Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Isabella had been energetic in her pursuit of the Canary Islands, which lay 650 miles to the south of Spain and just seventy miles off the west coast of Africa. For historical reasons the Herrera-Pereza family were the feudal lords of four of these – Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, La Gomera and Hierro – and had been given the right of conquest over the more heavily populated islands of Tenerife, Gran Canaria and La Palma. But her council, once consulted, quickly came up with a formula that would allow her to take back the right of conquest over the islands that the Herrera-Perezas had not yet managed to invade. The family was paid compensation, and the right returned to the crown.34

  The conquest of the island of Gran Canaria was a prolonged and bloody affair. Starting in 1478, it took five years, with the defeated natives either eventually allying with Castile or, more dramatically, and possibly apocryphally, hurling themselves to their deaths into a deep gully.35 ‘Their main weapons were stones, and whatever left their hands landed exactly where they wanted it to,’ said Bernáldez. ‘Their bravery made up for everything,’ wrote another chronicler.36 Isabella had received one of the Canary chieftains, Tenesor Semidán, who was baptised and became an ally.37 He would visit her more than once, as Isabella tried to carry out a process of evangelisation among the islanders. The methods used were cruel, bringing about the virtual destruction of their society, with those that remained quickly adapting to Castilian models and their chiefs, like some Moorish or Jewish converts, receiving special attention and privileges. ‘We have many advantages [over those on the other islands], as we [have learned to] speak [Spanish] and are accepted as Castilians,’ said one.38 Higher estimates claim that up to 85 per cent of the more than 60,000 islanders were killed or exiled, often after being lured on to boats with trickery.39 The conquest of the other Canary Islands also proved hard, slow work, with neither Tenerife nor La Palma wholly in Isabella’s hands before Columbus set off on his quixotic adventure.

  Gran Canaria was, then, the only real model that Isabella had of the conquest of populated Atlantic islands before Columbus set sail, with conversions as one of its main aims. The principle that only those who fought against Isabella’s armies, or rose against the crown’s authority, could be enslaved did little to stop widespread trafficking in the Canary Islands’ indigenous guanches and other peoples. They were forced to work at anything from cutting sugar cane and cleaning floors to prostituting their bodies. Canary slaves were fetching between 8,000 and 10,000 maravedís a head in Seville, Valencia, Barcelona, Lisbon and as far away as Venice.40 Münzer came across a group of seventy-three Canary islanders, fourteen of whose number had died on the crossing, in a slave-trader’s house. They were ‘very dark, but not black … well proportioned, with long, strong arms and legs’.41 Isabella did her best to protect those who had peacefully converted to Christianity. ‘We have been told that some people have brought … Canary islanders, who are Christians, and others who are on the path to conversion to our Holy Faith and they want to divide them up and sell them as slaves,’ she and her husband wrote to the authorities in Palos in 1477 after Gomerans began to appear in local slave markets.42 ‘Such a thing would be a poor example and cause for none of them at all to convert to our Holy Catholic Faith, which is something we seek to remedy.’ The following year an angry Isabella wrote to those leading the Gran Canaria conquest, demanding that the same slaves from La Gomera, who had sailed back to the islands with the expeditionary force, be put in boats and sent back to their homes, rather than kept on Gran Canaria. ‘I ordered them to be returned and given their freedom,’ she said.43 ‘[But] you have not taken or sent them to their own homes on the island of Gomera, as I had instructed.’ Her insistence did not seem to carry much weight. Twenty years later she was still receiving complaints from Canary Island slaves, or from the so-called procurador de los pobres – a sort of public ombudsman for the poor – complaining about the rapacious settlers. A native woman from La Palma, called Beatriz, was among those to complain, claiming her Christian status had been ignored when she was sold to a man called Bachiller de Herrera in Seville. ‘She says he beat her so much that she was close to death,’ the court stated.

  The Canary Islands had, in the imagination of Castilians, once belonged to their Visigothic kings, and Isabella’s stated aim was ‘to submit them to the crown and to expel, with God’s favour, all superstition and heresy that are practised there and in other infidel islands by the Canarians and other pagans’.44 This, then, she saw not just as reconquest but also as a religious crusade, just like the war against the Moors of Granada. Usefully, this also meant that it could be financed the same way – with the help of the pope and the sale of the indulgences offered in the Crusade Bulls he had issued.45 But its people were not like the Moors, deemed rather to be religious innocents. It was also, in terms of financing, a precedent that could be followed for Columbus.

  Columbus’s daring, foolhardy project did not go down well among the seamen of Palos who were ordered to provide both boats and crews. ‘It was publicly known and said that there was no land in those parts because Portugal had gone looking for it many times,’ one of them, Bartolomé Colín, recalled later. ‘Many wise men of the sea said that going to the west … even if you sailed for two years, you would never find land,’ added another, Martín González. Indeed, local anger about being picked as the port that should provide the vessels and seamen was such that even the man who had rented his mule to Friar Pérez, so that he could see Isabella, found himself being blamed. ‘Many people mocked the admiral and his business of going to discover the said islands, and they laughed about it, and even blamed this witness because I had provided the mule,’ said the beast’s owner, Juan Rodríguez Cabezudo. Friar Pérez had to twist many arms and convince many hardened sailors before the small fleet could be gathered.46

  In such an open-ended, risky expedition as that proposed by Columbus, Isabella probably did not have a particular objective beyond increasing her wealth, her power and, if possible, the reach of Christianity. There were no colonisers or priests sent with Columbus on his first voyage, so it is safe to say that she saw it as pure exploration, looking for ‘islands and mainland’. The royal instructions included orders to avoid Portugal’s gold trading station at La Mina, in present-day Ghana, and to respect existing treaties giving Portugal rights of conquest over Fez, possession of its Atlantic islands and trading priorities with the west African lands known as Guinea. A document signed by the monarchs as a passport for Columbus if he fell into foreign hands made it clear what he was expected to find. ‘We send the nobleman Christopher Columbus with three caravels [in fact they were two caravels, La Pinta and La Niña, and a larger, sturdier nao called Santa María] over the ocean sea toward the region of India,’ it read. Columbus even hired an oriental translator to go with him.47

  Isabella herself may have given Columbus little thought after he had left Santa Fe that May. She could be forgiven for being more interested in the conquest of the Canaries. In the previous five months she had brought Spain’s crusade against the Moors to an end and taken the dramatic step of expelling the Jews. The fortunes of the three vessels that left from Palos – within sight of the La Rábida friary – on 3 August 1492 were unlikely to worry her excessively.48

  Columbus set off first for the Canary Islands, where he resupplied his ships and, it was rumoured, spent a few passionate days with the cruel, tyrannical and widowed mistress of the island of Gomera, another Beatriz de Bobadilla (a niece to Isabella’s lady-in-waiting, she had allegedly ended up in the far-flung island after a jealous Isabella married her off to its feudal lord, Hernán Peraza, to keep her away from Ferdinand). He sailed west into the empty ocean from the port of San Sebastián on La Gomera on 6 September 1492. Most explorers heading into the unknown chose to sail into the wind, thereby ensuring that they could simply turn around in order to be blown back home. Instead, Columbus sought out the following wind that he knew blew at these latitudes. Those who watched his sails disappear over the horizon, a
nd the queen who was sending him on his way, must have wondered if he would ever find a way back.49

  29

  Partying Women

  Barcelona, 1492

  It was a new comic twist to the noble sport of jousting, and those who sat looking out to sea with Isabella after the lengthy feasting with her French guests at the great lonja trading house in Barcelona laughed uproariously. ‘This is how it was done: A man stood in the prow of a rowing boat with a lance at the ready and an oblong shield which he used to protect himself against the other jouster,’ explained one of Prince Juan’s pages, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. ‘Each boat had twenty oarsmen … and the two boats with the jousters would pick up as much speed as possible and when they clashed the jousters sometimes ended up in the water with their shields, which provoked great laughter.’ The party at the great, domed hall where the city’s merchants met daily to sign their deals and talk to their bankers had been just one of several festive interludes while the French ambassadors were tying up a peace agreement that would see Cerdagne and Roussillon return to Spanish hands. Several feasts involving all the royal family, the court, their visitors and the great and good of the city had ended in dancing, bullfights and games.

  Hernando de Talavera, the austere Jeronymite friar who ‘preached what he practised’, was not pleased. Isabella did not usually disagree with Talavera, nor was she used to being scolded, either in public or in private. But that is what her confessor, now archbishop of Granada, had done and she was determined to persuade him that his biting criticism of her behaviour during the partying that had accompanied the arrival of a French embassy was wrong. ‘We did nothing new, nor did we think that we had done anything untoward,’ she wrote back.1

  That is not what Talavera had heard. In Isabella’s court, men and women normally ate separately, yet this time they had been allowed to sit together. His anger extended to Isabella’s dancing, the way her ladies-in-waiting were led off by the French visitors and the gory bullfights laid on for them as entertainment. ‘I won’t criticise the gifts and prizes, though for those to be considered good they ought to be moderate. Nor the spending on clothes and new dresses, even though, where it is excessive, blame must be attached,’ he had sniffed.2 ‘What I think most offended God in so many and diverse ways were the dances – especially those involving someone who should not dance – which only a miracle can prevent from being sinful … and, even more, the licentiousness of mixing French gentlemen with Castilian ladies during the dinner and that they were allowed to lead them around however they wished.’

  ‘And what should I say about the bulls?’ Talavera asked. ‘They are, without doubt, a prohibited spectacle … Without any kind of profit for the soul, body, for honour or income,’ he declared. Talavera had obviously disapproved, too, of the partying and bullfights in Seville two years earlier with which the queen had marked her daughter Isabella’s marriage to her Portuguese husband. He now chose to remind Isabella that all that partying had been for nothing, given that Prince Afonso had died just eight months after the wedding. It was a low blow, and Isabella responded with unusual, if controlled, anger.

  She cared deeply about her moral reputation and Talavera’s criticisms meant that it was being questioned. ‘They must have told you that I danced there, but that is wrong. It did not even pass through my mind,’ she insisted. Spending on clothes had been minimal, though she had been unable to resist ordering up a new dress for herself. ‘Neither I nor my ladies wore new clothes,’ she said. ‘I only had one dress made, and that was silk … and as plain as possible.’3 She admitted that the men had worn costly costumes, but that had been done against her instructions.

  Isabella cared not just about her own reputation, but also about that of her ladies-in-waiting – who were meant to reflect her own image of virtuous femininity. Through her propagandists, she held up her supposedly wicked sister-in-law Queen Juana, whose Portuguese ladies had created such uproar, as an example of everything a queen should not be. ‘As for leading the girls off, which I read in your letter, I did not hear anything at all about them being taken off, and I still have not,’ she told Talavera. This had by no means been the first time that the rule about segregated eating had been relaxed in order to entertain visitors. ‘Eating at table with the French is an old custom and one that they themselves usually follow,’ she explained. ‘Whenever they are here and their main people eat with the monarchs the others sit at the tables in the salon of the ladies and gentlemen. That is how they always are, as they never place the women apart on their own. This was also done [by us] with the Burgundians, the English and the Portuguese.’4

  The only justifiable complaint was, she said, about the bullfighting. ‘With the bulls I felt the same as you, even though it was not quite so bad. But afterwards I decided with all my determination never to watch them again in my life,’ she said, though Isabella recognised that she could not ban a tradition enjoyed by, among others, her own husband.5 Her concern was not for the animals, but for the men who were gored. Isabella did not stick to her pledge, and later rued the fact. The following year she saw two men and three horses gored to death in a bull-run at Arévalo and responded by introducing a new rule to make the bulls less dangerous by covering up the points of their horns.6 ‘She ordered that the bulls’ horns be covered with others from dead animals and stuck on … in such a way that the tips of the [newly-added] horns pointed backwards,’ recalled Oviedo. The result was as if the bull’s horns had suddenly grown longer, but curled inwards like a goat’s, so that they could be used to batter runners, but not to impale them.

  Isabella was a strict mistress of her own household, where women were expected to behave themselves or, at the very least, be discreet about misbehaviour. Scandal, above all, was to be avoided. ‘She detested bad women,’ Pulgar explained.7 Normally the two sexes were kept rigorously separate. ‘In her palace she oversaw the upbringing of noble young ladies, the daughters of Grandees … investing great diligence in the supervision of them and the other palace women,’ said Pulgar.8 They normally ate apart from the men, and Isabella acted like a mother superior, making sure the girls in her care were closely chaperoned. Male officials and doctors had to wait outside Isabella’s quarters until all her daughters, and the ladies-in-waiting who slept there, were dressed and ready.9 The ladies-in-waiting were, in part, there to provide a shield. ‘In the absence of the king, until now she always slept in the common dormitory of certain young ladies and maidens of her household. Now she sleeps in the company of her daughters and other honourable women in order not to give root to gossip that could blemish her reputation for conjugal fidelity.’10 An English envoy whose host disappeared to eat with his wife noted that similar rules often applied outside the royal palace. ‘It is not the custom in this country that women ever come and eat in company with strangers,’ he explained.11

  Isabella’s ladies followed their mistress’s daily routine, where long and intense sessions of administration were punctuated with meals and regular visits to the chapel. In the chapel the cultural and material wealth of musical instruments, choristers, incense, priests’ robes, altar cloths and sparkling gold and silver ornaments provided a welcome change of atmosphere. The ritual sounds, sights and smells of her daily services were an invigorating feast for the senses that contrasted with the relatively drab world outside. Isabella’s chapel was a place to meditate not just on spiritual affairs, but also on the Christian ideology that drove many of her political choices. ‘Even though she spent night and day at work on the large and arduous tasks of government, it seemed as though her life was more one of contemplation than of action,’ said one Italian at her court, who noted that she rarely missed the daily services.12 Yet it would be a mistake to see her court as a cloistered, convent-like place reserved only for the prim and the pious. There was fun, too. Dwarfs, dancing girls and musicians entertained her court in the evenings and at meals. There were board games, cards, singing and dancing. Acrobats were also popular, with one of the
m astounding wedding guests by standing on a tightrope to juggle balls, swords and bells before hanging ‘by the teeth, most marvellously’. And in the intimacy of the queen’s quarters, her ladies played with pet cats and rabbits, while dressing up their little lapdogs with bells and collars. For literature they had heart-fluttering sentimental novels and the sung troubadour romances of knights and damsels.13 The queen’s household was overseen by her ‘milk sister’ Clara Alvarnáez, whose mother had been one of Isabella’s wet nurses in Madrigal. Isabella mixed young noble girls with well-bred older women in her group of a dozen ladies-in-waiting, while matchmaking the former to suitable partners became one of her favourite pastimes.14 Her ladies helped to manage the hospital for the poor that travelled with the queen – an item of royal charity that also served to augment Isabella’s popularity as she traversed her realms. The ladies were meant to be a reflection of Isabella herself – well behaved but providing a dazzling chorus of finery when she needed to put on a show of pomp. Like Isabella, they were expected to remain well turned out, clean and sweet-smelling. Apart from the soaps and perfumes available to them, a resident tooth-cleaner was on hand and there were slave-girls for hairwashing.

  The restricted contact between the sexes meant that, on the occasions when the separation was relaxed, the court went into a frenzy of courtly love. The Spanish courtiers’ ability to exaggerate their love interest involved everything from limpid adoration to swooning, and the elderly Spanish Duke of Alba, who later accompanied Catherine of Aragon to England, had to be carried out of a feast after fainting at the sight of one English lady.15 A Burgundian who passed through the Castilian court was amazed to see one young woman at a banquet simultaneously playing along three apparently besotted suitors. ‘She spoke to one who remained on his knees, with his head uncovered, for an hour and a half; she was a quarter of an hour with the second and a full hour with the third. She would talk to one, while throwing glances at another and keeping her hand on the shoulder of the third. That way she kept all three happy; because, given that they did not see them often, they show great delight at being with the women with whom they are in love,’ he explained. The Burgundians were shocked and wanted to know why the woman toyed with them like that. ‘We do as we want while we are waiting to marry, treating them like this,’ she replied. ‘Because once we are married they lock us up in a room in a castle. That is how they get their revenge on us for having such a good time when we were single.’16 Talavera would have approved. A woman’s wedding day, he said, was ‘the day in which you lost your freedom’. Married women were meant to stay at home since ‘they are made to be shut up and busy in their homes, while the male is made to move around and deal with the things outside it’. Like Eve, he thought, women were inherently foolish and easily led astray. ‘It is natural for them to easily believe in bad things.’ Isabella was so determined to protect them from temptation that when an unfortunate young man called Diego Osorio was found outside their window armed with a rope and, presumably, a desire to scale into their rooms, he was immediately sentenced to death.17