just think we are stupid.’ Vera was voicing the widespread anger at the burden of war taxes, especially in the cities. When news of his treasonous humour reached local authorities in the city, however, the escribano and others were arrested. Vera fled on a galleon to the Canary Islands and was handed a death sentence in his absence, while the man who had tipped him off was caught and executed. It was not until six years later that Isabella and Ferdinand, thanks to Vera’s family connections, commuted the death sentence to galley service.

  Pulgar claimed that the king’s counsellors, who wanted him to give up on the siege, were too scared to say so in public – because the queen would not approve. They hoped that, by bringing Isabella to Baza, they could make her realise how difficult the situation was. ‘Given the constant efforts of the queen to provide the camp with men, money and supplies, but not having achieved the expected fruit after all that time, they didn’t dare counsel the king publicly as they did in private. They begged the queen to come to the camp so that she could see the constant fighting and the daily toll of deaths and injuries … and by seeing herself what she heard in reports, she would agree to up camp, leaving garrisons at points near to the city,’ he reported.33 Others worried that the presence of so many women would ‘weaken the entire garrison’.34

  Isabella’s arrival, however, had the opposite effect. Tired, bored troops suddenly shook off six months of tedium and growing apathy. The impact on the Moors was even greater. They watched from the town’s towers and walls as Isabella’s noisy party arrived to the musical accompaniment of slide-trumpets, clarions, Italian trumpets, shawms, sackbuts, oboe-like dulzainas and drums. Over years of warfare, Isabella’s frightening reputation as a fierce and implacable enemy had grown to such an extent that her mere presence was enough to shatter the resistance of Baza’s Moors. Whereas, two and a half years earlier, the defenders of Málaga had blithely ignored her presence, Pulgar now swore that the queen’s arrival silenced the Moors’ guns for ever. ‘We don’t know whether it was because they thought the queen was coming to set up her own camp until the city was taken or for some other idea that they imagined, but it was amazing to see the sudden change in their attitude … As we were there and saw it, we can testify before God and the men who [also] saw it, that after the day in which the Queen entered the camp it seemed as if all the rigours of the battle, of the cruel spirits, of the enemy’s wicked intentions, ended,’ said Pulgar. ‘The arrow and espingarda shots, and of all kinds of artillery, which just an hour earlier never ceased to fly from one side to the other, was not seen or heard again, nor were armed skirmishes repeated or the daily battles that had become the custom.’35

  Negotiations were soon started and the city’s commander was given permission to consult with Zagal in Guadix. Terms were reached quickly, with Zagal giving up all his territory – including Baza, Guadix and Almería – in exchange for considerable personal rights and mudéjar status (similar to the ancient Muslim communities of Old Castile) for his people.36 There was little left for Isabella and Ferdinand to conquer now except for the city of Granada and the land around it, which was – at least in theory – due to be handed over under the terms of their treaties with Boabdil.

  Isabella and Ferdinand proclaimed the end of the war. They had captured the major ports of Málaga and Almería and defeated Zagal. Boabdil, now the ruler of (almost) all that remained of Granada, was their vassal. On 8 January 1490, they wrote to Seville. ‘After much effort, work and expense, it has pleased Our Lord in his mercy, to bring the war with the Kingdom of Granada to an end,’ they said. ‘King Boabdil, who currently holds the city of Granada, has agreed to hand over to us and our people the said city. We have sent our messengers to him and a reply and agreement on this will take no more than 20 days.’37 More than seven centuries of Muslim rule in Spain was over. Or so, mistakenly, they thought.

  * * *

  * For a table on relative monetary values, coinage and the prices of both everyday and extraordinary items see Appendix, pages 489–90.

  23

  The Tudors

  Medina del Campo, 14 March 1489

  Isabella waited for the English envoys in the grandest room of her palace at Medina del Campo. A cloth-of-gold canopy had been erected above where she now sat with Ferdinand as the awestruck ambassadors were brought in a torchlight procession through the sharp, early-evening chill of the streets of the great wool and textile trading town of the meseta. Isabella’s war against the Moors was heading towards a triumphant climax, as English volunteers like Lord Scales must have informed King Henry VII. Unlike the English king’s nascent Tudor dynasty, there were no longer any rivals to the crown that Isabella had definitively secured with Juana la Beltraneja’s forced retirement into a convent. Isabella was determined to avoid a repeat of the kind of embarrassment she had suffered during a previous English ambassador’s visit to her court early in 1477. On that occasion, early in the civil war, a scaffold that had been erected for the envoy, Thomas Langton, collapsed mid-speech – though the phlegmatic ambassador had picked himself up and continued as if nothing had happened.1

  A court that was mostly either on the move or at war was not a place for daily displays of grandeur and luxury – or for the expense that came with that. But, when it was needed, Isabella ensured that her Castilian court gained a reputation for flamboyant hospitality. It was a sure way to transmit the message that this was a wealthy and powerful monarchy, able to compete in magnificence with other European courts. Her great crusade against the Moors of Granada had already enhanced
Castile’s standing across Christendom but, now that it was almost over, she and Ferdinand were starting to look beyond the frontiers of their joint realms towards other countries that might become allies. Henry VII had sent his ambassadors here to negotiate just such an alliance, which would be cemented by an engagement between Isabella’s three-year-old (and fourth) daughter, Catherine of Aragon, and the English king’s own two-year-old son and heir, Prince Arthur. She wanted them to go home impressed. The ambassadors Dr Thomas Savage, a future archbishop of York, and Sir Richard Nanfan were astonished by the hospitality they received.2 ‘People speak of the honour done to ambassadors in England; certainly it is not to be compared to the honour which is done to the ambassadors in the kingdom of Castile, and especially in the time of this noble king and queen,’ wrote their herald, Roger Machado.3

  Just as Isabella had known when to shed the black robes of mourning and dazzle the people of Segovia with her brilliant, regal robes, so she now also indulged in blatant power-dressing. A star-struck Machado reported that the queen wore a cloth-of-gold robe covered by ‘a riding hood of black velvet, all slashed in large holes, so as to show under the said velvet the cloth of gold in which she was dressed’. The hood was decorated with finger-sized, oblong-shaped blocks of gold thread encrusted with jewels ‘so rich that no one has ever seen the like’. A white leather girdle with a pouch – which Machado saw as an odd, manly touch – was decorated with a ‘balass ruby [from Persia] the size of a tennis ball, five rich diamonds and other precious stones the size of a bean’.4

  The queen’s jewellery spoke even more eloquently of wealth and power.

  She wore on her neck a rich gold necklace composed entirely of white and red roses, each rose being adorned with a large jewel. Besides this she had two ribbons suspended on each side of her breast, adorned with large diamonds, balass and other rubies, pearls, and various other jewels of great value to the number of a hundred or more. Over all this dress she wore a short cloak of fine crimson satin furred with ermine, very handsome in appearance and very brilliant. It was thrown on [nonchalantly] cross-wise over her left side. Her head was uncovered, excepting only a little coiffe de plaisance at the back of her head without anything else.5

  Isabella would have been pleased to know that Machado was minutely noting down all he saw – and all she wore during the feasts, jousts, bullfights and dances celebrated over the next two weeks – in order to report back to Henry VII. He even produced an estimate for the value of the jewellery she was wearing – some 200,000 crowns of gold. Isabella’s family and ladies-in-waiting were also magnificently attired, but no one was allowed to outshine the queen. Strict sumptuary laws regulated everything from the use of silk and brocades to the gold- or silver-plating of swords and spurs by anyone outside the royal family. The report included descriptions of the elaborate ceremonials at feasts and, crucially, the seating arrangements at formal events which showed (by whoever was closest to the sovereigns – with Cardinal Mendoza always near to Isabella) where power in the court lay.

  France had long been a Castilian ally, but Isabella was ready to change that, especially as her husband’s kingdom of Aragon was continually fighting the French on its borders. England, whose monarchs had long styled themselves kings of France (and who still maintained sovereignty over the area around Calais) was a perfect ally. The ambassadors were, like much of Europe, intrigued by the relationship between Isabella and Ferdinand. It was now that the herald Machado produced his convoluted explanation of how Castile could be ruled jointly by the royal couple. ‘Perhaps some may blame me that I speak of “monarchs” [in the plural], and some people may be astonished, and say, “How! Are there two monarchs in Castile?” ’ observed the herald Machado. ‘No [I say], but I write “monarchs” because the king is king on account of the queen, by right of marriage, and because they call themselves “monarchs”, and superscribe their letters “From the King and Queen”, for she is the heiress [of the throne].’6

  The journey to Medina del Campo, a sprawling walled town overlooked by an imposing castle, had been long and arduous. The stormy, dangerous Bay of Biscay had twice driven the English emissaries back to Southampton with a blast of wind toppling their ship over sideways so that it took in ‘so much water that she was quite under water and all on one side for a while, with the great sail almost entirely steeped in the sea’. They had sheltered in the port town of Laredo while snowstorms painted the Cantabrian cordillera above them white and blocked the roads. When they finally set out across the mountains and sought somewhere to stay the night they found themselves confronted by an irascible Spanish landlady who ordered them back into the cold for being ‘so bold as to come into her house without her leave’. After being bawled out as ‘great devils’ and ‘bawdy villains’ she allowed them back in and they spent an uncomfortable night before rising early and fleeing to Medina del Campo, where Isabella had arranged cosy lodgings hung with fine tapestries.7

  Isabella’s first encounter with the Englishmen was as carefully stage-managed as each of the meetings that would follow over the next seventeen days. A gaggle of Grandees, bishops and ‘great persons’ accompanied the starstruck ambassadors from their lodgings as they travelled towards the palace. Isabella and Ferdinand sat on separate bench seats. ‘The Queen was accompanied by thirty-seven great ladies and maidens of noble blood all richly dressed in the fashion of the country, and in cloth of gold with several other rich [materials] which would be too tedious for me to relate,’ observed Machado. There was formal hand-kissing and speech-making, though the English visitors failed to understand the mangled Latin of the ancient Diego de Muros, bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo, who spoke on behalf of the Spanish sovereigns. ‘The good bishop was so old, and had lost all his teeth, that what he said could only with great difficulty be heard,’ said Machado.8 It was not until two o’clock in the morning that they were finally led off back to their quarters, with the promise of another meeting the following day.

  The next day’s meeting was more businesslike. Isabella’s quest to have children and, especially, to produce an heir, had been fraught – and had been interrupted by the rigours of her nomadic lifestyle and commitment to planning for and provisioning her armies. But she now had an heir, Juan, and four daughters. While she had longed for a boy, and showed particular devotion to little Juan, she could not be faulted for her attentiveness to her daughters. These she kept close, raising them according to a set of criteria that were at once strict and conservative on personal morality and public image, while groundbreaking and progressive in terms of education. Their training, in Latin, the lives of saints, music and proper religious behaviour, imparted by foreign tutors who had drunk deeply from Italian humanism, was not completely altruistic. Her daughters were also political assets, as she would show the following year by marrying the eldest – Isabella – into the Portuguese royal family. Her other daughters held out the promise of three more alliances sealed by marriage. ‘If your highness gives us two or three more daughters in 20 years’ time you will have the pleasure of seeing your children and grandchildren on all the thrones of Europe,’ a prescient Pulgar had told her.9

  Henry VII was deeply excited by the thought of his heir marrying the daughter of such a formidable woman, even claiming that he would be willing to give up half of his kingdom if Catherine was like her mother.10 The founder of the Tudor dynasty needed the match more than Isabella and Ferdinand. His crown was still precarious, with threats both from within and from abroad. Little Catherine offered not just an ally on France’s southern flank, but one with influence in Rome and whose approval of his son’s suitability as a husband provided a valuable display of confidence. The commitment, in any case, would never be considered cast-iron. Such engagements could be, and frequently were, broken when a better bidder appeared.

  Isabella was in no hurry for the wedding treaty to be closed. She planned, instead, to woo the ambassadors slowly, continuing the display of magnificence that had started the previous evening. On thi
s occasion, Machado reported, Isabella was dressed ‘in a rich woven cloth of gold, and above it, as before, a hood of black velvet, and above that a line of beaten gold strewed with red and white roses of beaten gold, each rose being adorned with rich jewels. She had on her neck a rich necklace decorated with large rubies and carbuncles, and of great value.’ Now it was time to start showing off her family. Ten-year-old Juan and eighteen-year-old Isabella – accompanied by four maids – were ushered in, with Catherine kept tantalisingly out of sight for the moment. ‘The prince was dressed in a robe of rich crimson velvet, furred with ermine, and on his head a black hat after the French fashion with a cornette of purple very narrow all like the branch of a tree,’ wrote Machado. ‘And the Infanta was dressed in a kirtle of cloth of gold, and over it a robe in the fashion of the country with a long train of very rich green velvet. She wore a head-dress made of gold thread and black silk in the form of a net, all adorned with pearls and other precious stones.’ Hands were kissed, more speeches made, and a viewing of little Catherine promised for later.11

  On the Sunday, four days later, they were invited to the royal chapel for compline, the evening prayers, before withdrawing to a large salon, where there was music and young members of the court were already dancing. The younger Isabella performed with one of their Portuguese dance teachers. Machado wrote: