Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  The royal fleet of forty-one vessels was led by two giant 1,000-ton Genoese-style carracks which were notoriously safe. Smaller carracks, swift caravels and small pinnaces with both oars and sails made up the rest of Juana’s personal fleet.45 Half of the 4,500 men manning the vessels were soldiers, mostly Basques, in charge of 600 artillery pieces and other guns, some made especially to protect the Spanish infanta.6 An attendant merchant fleet, including two ships carrying iron to England, numbered more than sixty vessels. At least 200 people – including four slaves – formed Juana’s household and the accompanying party of nobles was led by Ferdinand’s cousin, Fadrique Enríquez, the admiral of Castile. It was an enormous expense for the crown.7 The origins of Juana’s goods show that mudéjar Muslims were still important as artisans, with her copper kitchen pots made by ‘Ali, a Moor from Torrelaguna’ while another Moor called Palafox made thirty-six chests and Mohammed Moferrez (a ‘great Moorish master from Zaragoza’) was charged with providing the new-fangled claviorgan or harpsichord (or both) that went with her.8 All these were, of course, designed for showing off – including the 95 pounds of gold and 256 pounds of silver used to create jewels, plate and chapel ornaments.9 Isabella was accustomed to displaying wealth and power at home. Now she was determined to put on a similar show abroad. If Spain was to become a major European power, it had to impress.

  The stormy Bay of Biscay and the English Channel were terrifying for non-sailors, but Isabella’s worries were not just about the natural hazards of the sea. What, she wondered, would happen if her daughter’s vessel was attacked by the French as it travelled around Brittany and squeezed through the English Channel? The worry was real, for the marriage with Philip was part of the concerted attempt to create an anti-French alliance that would be further bolstered by a match between his sister, Margaret of Austria, and Isabella’s son Juan. Tension with France had reached such a state that Isabella was in Laredo without her husband, who had rushed off to Catalonia to deal with the French threat there.10 She would not see him for almost three months.

  When she wrote to England’s King Henry VII, via her ambassadors, three days before Juana set out, it was as a mother rather than as a stateswoman. ‘Tell the king of England, my cousin, about the departure of my daughter … because they have orders from me, if the need arises, to put in to any harbour or land belonging to the king of England. Because of the trust that we have in him, I believe that my children will be treated by his subjects in the same way as his children would be treated in my kingdoms,’ she wrote.11 If the fickle Atlantic weather drove them into an English port, she meant, she hoped that he would treat Juana as he would his own daughter.

  Isabella may have been seeking her own solace by spending the two nights before Juana’s departure with her lively, intelligent and creative daughter – for her own mother, Isabella of Portugal, had died at the old house in Arévalo just a week before. She had long been a depressive recluse, but her daughter had continued to visit whenever her duties allowed. On 22 August, after two nights on the carrack, Isabella waved her daughter off. ‘The queen bade farewell with many tears, thinking that they might never see one another again,’ the chronicler Alonso de Santa Cruz reported. ‘Last night at midnight the armada set sail, the weather, thanks to God, being favourable,’ Isabella wrote as Juana’s fleet disappeared over the horizon. ‘May it please Him very quickly to bring it to the desired haven, as He has the power to do.’12

  Isabella moved on to Burgos, where she spent several days in a state of anxiety. ‘She was distressed about her daughter, in deep need of news of her. As she had gone into the mouth of hell [at sea], she worried that she would be struck by some storm or be unable to pass the Flanders banks,’ wrote Santa Cruz. ‘For that reason she kept men of the sea around her, so that they could tell her what winds were blowing, in order to calm her.’ In a fresh letter to her ambassador in England she now asked Henry VII to send boats to Juana’s rescue if she was attacked at sea ‘by any who want to do harm’. The safe conduct she sought from Henry VII proved necessary after the English Channel lived up to its stormy reputation, with the fleet forced to put in for several days at Portland. The Flanders banks also wrought damage. A heavy Spanish nao was lost and the huge Genoese carrack carrying most of Juana’s trousseau grounded and sank, taking with it the jewels of many of the Grandees and other nobles travelling with her.13

  Juana reached Flanders on 8 September 1496. The sea turned out to be the least of her worries. Her huge retinue was surprised to find that no one of equivalent rank awaited them. Neither Philip nor his father Maximilian was in Flanders, and it was another month before she met her husband and married him. Juana was joining one of the most flamboyant courts in Europe and one that set fashions and standards of display for the rest of the continent. Philip’s courtiers had laughed at the poor dress sense of Isabella’s ambassador, Francisco de Rojas, when he played Prince Juan’s part in the engagement ceremony to Margaret of Austria. Rojas was one of the men Isabella had raised from a relatively lowly status to become a favourite envoy. He had to partially undress and climb into Margaret’s bed, revealing torn crimson tights held together by a leather strap around his thigh. The Spaniard’s austere dress sense – a reflection of the moralistic type of humanism embraced by Isabella’s court – clashed with the hedonistic style favoured by the courts in both Burgundy and France. The Spaniards who accompanied the infanta were shocked by the loose morals and easy spending. Burgundians, the word came back, ‘honour drinking well more than living well’. A particularly cantankerous Castilian ambassador, Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida, later observed that Juana ‘should no longer countenance these people, since they have no manners at all’.14

  Maximilian was not the most reliable of allies, partly because he was often short of money. One of Isabella’s ambassadors called him ‘slow to take decisions, and with a penchant for contradicting people; who never wants what is proposed to him, even if it is for his good; and with a reputation for generosity, but not very much [as] he is so poor that to get 100 florins from him people have to insist for 100 days’.15 But Isabella and Ferdinand knew that the best counterweight to France’s muscle and ambition was an alliance between themselves, the Habsburgs and the Tudors.

  Messengers, meanwhile, carried descriptions of the Burgundian court’s luxurious and novel style back to Spain. Rumours quickly spread that Isabella was preparing rooms for her future daughter-in-law Margaret in Spain that would be almost identical to those draped in gold cloth à la nouvelle mode that the Spaniards saw when she eventually received her new sister-in-law.16 While Juana and the chief nobles with her now impressed the Burgundians with their clothes and jewellery, the latter were disappointed with the rest of the party. ‘Their followers were too thinly wrapped and spent very little,’ recorded the chronicler Jean Molinet.17 ‘For they are sober in eating and drinking.’ Philip then dismissed most of Juana’s Spanish court, leaving her lonely and powerless. Among those permitted to stay were her four slave-girls, though this later provoked another culture clash as they bathed her and washed her hair so much that her culturally obtuse husband eventually worried for her health. Isabella did her best to stop Philip from leaving her daughter without Spanish staff, sending a bishop to Flanders with instructions ‘to ensure that the persons that the archduchess took with her for her service are not removed from her household’. She also lobbied for Juana to be given control of her own income, following the Spanish fashion, rather than having to squeeze money out of her husband’s accountants. It did not work. Philip was neither caring nor faithful and was often absent. Fuensalida found him to have ‘a good heart, but [he] is changeable and under the influence of counsellors who intoxicate him with a dissolute lifestyle, taking him from banquet to banquet and from lady to lady’. Many of those counsellors were radically pro-French and disapproving of a marriage designed to weaken the Valois monarchs of France. Juana herself soon discovered that she had inherited her mother’s propensity for passionate, possessive
love. ‘This passion is not found only in me,’ she admitted later. But if her mother had been ‘equally jealous’, she said, time had eventually cured her of it and she hoped that the same would happen to her.18

  To make things worse, the Spaniards found the change of climate unbearable. They had arrived so late in the summer that it was now impossible to make the return trip, taking Margaret of Austria with them to marry Juan, until the spring. The cold, damp weather of the Zeeland coast, combined with the unfamiliar food and an outbreak of the plague, meant that many did not survive a terrible winter. Their fingers froze and the storms sweeping in from the North Sea left them shivering and vulnerable. ‘Whether from the change of air, or of diet, or because of the skimpiness of their clothes, which were unable to resist the agonising cold, the plague got to them and some three to four thousand of them finished their days,’ recorded Molinet.19 Around half of the Spanish party died and some 75,000 maravedís was spent just on burying them. Not surprisingly, many of the Spaniards who had been due to stay with Juana now begged to be taken home. Abandoned to her fate, she could – at least initially – do little to bring Isabella’s kingdoms closer to Burgundy or help promote Spain’s interests against those of France. Philip was not very involved in administering his own lands, leaving that work to his counsellors. Partying and hunting interested him more. ‘He was neither ambitious nor greedy and was not given to work, preferring others to take it from him and govern,’ reported Zurita. Philip often agreed with Juana when they were together alone, she told an ambassador, ‘because she knows that he loves her’. But as he shared everything that she said with his former tutor, the pro-French archbishop of Besançon, she also learned to hold back from telling Philip ‘certain things that she believed should be said to him and that should be done’.20

  Isabella’s son-in-law, then, was a disappointment. He showed few signs of turning pro-Spanish and, indeed, created more problems for Isabella than he solved. She had lost a daughter and gained very little in return. She now hoped that the other part of their agreement with the Habsburgs – the marriage between her son Juan and Philip’s sister Margaret – would produce happier results.

  39

  Twice Married, But a Virgin When She Died

  Burgos, March 1497

  Welcoming candles burned in the windows of houses and 1,500 flaming torches, mounted on stands, lit the streets of Burgos. Once more, Isabella had chosen dusk as the most dramatic moment for an important meeting and night was falling as the cavalcade bringing her daughter-in-law Margaret of Austria entered the city. Isabella waited for her by the inner door of the palace, wearing a cloth-of-gold brocade gown, a gold-decorated crimson scarf and black mantilla – an outfit that was copied for both Catherine and María. The encounter was elaborately stage-managed. When Margaret tried to kneel and kiss the queen’s hand, Isabella raised her gently up. ‘The queen’s reception of her was quite a sight,’ the Venetian ambassador observed. ‘Kissing and hugging many times, she took her with her.’1

  A tiered stage had been set up in the palace’s grand hall, with the royal family carefully arranged by rank. Isabella and Ferdinand sat at the top, with their daughters a step below them and Ferdinand’s illegitimate daughter, also called Juana, another step further down. The latter seems to have been born before his marriage, though at least two other illegitimate daughters, both of them nuns called María who spent most of their lives together in a convent in Madrigal de Las Altas Torres, had come later. ‘In her youth she was praised as the most beautiful girl in Spain,’ reported a visitor who saw Juana marry a Grandee, the Condestable de Castilla (with whom she already had a child) many years later. The choreographed pomp in Burgos, with sixty of Isabella’s ladies queuing for almost an hour to kiss the new princess’s hand, impressed the Venetian ambassador – who praised the fine clothes of the ‘damisele … nubile’. Margaret brought with her not just the sophistication of Burgundy but also that of the similarly hedonistic French court, where she had once been betrothed to Charles VIII. She dazzled the audience with a glamorous French-style dress of gold brocade and crimson lined in ermine, topped off by a black felt hat and accompanied by large pearls. ‘Since she was so very beautiful and very pale, the gold and precious stones she was wearing seemed even more rich,’ reported Santa Cruz.2 ‘And her ladies were much the same, all dressed according to their customs.’

  Isabella’s anxiety about Margaret’s sea journey to Spain had been almost as bad as that which she had felt on Juana’s departure. Once again, her fear proved legitimate. Margaret was energetic and intelligent, with a wry sense of humour. This was, after the collapse of her long-term engagement to France’s Charles VIII, her second attempt at marrying. When the fleet taking her to Spain, which also had to put into English ports, was battered by storms in the Bay of Biscay, she jotted down her own witty epitaph. ‘Here lies Margot, the willing bride, / Twice married – but a virgin when she died.’3 News of her arrival at Santander reached Isabella in Burgos early in March 1497. A large group of nobles set out across the Cantabrian mountains to greet the princess-to-be and bring her to court. Margaret’s party had little idea about Spain and its rugged geography, bringing with them the four-wheeled carriages that were used in north-west Europe. These soon fell foul of Spain’s steep mountains and muddy spring tracks. ‘They are for flat terrain,’ sniffed the prince’s page, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, many years later.4

  The boy whom Margaret had come to marry was Isabella’s most special child and had always been adored and spoiled by his mother. ‘My angel’, Isabella routinely called him, even when scolding him.5 For most of his life she had taken charge of his expenses, education and household officials. His ama, or nurse, Juana de la Torre, the woman who had made Columbus his miel rosada, was clearly the boy’s favourite. Juan became so attached to her that he considered her ‘like a mother’,6 missed her when she was away and, more confusingly, once dipped his pen into ink and, in scrawly handwriting, said he expected to marry her.7 ‘My ama, what sadness you gave me with your departure; I don’t know how you did not suffer great anguish at leaving me like this, because you know the loneliness that I will feel without you,’ he wrote. ‘I beg you, my ama, that for love of me you return, because you should have me – and nobody else – as your husband.’ It was not until he was eleven (in 1489) that his household was separated out from Isabella’s own accounts, but, by the time of his marriage, he had his own court and palace at Almazán.8

  Like all Isabella’s children, Juan had a peripatetic childhood. As a small boy he had been carried in a litter by servants as the court moved from place to place. Later he had learned how to perch on a mule – something his younger sister Catherine was doing at the age of six. Large, padded children’s saddles – with crossed poles attached so they could be lifted on and off or carried by bearers – were covered in silk cushions and blankets. The endless journeys traipsing along trails, tracks and old Roman ways, wading rivers or scrambling up mountain passes, meant that all Isabella’s children became practised riders at an early age. Juana’s mule had stumbled and was washed downstream as the family waded across the River Tagus at Aranjuez in 1494. A frightened Isabella began shouting for help as Juana clung bravely to her saddle while her mule tried to swim, and, when rescued by a stableboy, she was ‘red as a rose’ and ‘with great spirit’. All were equally accustomed to spending the night in palaces big and small, as well as village houses or large (sometimes Arab-style) tents pitched in the open. That did not mean that they were used to discomfort. Ermine, rabbit, hare, otters and martens were all sacrificed to keep the royal children warmly wrapped. Juan’s accounts show him going through at least fifty-five pairs of shoes and a similar number of high, soft borceguí boots each year.9 But Juan’s liking of his clothes, and his habit of holding on to them rather than giving them away to retainers, angered Isabella, who stepped in to educate him about proper royal generosity.

  ‘The queen was told that the prince was becoming tight-fisted,’ re
ported Oviedo. ‘As a prudent and magnanimous queen, she wondered how to free her son from this defect and make him more generous … because it is a great defect if a king does not know how to gratify those who love and serve him.’ One day she asked the prince’s chamberlain, Juan de Calatayud, what had happened to a suit of clothing that the prince should have given away. ‘My lady, it is in the prince’s chamber. He has not given it away, nor does he generally give away anything that your highness has bought him,’ came the reply.

  ‘It would have been better for him to give it away, because princes should not have the trunks in their chambers stuffed full of clothes,’ said Isabella. ‘From now on, you must make sure that, every year on the last day of June [the prince’s birthday], you bring before me all the doublets, tunics, capes, other clothes, hats and harnesses, and all the trappings of horses, mules and ponies, in other words all the personal apparel of the prince – except the tights and footwear.’ At his next birthday all his clothes were laid out and an inventory made. Isabella called Juan to see her and, with the list in her hands, scolded him gently: ‘My angel … princes should not be like second-hand rag merchants, nor have their trunks full of personal clothes and attire. From now on, on this day of the year and in front of me, I want you to share all this out between your servants.’10 Isabella, of course, already did much the same with her own clothes.