Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Isabella’s daughters were the other great torch-bearers of her reputation. The infantas were expected to spin, sew, weave and embroider, since even queens should take pride in sewing a husband’s shirt.18 Isabella’s propagandists and hagiographers, understandably, praised the virtues of her daughters, who were deemed pure, honourable, loving and properly submissive to their husbands. Clumsiness and lasciviousness were their ‘enemies’, according to one contemporary.19 More importantly, they were also extremely well educated. Isabella had little formal education herself but soon realised its value, teaching herself Latin – the language of high culture and of the mass – as an adult. She called a talented woman Latinist, Beatriz Galindo, nicknamed ‘La Latina’, to court to give her lessons and kept her there to teach her daughters, while also hiring Italian humanists as their tutors.20 Juana ‘answered instantly in Latin to any question she was asked, just like the princes who travel from one land to another. The English say the same thing of Catherine, Juana’s sister. And the whole world has similar praise for the [other] two sisters,’ said the contemporary humanist Luis Vives. Even the Dutch humanist Erasmus was impressed, though fawning to royalty was one of his specialities. Catherine was ‘well instructed – not merely in comparison with her own sex’, he commented after meeting her.21 ‘And is no less to be respected for her piety than her erudition.’

  Isabella had a library full of devotional works, the lives of saints and pious manuals instructing her on how best to bring up her daughters.22 The latter were written by friars or other religious men with no experience of raising children of any kind. They often saw women as naturally afflicted by a series of vices. They were envious, grasping gossip-mongers in constant danger of the most terrible feminine weakness of all – the ‘madness of love’.23 And when women strayed, the world trembled. ‘Disordered love is a sin that occurs especially among women, which in turn causes discord, deaths, scandals, wars, the loss of goods … and, what is worse, the perdition of the most tragic souls to the abomination of carnal sin,’ Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, known as the archpriest of Talavera, wrote in his Reprobation of Wordly Love. ‘Love is foolishness, madness, deranged and a waste of time,’ he added. ‘Lust together with shameless, dishonest love is … counsellor to the twisted Satan, mortal enemy of human salvation.’ One of the most influential of these works was the Carro de las Damas, or Book of Women, by the Franciscan monk Francesc Eiximenis. He was less radical in his assessment of women’s ‘natural’ faults, but still believed they needed a firm hand when they misbehaved. ‘Punish them and wound them on the back with some switch,’ he advised.24 Self-control and discretion were the distinguishing qualities of well-brought-up girls, who were meant to carry rosaries and spend part of each day praying. They should also learn to avoid non-Christians, refusing food from them and staying away from Jewish or Muslim men.

  Isabella consciously cultivated an image of virtue and feminine modesty, creating a public persona which was both majestic and impassive. As with many a fellow teetotaller, self-control was paramount. ‘She was measured and contained in her bodily movements; she did not drink wine,’ reported Pulgar. This rendered her difficult to read and frightening, while also making her moments of public warmth or joy seem that much more endearing. But life on what her English counterparts would have called ‘the queen’s side’ of the court was not just about primers, prayers and needlework. Her daughters learned falconry, horse-riding and hunting. There were dancing lessons with Portuguese teachers and musical instruments of all kinds to be learned. Songs were sung at dinner and stories of chivalry – Isabella’s favourites – were told out loud.25 Legends from the magical, mysterious world of Merlin and Lancelot also sat on her shelves,26 though these would be condemned by one male contemporary as ‘based on lust, love and boasting … causing weak-breasted women to fall into libidinous errors and commit sins they would not otherwise commit’.27 The archpriest of Hita’s ribald Libro de Buen Amor (The Book of Good Love), with its brazen women and earthy sexuality, was also on her bookshelf. Perhaps, behind closed doors and in the entirely feminine world of her private court, the scatalogical references to sexual organs, pubic hair and bodily functions in some of the bawdier songs in the Cancionero de Palacio (Palace Songbook) were allowed. There was no lack of well-paid musicians to sing them.28

  Such bawdiness was certainly not for public display. And the thought of French knights wandering off with her carefully controlled ladies-in-waiting during the partying in Barcelona cannot have pleased Isabella. Talavera’s complaints did not go unheeded. As she awaited the arrival of her future daughter-in-law Margaret of Austria, with her court of Burgundians, Isabella issued instructions to avoid the ‘familiarity, common treatment and informal communication used by queens and princesses in Austria, Burgundy and France’. She ordered, instead, that the visitors be welcomed with ‘gravity … as was the [common] usage in Spain’.29

  30

  A Hellish Night

  The Old Royal Palace, Barcelona, 7 December 1492

  At midday on a grey, overcast December day in 1492, after a morning of listening to pleas from his Catalan subjects, Ferdinand began to walk down the steep stone staircase that fanned out from the corner of what was already considered the ‘old’ royal palace in Barcelona. He must have briefly glimpsed a peasant farmer called Juan de Canyamars as the man appeared from a chapel beside the main doorway and then stepped aside to let the king, who was wearing a favourite heavy gold chain, sweep past. As Ferdinand took the first two steps, Canyamars pushed his way through the king’s entourage, came up behind him, pulled a large, machete-like farmer’s knife out from under his coat and lunged at his neck. The knife entered the base of the left-hand side of the king’s neck, though his collarbone and the thick loops of his chain deflected part of the blow. Those with Ferdinand reached for their own knives and swords, and soon both men were on the ground and bleeding from their wounds. Ferdinand was rushed back inside, blood issuing from a two-inch-deep gash.1

  Isabella was in a separate palace that gave on to the beach and the Mediterranean Sea. When news arrived of the attack, she automatically assumed that some kind of coup was under way. She wanted to run straight to Ferdinand, but her mind instantly turned to the consequences of regicide. She ordered that boats be brought up so that her fourteen-year-old son Juan could be rowed out to sea. If her husband died, Juan would become king of Aragon. That made him the next target for any plotters. Her Castilian courtiers armed themselves and stood by, ready to repel any attempt to kidnap the child.2 Rumours flew around the city – about Moors or Navarrans or others who might want Ferdinand dead – and the mob grew restless.

  Isabella had never felt such fear. ‘My soul could not have felt it more if it had left my body. It is impossible to exaggerate, or even express, what I felt; and should death want him again, I pray to God that it would not be in the same way,’ she wrote to Friar Talavera. Ferdinand would not initially allow her to go to him, as he was preparing for death with his priests. ‘He wrote to me because he did not want me to come while he was confessing,’ Isabella said. Pere Carbonell, a chronicler who worked in the neighbouring Archive of Aragon, ran into the palace to see what was going on, but found the doors to the great hall locked with the king inside. ‘Some said the king was injured; others that his throat had been cut with a sword,’ he recalled. ‘I thought I would faint when I heard that, but I recovered my strength … there was so much pushing and shoving that I was unable to see him.’

  Ferdinand’s bulky gold chain had ‘prevented [Canyamars] cutting off his head with a single slice’, but he still appeared to have suffered a mortal blow, according to Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, an Italian humanist whom Isabella had hired to run the court’s school for young noblemen.3 Anghiera reported that ‘a battalion’ of doctors and surgeons had appeared to save the king’s life. These cleaned the wound, removing hair and fragments of bone before sewing it up with seven stitches.4 ‘The doctors are not sure whether the king will survive, o
r not,’ he said afterwards. Isabella feared she would now lose the man she loved with a jealous passion and with whom she had reached a pinnacle of glory. Their unique partnership, and the future fruits that it might bring, hung by a very fine thread. ‘We count the days and live between fear and hope,’ wrote Anghiera the following day, as the court prepared to mourn.5 In Barcelona and across his kingdoms, people prayed for Ferdinand’s recovery, vowing to perform extravagant acts of gratitude if he survived. The next evening hopes were raised as Ferdinand began to show the first signs of recovery, but a week later he was back in danger again, collapsing as an infection took hold. His tongue swelled, his heart beat frantically and his face turned red.6 ‘It was a hellish night,’ Isabella recalled. ‘The wound was so big that, according to Dr Guadalupe, you could put four fingers inside,’ though her squeamish side prevented her from checking that for herself. ‘I was not brave enough to look.’ One courtier suggested that her suffering ‘seemed greater than the king’s’.

  Barcelona was gripped, once more, by fear. Churches filled up. ‘There was more demand for confession than was ever seen in Easter Week, and all without anybody issuing instructions,’ Isabella wrote to Talavera. By Christmas Day 1492 – although weak – Ferdinand was out of danger. He still could not leave the palace, but showed himself at a window to reassure those below that he was recovering.7 ‘God behaved with such mercy that it seems he measured the site [of the knife-blow] precisely to avoid danger in such a way that it missed his tendons, the neck-bone and all the dangerous parts,’ Isabella told Talavera. Soon Isabella was preparing to ride with her husband to a different house where he could rest better. ‘He is up and walking about outdoors and tomorrow, if God wills, he will ride to the other house that we are moving into. The pleasure of seeing him up is as great as the original sadness was, so that we all now feel revived,’ she declared.

  Isabella was not the only person to see divine intervention in Ferdinand’s survival. There could be little more providential than being saved by the golden chain of God-ordained royal authority. His surviving the attack, indeed, only added to the couple’s reputation as God’s chosen servants, destined to restore Christianity’s authority even beyond their own frontiers. Those who had vowed to give thanks and make pilgrimages if he recovered now kept their word. Catalonia’s holy mountain, the serrated rocky outcrop known as Montserrat, saw the faithful clambering up its steep, dangerous sides – some barefoot or on their knees. Isabella and her children, too, made the trip up the mountain’s steep, winding tracks, walking at least part of the way, to give thanks. ‘All sorts of people are making pilgrimages up mountains, through valleys or along the coast to any place where there is a sanctuary,’ reported Anghiera.8

  Fears of a plot were soon dampened. Canyamars had acted on his own. The farmer from a village near Barcelona was mad and delusional. He had been convinced that if he killed Ferdinand, the crown would be his. He was tortured to extract the truth of a wider plot, but stuck to his story.9 ‘No evidence could be found, or suspicion raised, that anyone else knew about this except for the person who did it,’ Isabella reported. He had been visited by either the holy spirit or the devil almost twenty years earlier, he said, and told he would be king. Isabella’s prime concern was that the attacker refused to confess his sins to a priest before death, thereby placing his soul at risk, and she sent her own friars to persuade him. Canyamars finally gave way. ‘And on deciding to confess, beforehand, he realised that he had done wrong and said that it was as if he was waking from a dream, that he had not been himself. And he said the same thing after confessing, apologising to the king and to me,’ Isabella told Talavera. The royal council had condemned him to death and only Isabella’s intervention prevented him being handed over to the mob for lynching. She insisted, as an act of clemency, that he be killed by drowning.10 He was paraded through the city in a cart, then drowned (though some reports claim he was garrotted) and butchered. ‘They cut off the right hand with which he had done the deed, and the feet he used to get there and plucked out the eye he had used to see it with and the heart with which he had thought it up,’ a local historian said a century later.11

  Isabella wondered whether the attack on Ferdinand meant that she was being punished for her own sins, though she did not enumerate them and she asked her confessor, in a rare display of remorse, to draw up a list of those she may have committed while seeking power. ‘That was one of the things that hurt most, to see the king suffering what should have happened to me, without him deserving to pay for me,’ she wrote. ‘That nearly killed me.’

  31

  A New World

  The Atlantic Ocean, 14 February 1493

  Five months after setting sail, Christopher Columbus doubted whether he would see Europe or the queen who had sent him on his journey ever again. As he battled fierce Atlantic storms and worried about his ship sinking hundreds of miles from land, he made a special plan to ensure that news of his journey reached Isabella and her husband. He knew well that a discovery does not exist if the discoverer perishes without telling anyone. That is why, according to his own account, he wrote out a long document explaining all that had happened since he left La Gomera. The document was then wrapped tightly in a waxed cloth and sealed inside a wax tablet before being put in the equivalent of a glass bottle – a wooden barrel that was tossed overboard. A well-made barrel was the object most likely to survive if the ship and its crew went to the bottom of the ocean. A note inside the barrel offered a reward of 1,000 ducats to whoever delivered it, with the seal intact, to Isabella and Ferdinand.1 ‘I placed a similarly packaged message at the highest point of the poop deck, so that if the ship sank, the barrel would float off on the waves and be at Fortune’s mercy,’ he explained later. If found, history would record the fact that he had indeed discovered new lands. The barrel was never found, or the money claimed, but the letter would have been very similar to the one which, by a more orthodox route, found its way into Isabella’s hands the following month during the family’s long stay in Barcelona.2 It had been sent overland from Lisbon and contained a dramatic declaration: ‘I come from the Indies with the fleet that your Highnesses gave me, which I reached 33 days after leaving your kingdoms.’3 This was, Columbus told her, the greatest moment of Isabella’s reign so far. ‘That everlasting God who has handed your Highnesses so many victories has now given you the greatest victory ever delivered to any monarch until now.’

  Columbus’s letter promised ‘as much gold as you need’ and ‘slaves without number’ while the ‘whole of Christendom must hold great celebrations … for the discovery of such a multitude of peoples so concentrated together who, with very little effort, can be converted to our Holy Faith’. Isabella must have found perfectly reasonable his claim that Castile’s great prize came from God, who had ‘decided that I should find gold, mines, spices and countless people willing to become Christians’. Columbus had not, of course, found India – having bumped, instead, into the islands of the Caribbean. Nor had he found any gold mines or, as he told Isabella and her husband, islands populated entirely by women. But he had crossed what we now know as the Atlantic Ocean, and the news that there were other lands – and other peoples – far away to the west was stunning. One of the boldest, or most foolhardy, pieces of navigation in history had ended in triumph for Castile. It was an extraordinary letter and, for Isabella, doubly so. She was not just one of the first people in Christendom to hear of these distant, exotic lands that Columbus described so gushingly in his letter. She also knew that they now belonged to her.

  From Columbus’s dramatic and colourful descriptions, Isabella could be forgiven for thinking that she was now queen of something akin to the Garden of Eden. ‘The islands are so fertile that, even were I capable of describing it all, it would still be difficult to believe; the climate is very temperate, the trees, fruit trees and grasses are beautiful, though very different to our own, and the rivers and ports are many and extremely good,’ she read. ‘The islands are wel
l populated with the finest people in the world, who are without wickedness or pretence. All of them, whether men or women, go about as naked as the day their mothers gave birth to them.’ One of the islands he had found, and called Hispaniola, he thought must be bigger than Spain itself, while a second one, which he christened Juana (and then Cuba), he deemed larger than Britain. ‘This sea [the Caribbean] is the sweetest in the world for sailing with little danger for naos and other ships,’ Isabella read.4