Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Tell me: with what right and justice do you keep these Indians in such cruel and terrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such hateful wars against these people who were peacefully and gently in this land, waging so many of them, with unheard of deaths and damage? Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them [proper] food or curing them of the illnesses they contract because of the excessive work you give them so that they die or, better said, you kill them in order to obtain gold every day? And how careful are you to ensure that they are taught [church] doctrine, learn about God their creator, are baptised, and go to mass, observing holidays and Sundays?25

  In time, the slavery problem disappeared by the worst possible means. The decimation of the local population by war, famine and sickness was such that soon there were not enough inhabitants to work the land. Swine flu appears to have wiped out a quarter of the population of Hispaniola in the two years after Columbus returned on his second voyage, and within fifty years there would be fewer than 500 Indians on Hispaniola, down from 100,000.26 By then slavery had long been going into the Caribbean, rather than out of it, with the traffic of Africans to the islands. Isabella’s administration issued the first licence to transport African slaves to the Indies, as a way of replacing the disappearing native population, in 1501, just nine years after Columbus’s first voyage. It was the start of an enormous forced movement of African people into the Americas that would last for centuries.

  After his undignified arrival home as a prisoner, Columbus was taken before Isabella and Ferdinand in Granada. They had been upset by the treatment meted out to him and had ordered his release and payment of 2,000 ducats so that he could prepare himself for court. His son Hernando, or whoever wrote in his name, later claimed that Isabella and Ferdinand welcomed him with ‘joyous faces and sweet words’. Columbus began a letter-writing campaign, managing to have some of his letters delivered to court before Bobadilla’s report, which had travelled in the same fleet.27

  One of these letters went to Juana de la Torre, Prince Juan’s nurse, who could be counted on to relay its contents to Isabella – his real target. The queen, he said, had been the decisive benefactor of his voyages of discovery, above Ferdinand. ‘Everyone reacted with disbelief but [Our Lord] gave to my lady the Queen the spirit of understanding and great strength, and made her the heiress of all [those lands] as his dear and beloved daughter. I went to take possession of all this in her royal name. Those who had shown their ignorance then tried to cover it up by talking instead about problems and expenses. And yet, despite this, her Highness gave her approval and maintained it in every way.’28

  Columbus’s wild mysticism was matched by false modesty, claiming that he had set out on his third voyage only in order to please Isabella. ‘I would love to bid farewell to this business, if I could do so in way that was honest towards my Queen. The strength of the Lord and of her Highness made me continue,’ he wrote.29 In an attempt to gain the moral high ground, he also painted a savage picture of his own colonists as traffickers of young girls. ‘Today when so much gold is being discovered there are arguments over how best to make profit, by going to steal or by going to the mines: a woman can be had for one hundred castellanos, as much as for a small holding: that is quite common and there are plenty of merchants on the lookout for girls of nine or ten years old, which is currently the most expensive group.’

  Those who had arrested him had ulterior motives, he insisted to Isabella, via Juana de la Torre.30 ‘It is a great dishonour that a judge has been sent to investigate me, especially as he knows that by sending a damning report, he himself can take over the government.’ Tough measures had been needed, he said, because of the rough nature of the colony and because the Indians – whose peaceful nature and innocence he had previously praised – were so warlike. ‘I should be judged as a Captain who left Spain to conquer the Indies and numerous, warlike peoples with customs and beliefs that are opposed to ours … and where by divine right I have established the sovereignty of the King and Queen over a new world; so that Spain, which was once reputed to be a poor kingdom, is now among the richest.’ It was a very different picture to the earthly paradise of his earliest letters.

  ‘When I finally thought that I had earned a rest and could reap my rewards, I was suddenly made prisoner and brought here in chains, to my great dishonour. The charges against me were brought out of sheer malice,’ Columbus wrote in a separate letter, believed to have gone to Castile’s main council, the Consejo de Castilla.31 He had abandoned his wife and children to serve Isabella’s Castile, he said, and ‘now at the end of my life I find myself stripped of my honour and estate for no reason at all’.

  Isabella and her husband did not need much persuading that Columbus had been shabbily treated by Bobadilla. ‘Such grateful princes could not allow that the admiral be treated badly, and so they ordered that he come to them with all the rents and rights that he kept here but which had been sequestered when he was detained. But they never again allowed him to take charge of the government [of the islands],’ wrote Prince Juan’s page Oviedo, who went on to become another early historian of the Indies. Isabella and Ferdinand ordered that Columbus’s share of trade profits be restored along with his property. Bobadilla, who was replaced ten months later, was instructed to return samples of gold ore that he had taken from Columbus and repay him for any he had sold.32

  Late in 1501, Isabella received another letter from Columbus, this time addressed to her alone, in which he donned the mantle of a chivalrous knight writing to his lady. ‘Most Christian Queen. I am your Highness’s loyal servant. The keys to my free will I handed to you in Barcelona. And if you sample it, you will find its scent and taste has grown and there is no little pleasure to be had from it. I think only of your contentment … I gave you my devotion in Barcelona in its entirety, with all my soul and honour and estate. Friar Juan Pérez [at La Rábida friary] and the nurse [Juana de la Torre] will both confirm that this is true. And I am ever more firm in my dedication to you.’

  By now Isabella was beginning to suffer long bouts of illness, and Columbus saw her weaker control as one cause of the mounting problems.

  The other matters that your Highness must deal with, along with your poor health, mean that the government of this affair is not being carried out so perfectly. That saddens me for two reasons: first, because of the Jerusalem business, which I beg your Highness not to ignore, or to think that I spoke of it just to impress; the other is my fear that this whole business may escape from us. I beg your Highness not to consider me anything other than your most loyal servant in all this, and that I do not lie when I say that I put all my effort into bringing you peace of mind, and joy, and to augment your great dominion.33

  Isabella did not take his offer to recapture Jerusalem for Christianity too seriously, but was prepared to send him back to the New World – under very strict conditions, which included not stopping in Hispaniola, where the new governor Nicolás de Ovando had arrived in a mighty fleet of thirty-two vessels. Las Casas had sailed with Ovando and found the colonists in a good mood since they had now discovered a reasonable quantity of gold,34 while an Indian ‘uprising’ offered an excuse to take more slaves.

  Columbus eventually embarked on his fourth and final voyage in April 1502 with a relatively discreet squadron of four vessels and his brother Bartolomé and his thirteen-year-old son Hernando with him. By this time other explorers, including Amerigo Vespucci, had been sailing to the Indies and widening the area of discovery with growing evidence of a continent to the south of the islands that Columbus had discovered in the Antilles. Columbus’s mission on this occasion was to find a channel that would take him towards Asia. He ignored Isabella’s instructions to stay away from Hispaniola’s main port at Santo Domingo and was turned back.35 ‘The reply was to tell me that, on orders from over there, I could not pass or try to land,’ he wrote in what was probably his last letter to Isabella. ‘The hearts of those with me sank out of fear that I would
take them far away, where, they said, there would be no remedy to any dangers that might befall them.’36 Columbus felt the humiliation keenly, especially after his ships had been caught out of port by a storm that he had predicted would arrive. His four vessels and his sickly son survived, but an outgoing fleet heading back to Castile that ignored his warnings lost nineteen vessels. Some 200,000 gold castellanos (the largest haul of gold yet, worth 100 million maravedís, which included a single, huge piece found in a riverbed that was believed worth 3,600 pesos de oro, or more than 1.5 million maravedís alone) went to the bottom along with 500 men. His nemesis Francisco de Bobadilla and the former rebel Francisco Roldán were among those who drowned. ‘Neither man nor boy survived, with no one found either alive or dead,’ reported Las Casas, adding that the mud and straw buildings that made up much of Santo Domingo had also been flattened.37 ‘It was as if an army of devils had been let loose from hell.’

  Columbus sailed on to central America and modern-day Honduras, where he received news that another sea (the Pacific Ocean) was just nine days’ march away, but decided not to seek it out, being more interested in gold and channels that would take him further towards Asia. His attempts to set up new colonies failed and, after being chased off by Indians in modern-day Panama, he eventually found himself stranded in a remote corner of Jamaica.38 It was from here that Columbus wrote that final letter to Isabella, claiming to have heard of new gold mines while also reflecting on his failure to achieve one of his main aims – to become wealthy. ‘Today I do not even own a roof tile in Castile; if I want to eat or sleep somewhere, I must go to a tavern or inn, and often I cannot even pay for that,’ he claimed.39 Columbus also reprimanded Isabella and her husband. ‘Until now I have been treated as a foreigner. I was in your royal court for seven years, and everyone I spoke to about this enterprise treated it as a joke. Now even tailors are asking [permission] to make discoveries. And they obtain it, though it is to be believed that they are really going to steal, by which they do great damage to my honour and to this whole business.’40 He added a final lament, demanding that the monarchs act to restore his honour.

  I came to serve you when I was 28 years old and now I do not have a single hair that has not turned white. I am sick in body and have spent my final years in this, but all was taken away from me and my brothers and was sold, including the clothes on our backs, without us being heard or seen in court and to my great dishonour. I must believe that this was not done by your Royal command. The restoration of my honour and of the damage done to me along with the punishment of those who are to blame would make your Royal Name ring out loud once more.

  We do not know how Isabella, a person to whom honour (meaning her reputation and the respect due to her) was also very important, reacted – but time was running out. Only after two of his men had managed to paddle a canoe to Hispaniola was Columbus able to leave Jamaica, though by then he had been stranded for a full year. It was June 1504. He would return to Castile later in the year with his reputation in tatters, sick, indebted and soon to die. Neither he, nor Isabella, could have known what a huge impact his voyages – and their mutual love of grand adventure – would have on the world.

  35

  Borgia Weddings

  The Vatican Palace, 12 June 1493

  While Isabella tried to impose strict morals on her court, her church and Castile’s growing territories, a new pope was flouting the most elementary rules of good conduct in a brazen fashion which angered and exasperated her. The new pope was a Spaniard, none other than Rodrigo Borgia, the wily, powerful cardinal who had helped Isabella while she jostled for position as her half-brother’s heir in Castile. The sixty-one-year-old had been elected in August 1492, taking the name Alexander VI, and news soon filtered back to Isabella that he had brought his own, special form of nepotism and notoriously loose understanding of personal morality to the Vatican palace. The most scandalous event of all was the wedding procession led through the palace’s sumptuously decorated rooms in June 1493 by the pope’s daughter, the thirteen-year-old Lucrezia Borgia. Famous for her hazel eyes, slender neck and calf-length mane of blonde hair, Lucrezia had inherited both her father’s poise and his pouty mouth. Male contemporaries also commented on an ‘admirably proportioned’ bust. A black servant girl carried her bridal train and behind them walked more than a hundred of Rome’s greatest ladies dressed in their full wedding finery.1 Much of the chatter would have been in Catalan or Spanish, the languages that the huge Borgia clan and their friends had brought with them to Rome. At their head was the dark-haired, vivacious nineteen-year-old Giulia Farnese, also referred to as Giulia Bella, ‘the beautiful Giulia’, or, less flatteringly, as ‘the pope’s concubine’.

  Thus it was that a pope’s bastard-born daughter was being married into one of Italy’s most powerful families, the Sforzas of Milan, while his concubine acted as first lady and a large brood of similarly bastard-born children looked on. Chief among them was the immature, spoiled and ruthlessly ambitious Cesare. He was the eldest of the four children born to Vannozza dei Cattanei, at least some of whom had since been been legitimised. Although he was still only eighteen years old, and not yet ordained, Cesare was already being lined up by his father for a cardinal’s hat.2

  Lucrezia was led into the Sala Reale, or Great Hall, where her father sat in papal magnificence on a throne surrounded by velvet hangings and tapestries. Her brother Juan Borgia, who held the Spanish title of Duke of Gandía, escorted Lucrezia into the room, where she and the bridegroom, the twenty-six-year-old Giovanni Sforza, knelt on cushions before the pope. A third brother, twelve-year-old Jofre, presumably stood near by. Borgia’s master of ceremonies Johannes Burchard was disapproving of the gaggle of women who followed – most of whom forgot to genuflect to the pope. The vows were made, a ring was placed on Lucrezia’s finger and the partying began. ‘Valets and squires served two hundred dishes of sweets, marzipan, candied fruits and various sorts of wines,’ Burchard reported. ‘At the end the guests threw large quantities of the sweets to the people outside.’3 In Spain, a disapproving Isabella would soon hear rumours that the party had been lewd and rowdy, with guests lobbing sweetmeats into the cleavages of the younger women. ‘Each cardinal has a young lady beside him. The meal went on until long after midnight, with bawdy comedies and tragedies which made everyone laugh,’ Burchard recorded. ‘Many other things are being said, but I am not reporting them because they are not true, and if they were true they would, in any case, be unbelievable.’ This mysterious, throwaway last line was a reminder that Rome lived off scandal and gossip as much as religion, and that the Borgia pope himself was central to many of the city’s favourite scurrilous tales. ‘Alexander VI could be moved by anger and other passions but principally by his excessive desire to magnify his children, whom he loved to distraction,’ wrote the Italian historian Francesco Guicciardini, who was twenty years old when the pope died. ‘Many popes had had children before but had usually hidden this sin by describing them as nephews; he was the first to present them openly to the world.’4

  Four years earlier, the then fifteen-year-old Giulia had married a member of the powerful Orsini family. The wedding festivities had been hosted by Rodrigo Borgia, then fifty-eight years old and not yet pope but still – according to one observer – ‘tall with a medium complexion, neither dark nor fair. He has dark eyes and a full mouth, his health is excellent and he has enormous energy. He is unusually eloquent and blessed with innate good manners, which never leave him.’ Giulia was either impressed, manipulated or merely calculating.5 Either way, she soon became the powerful cardinal’s lover. Borgia considered this a highly satisfactory arrangement and gave her the kind of prominence that made her role as his ‘concubine’ obvious to all. He even had her face painted on a fresco depicting the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus above his bedroom door in the Vatican. It was the kind of thing that made Isabella furious.

  Borgia made no attempt to separate his private life and ambitions from those of the papacy. W
hen he proposed creating an unprecedented thirteen new cardinals in September 1493, there was outrage among the existing cardinals. One of his nominees was Cesare and another was Alessandro Farnese, Giulia’s brother. ‘Such discord has never been seen,’ the Mantuan ambassador wrote.6 Borgia, in turn, reportedly declared that he would ‘show them who was Pope, and that at Christmas he would make more cardinals, whether they liked it or not’.

  Isabella must have heard the details of Lucrezia’s wedding party from her own ambassadors, who had arrived in Rome a week before – with the new pope countering attempts to cancel the Corpus Christi procession on account of the terrible rains because he badly wanted to impress the Spanish ambassadors. Their masters, after all, were vital to his personal and political ambitions. Reminders of the power now being exercised by Isabella and Ferdinand were everywhere, including just outside the walls of Rome at the gate that led to the Via Appia, where a tented camp of refugee Spanish Jews had sprung up (which would soon be blamed for an outbreak of plague).7

  Although Borgia’s election was seen as further proof of Isabella and Ferdinand’s growing might – with a torchlit, festive procession of 4,000 Roman nobles and their children shouting ‘Spain! Spain!’ as they walked through the city’s streets – the queen deplored the scandalous behaviour of the Borgia family and disapproved strongly of the papal offspring. Most of all, however, she hated that this Spanish pope was so shameless. It was perfectly normal for Popes to have children, but usually they were discreet. For Isabella, the avoidance of public scandal involving those in power was just as important as correct behaviour itself.

  She had tried to prevent Borgia from handing the title of archbishop of Valencia to the teenaged Cesare. The new pope’s ambitious plans in Spain for his son Juan, Duke of Gandía (a duchy near Valencia), irritated her too. When she heard that he also planned to make Cesare a cardinal Isabella was livid, calling in the papal nuncio, Francisco Desprats, for a private meeting.