It is not clear whether the case made its way to Isabella herself or was dealt with by her officials, but this was just one more example of a priest behaving as if he was above all laws. Among the many advantages that priests enjoyed, indeed, was a degree of protection against civil courts, and some recruits to the minor orders had joined purely to avoid trial or being pursued for their debts. These not only sought ‘to escape punishment for their crimes’, as Isabella herself put it in 1500, but even continued ‘to perpetrate many and diverse crimes’. She eventually felt it necessary to demand that lower-order priests be banned from carrying arms in towns and cities and that bandits, blasphemers and murderers be stopped from joining their ranks.3 Even otherwise honest priests thought they had the right to flout basic laws relating to women. In one case heard at a court in Seville, a woman called Marina Rodríguez complained that her lover, a priest at the city’s cathedral called Juan Simón, had reached for his weapon when confronted by her husband. The cut to her husband’s face was deep enough to ‘slice through skin and flesh, losing a lot of blood’, Marina told the court. Simón does not seem to have been punished, however, and when the husband died some time later, Marina publicly pardoned his attacker and, presumably, re-established herself as his official manceba, or mistress.4
The Spanish church was among the richest and most powerful in Christendom. Its income in Castile in 1492 was 50 per cent greater than that of the crown and, together with Portugal and Aragon, it provided one-third of the income of the papal treasury in Rome – more than France, England and Scotland combined. That wealth made it a magnet for the lazy, the ambitious and the venal, as well as for holy men and women. In the steep streets of Toledo, home to Castile’s senior archbishopric, visitors were amazed both by the number of tonsured heads and by their owners’ individual wealth. ‘The cathedral has many chaplains [Münzer counted more than 100 in 1494] who earn 200 ducats a year, such that the masters of Toledo and of its women are the clergy, who have beautiful houses and can spend and conquer, giving themselves over to the highest living without anyone scolding them,’ observed the Italian diplomat and writer Andrea Navagero later in the sixteenth century.5 Positions could be, and frequently were, bought. Important bishoprics were bickered over by the Grandees and aristocracy, because they brought the same wealth and secular power as the great noble titles. Teenagers became bishops, bishops became political players and their bastard children were often raised to greatness.
Isabella disliked all this immensely. On the one hand the church, via the secular holdings of its great archbishops and bishops, was a rival source of power and a potential cause of trouble in much the same way as the Grandees were. On the other, she was outraged that so few monks, friars and nuns abided by the basic rules of poverty, chastity and obedience to their orders, and that so many priests lived openly with their concubines. Spain’s nuns, the Italian professor at Salamanca Lucio Marineo Sículo tutted, often ‘lived with great freedom and dissolutely’ and, worse still, ‘in contact with men’. At the convent of San Pedro de las Dueñas, where Isabella’s half-brother had placed his lover Catalina de Sandoval as abbess, they reputedly enjoyed a ‘dissolute and frenetic life’.6
The queen wanted order, discipline and decency restored by reforming the monasteries, the clergy and, if possible, the papacy itself so that all behaved more like people whose prime interests were God, souls and charity, rather than wealth, power and pleasure. There were plenty of good examples to follow too, especially in the observant monasteries that had sprung up over the previous century in an attempt to renew the original, disciplined spirit of the monastic orders.
Spain was no worse than elsewhere. In England, France and the German principalities of the Holy Roman Empire, corruption and simony were also prevalent. Redemption from sins, and avoidance of purgatory, could be and frequently were bought with money. No one could foresee the dramatic splits of sixteenth-century Christendom, but popular dismay with the church was there in rhymes, songs and satirical coplas. ‘Whenever a friar dies, the rest go to sing, because one less means another ration to share out,’ was one. The first stirrings of what would become a Protestant revolt against these excesses had already been seen in England, with the Lollards, and among the Czechs, with the emergence of the Hussites. Martin Luther had been born in a town in Saxony in 1483, just nine years into Isabella’s long reign. He would lead the assault on a corrupt church where almost everything, including virtue, seemed up for sale, while Isabella’s own daughter Catherine of Aragon would eventually help provoke Henry VIII’s split with Rome by refusing to accept the nullity of her marriage.
At the same time as she battled the Moors, chased heretics and expelled Jews, Isabella insisted that the church cleanse itself of corruption and venality. She soon gave up with Rome as a source of reform. How could popes like Borgia or his predecessor Innocent VIII – who watched prostitutes dance naked and paraded their bastard children in public – demand chastity, or anything else, of ordinary priests, monks or nuns? Rome itself was full of the illegitimate children of cardinals, and envoys like Palencia had returned with their tales of decadent luxury, bacchanalian parties and old men in their underwear racing before the pope.7 As with the Inquisition, reform was either carried out under the aegis of the Castilian crown, or would probably not be undertaken at all. And if that meant increasing royal power over the church, that also fitted Isabella’s ambition for a centralising, more authoritarian monarchy.
Ironically, it was the dissolute, power-greedy and nepotistic Borgia who did most to help her. If Isabella and Ferdinand wanted powers to reform, they needed his permission. That gave him an extra bargaining chip as he manoeuvred for his own children’s benefit and to keep the papal states protected from outside powers. In March 1493 he issued a bull allowing them to oversee a reform of the monasteries that, in simplistic terms, saw many of them forced into switching their allegiance from the less strict ‘conventual’ branch of their order to the ‘observant’ branch, which insisted on poverty, chastity and correct behaviour. Isabella also wanted nuns to be cloistered and greater devotion in all monasteries and convents to meditation, penitence and the mass. In the most exaggerated of cases, this was a change from good food, fine wine and the company of women to hairshirts and hard work. Of the three bishops who were to oversee the reform, one would always be at court so that Isabella and Ferdinand could watch over the process. This made it similar to the Inquisition and the Hermandad, or Holy Brotherhood, whose senior officials also moved with the court – reflecting Isabella’s priorities about policing, religious repression and purifying reform. On the same day Borgia also formally handed Isabella and Ferdinand control of the wealthy and powerful military religious orders of Alcántara and Santiago, adding another important building block to Isabella’s royal absolutism. She and Ferdinand had already grabbed control of the third big military order, Calatrava, though some in Rome deemed it ‘illegal and monstrous’ that a woman like Isabella might be given control of a masculine order. Borgia’s backing was bought with a simple series of trade-offs, including allowing Cesare to become archbishop of Valencia.8 Monastic reform, in other words, was exchanged for outrageously obvious papal nepotism.
A similar reform of the non-monastic clergy was also initiated. In this case it was mostly a problem of public morality, though Isabella and Ferdinand worked hard to appoint honest, learned bishops who would, in turn, appoint honest, qualified priests. ‘No one without a university degree enters here,’ Talavera said when he was made archbishop of Granada. The German Popplau had been shocked when he visited in 1484. ‘The clergy, with only a few exceptions, do not even know how to speak Latin,’ he said. Concubinage was a particular target, but so was dress – with priests ordered to make sure their tonsure was the right size, their hair not too long and their habits below the knee. A particular blight was the large number of clerics living openly with women. This had long been a tradition and official reaction had varied from tolerance to largely unenforceable
intolerance. Punishment mostly fell on the women, who could be fined and forced to wear a red strip of cloth in their hair as public proof that they were not ‘honourable’. But when the rules were publicly flouted by the clerics of Santo Domingo de la Calzada in 1490 and officials tried to punish their women, the boyfriends reacted by excommunicating the officials. Isabella had originally trusted the church to sort this problem out itself but imposed her own punishments when it became clear not only that clerics continued to live with women but – a particular worry for Isabella, for whom image was often as important as reality – also flaunted their scandalous behaviour. ‘We have been informed that many clerics have had the audacity to take concubines openly and these publicly proclaim themselves to be their women, and that they do not fear the law,’ Isabella and Ferdinand wrote as they tightened the rules again. Once more, it was the women who were to be punished, with banishment from their town or village or with 100 lashes and fines for reoffenders. These punishments were also extended to the mistresses of married men,9 who were not allowed to flaunt relationships that challenged the established order.
Isabella’s attitude to prostitution, however, was relaxed and she even handed out licences. All cities had their brothel districts. In Córdoba these were on cathedral land, and paid rent directly to the church as well as local taxes. In 1486 Isabella and Ferdinand awarded a licence to Alonso Yáñez Fajardo, sometimes described as a priest, ‘so that he can establish brothels in all the conquered towns and places yet to be conquered’ in the kingdom of Granada. Higher-class prostitutes, known as encubiertas, or hidden ones, were to be treated differently to public mistresses, especially as they conducted their business discreetly in private. Officials ‘should not confiscate anything from any woman who is not a public prostitute. Those they call “the hidden ones” should not be fined or given a bad reputation, because that could cause scandal or other problems,’ Córdoba’s bylaw stated.10 The priorities, then, were mostly to avoid social scandal and trouble, but also to protect the status of properly married women. Even Isabella’s own court, so praised by her own propagandists, was suspect. ‘How difficult it is to conserve virtue and honesty or avoid unfortunate disillusions in the court,’ lamented Popplau.11 One of Isabella’s favourite poets, the allegedly womanising court preacher Friar Íñigo de Mendoza, admitted that it was all temptation. ‘To flee the devil it is better to go to the stables than to the royal court,’ he said.12 He might have been referring to Enrique IV’s court, but Isabella’s reputation for expelling young ladies who interested her husband suggests that her ‘reformed’ court had its own not-so-secret life of clandestine trysts and sexual dalliance. One out of every seventeen children of nobles in the Extremadura region, for example, were bastards.
Isabella may have been strict and reasonably devout, but that did not mean she could impose her view of the church on her husband.13 Ferdinand apparently saw no conflict between reforming the church and appointing his own bastard son Alfonso of Aragon (born the same year as his first legitimate child with Isabella) as archbishop of Zaragoza when he was just eight years old or, many years later, making him archbishop of Valencia.
Isabella would have liked to reform Rome itself, which many saw as the root of the church’s ill-discipline and decline. But that would mean reforming Borgia. ‘His own house was in such disarray that all the rest of Rome could have claimed to be a monastery full of monks and nuns in comparison to it,’ said Zurita. The sermons of the firebrand puritan Italian preacher Girolamo Savonarola – who organised bonfires of vanities in Florence to burn sinful art, books and cosmetics, and who also savaged Borgia’s papacy from the pulpit and was excommunicated – were on Isabella’s bookshelf. One Spanish official even accused Borgia to his face of promoting Rome as a ‘house of pleasure’ rather than as the home of St Peter.14
Isabella could not press Borgia too far because the church was becoming an important source of income for her. When her beloved friar Talavera wrote a damning letter to a Spanish cardinal in Rome she censored his complaints about hypocrisy, scratching them out. ‘You will have to pardon my great presumption for changing it, but I rubbed out the part where you mentioned hypocrisy, because I did not think Rome should be besmirched,’ she explained to Talavera. With the excuse and considerable expense of the Granada War, they had received papal authority to raise extra money directly from, or via, Spain’s wealthy church. Over time this source of income grew from a quarter of the money that reached Isabella’s exchequer to account for up to 40 per cent. Every three years Isabella and Ferdinand would have to go back to the pope to ask for a renewal of the so-called Crusade Bulls by which they raised much of this. They continued to do this after the Granada War was over, by which time church money had become a bedrock of their funding. The money was used not just for fighting the Moors, helping the pope in Italy or sending fleets against the Turks.15 It also helped fund Columbus’s voyages and those of their daughters Juana and Catherine when they went to Flanders and England, respectively, to marry. Isabella was obviously anguished about this. She knew that the extra money was meant for crusading, and in her will, as she totted up the balance of wrongdoings that might be held against her when she sought to enter heaven, she asked that any misappropriated funds be paid back.16
On the other side of the balance, however, she could point to having achieved genuine reform in the monasteries and partial reform of the clergy (though, as Navagero witnessed in Toledo, the problems of concubines and wealth had obviously not been completely eradicated). By reforming in advance, Isabella can also be credited with helping prepare Spain to resist the impact of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. As a result, it remained an almost universally Roman Catholic country that would spread the faith through the Americas and to other Spanish lands like the Philippines. ‘She had the great dishonesty and dissoluteness among the friars and nuns of her kingdom corrected and punished,’ said her loyal propagandist Andrés Bernáldez,17 though this was only partially true.
Isabella did not, however, achieve her full ambition for the Spanish church. The model she and Ferdinand really sought was that enjoyed by other monarchies in Europe who controlled the naming of bishops and archbishops. This they were given in Granada and the Indies, along with a share of the church’s income there, though they pushed continually for the right to be extended and fought any attempt from Rome to appoint non-Spaniards as bishops. They did, however, bring change to the kind of men who became bishops. Alfonso Carrillo and Pedro González de Mendoza had been old-style Grandee-archbishops in the main see of Toledo, plucked from the ranks of the upper nobility and as interested in politics and their own glory as they were in the church itself. Isabella’s new bishops were more modest, more learned and more devout. Middle-class men with university degrees and profound convictions were handed power, sometimes against their will. Among them were the two most influential churchmen of her reign, archbishops Hernando de Talavera of Granada and Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros of Toledo – both of them friars who had originally planned to follow a more humble life.18 After her husband, these were the men who most influenced Isabella and the way she governed.
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Juana’s Fleet
Laredo, 22 August 1496
Queen Isabella was not accustomed to the sea, let alone to sleeping on a boat. But she had always felt a fascination for the ocean that, at the same time, terrified her. Now she was aboard ship in the well-protected northern port of Laredo, with her sixteen-year-old daughter Juana, listening to the water lap against the hull of a heavy Genoese carrack. This was a mother’s attempt to calm her daughter’s fears about travelling across the seas, allowing the young girl to get used to the rocking of waves and the creaking of timbers. Juana was about to set sail for Flanders, where she was due to marry Philip, Duke of Burgundy, whose lands included much of modern-day Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. The pale-skinned, long-faced duke with orangey-auburn hair was known as ‘the Handsome’ and, as a son of the Habsburg Emperor
Maximilian, also used the title Archduke of Austria. Isabella knew that, in the future, she would probably see little of her second daughter. With her chestnut hair, dark eyes and narrow face, Juana was more obviously cast in the mould of her father’s family. Isabella had given her second daughter the nickname suegra, or ‘mother-in-law’, apparently because she looked so like Ferdinand’s adored and legendary mother. Ferdinand joined this game, and also jokingly called his daughter ‘mother’. Juana, like her two younger sisters Catherine and María, had not received as much maternal attention as Isabella had lavished on the older children, Isabella and Juan.1 Now she was leaving home, and as her departure date of 22 August 1496 approached her mother was concerned.
A vast fleet of more than a hundred ships had gathered at Laredo. The towering green bulk of Mount Buciero and its cliffs protected the bay way off to the north, while Laredo itself was tucked into the western fold of a steep promontory created by an extinct, eroded volcano. At the quayside and anchored in the bay off the broad, sweeping beach the costly cargo of linens, clothes, jewels, silver and gold plate for Juana’s trousseau had slowly been loaded. Isabella both oversaw it all and conducted affairs of state from a large, solid stone house on one of the steep streets running down to the port. The lengthy shopping list that Isabella approved included 200 thimbles, 10,000 sewing needles, 40,000 pins and 62 pairs of clog-like chapines. Four miles of silks, brocades, velvets, cottons and wool were ordered up for clothes and linens. Delicacies included green ginger, sugared fruits and quince jelly. Perfumes bore strange and sometimes Arabic-sounding names like menjuí, estoraque, algalía, ámbar and almizque (the latter, civet oil, came from caged African civets, with Münzer shown a ‘furious and choleric’ animal that had what looked like its testicle sack turned inside out and a small spoon thrust in to extract oil that made his hands ‘smell of civet oil for several days’).2 Among the more exotic pieces of jewellery to travel with her were Juana’s much loved three-inch-thick Moorish-style gold axorca bangles, which could be secretly scented.3
Isabella of Castile Page 41