Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Bullfights, hawking, ball games, music, mummery, fireworks and chess were among the entertainments provided for Juan. Perhaps as he gripped in his hand the chess figure of the queen – newly powerful after rule changes that allowed her to move diagonally across the board – he thought of his mother, who some historians see as a model for the change. Isabella’s main concern, as always, was education. Once he had reached school age by turning seven, a Dominican tutor, Diego de Deza, trotted along behind him, filling his head with Latin, grammar, ethics, reading and musical tuition.11 Seven years old was, according to one manual, the age at which young royalty should start ‘reading, writing, learning the Latin language, and then playing instruments, dancing, swimming, firing bows and crossbows, fencing, board games, ball games and other things that prudent and well-trained men can do’.12 As he grew older, Juan was drawn closer to both parents, learning by proximity about royal decision-making, war and justice. By the age of fourteen he was a wealthy man in his own right, accumulating lands that paid rents and taxes – and the responsibilities that went with them. In 1496, shortly before they waved goodbye to Juana, Isabella and her husband had formally given him the title enjoyed by the heirs to the crown, prince of Asturias.13 ‘By ancient custom in these our kingdoms … when there is an eldest son to be heir to the kingdoms, when he leaves tutorship and comes of age, the sovereign used to give them a household and principality to have and to govern,’ they wrote.

  Juan was the third of Isabella’s children to marry and, like his sisters and mother, he quickly turned a marriage of political convenience into a passionate, ardent relationship. The couple married on 19 March 1497, but it was still Lent – a time of church restrictions – and they were forced to wait two weeks before being allowed to consummate the marriage. In the meantime, the celebrations were dampened by the death of a young noble who fell under his own horse during an energetic game of cañas, with some seeing a bad omen for the couple. The blonde, fair-skinned Margaret impressed the southern Europeans who saw something superior and desirable in her pale complexion. ‘You would think you were contemplating Venus … unspoiled by make-up or artfulness,’ wrote Anghiera, though it is difficult to imagine a product of the French and Burgundian courts being quite so unadorned.14

  Juan and Margaret took to one another immediately. Some, indeed, worried about the obviously intense sexual attraction between the young couple, with court physicians concerned about the amount of time they spent in bed together.15 They fretted that the prince, whose long history of illness saw him regularly fed tortoise meat to deal with stomach pains, was too young and weak for such exertions. ‘A prisoner to his love for the lady, our young prince is once more too pale,’ wrote Anghiera, who accompanied Juan as he rode down streets carpeted in thyme and other herbs on his royal entry into Salamanca on 28 September.16 ‘The king’s doctors have advised the queen to separate Margaret from the prince’s side from time to time, giving them rest, arguing that such frequent copulation is a danger.’ Isabella did not listen. ‘Time and again they tell her to observe how thin he is getting and what poor bearing he has and they warn the queen that, in their judgement, this might soften his marrows and weaken his stomach. They don’t achieve anything,’ said Anghiera.

  Isabella’s reply may have reflected her own experience of both sex and marriage. ‘The queen says that it is not right for man to separate what God has joined,’ reported Anghiera, who worried that Isabella was transferring her husband’s natural robustness on to her obviously weaker son and blamed a bland diet of ‘chicken and other weak food’ for his sickly nature. ‘The prince has patently been weak from birth … They advise her [Isabella] not to trust in the example of her husband, whom nature gifted an admirable robustness as soon as he emerged from his mother’s womb, repeatedly telling her that a great difference exists between father and son,’ he said.17 On matters of state Isabella was obliged, at the very least, to seem as though she was listening to advice. When it came to her children, however, she clearly felt that the decisions were hers to take alone. ‘The queen will not listen to anyone and clings obstinately to her womanly decision,’ said Anghiera in mid-June, after the family had gathered in Medina del Campo while the younger Isabella prepared for her return to Portugal, this time as queen consort. ‘She has turned into something that we would never have expected in her. I have always proclaimed her to be a very reliable woman. I wouldn’t like to call her obstinately rebellious; [but] she is overconfident.’

  Isabella and Ferdinand had other things to think about. The younger Isabella had to be seen off in proper style, and a series of festivities and ceremonies had been organised for early October in the border town of Valencia de Alcántara. From there she was due to cross into Portugal. The family split, with Isabella, Ferdinand and their daughters moving on to the frontier while Juan stayed in Salamanca – one of his personal señorios, where some 3,000 students at Spain’s greatest university made up about a sixth of the population. He had been showing signs of exhaustion and soon took to his bed with fever. ‘In the full effervescence of pleasure, Prince Juan reached the end of his journey exhausted,’ wrote Bernáldez, who was among those who thought the prince was overexerting himself with his playful wife. Despite his weakness, he had continued with his favourite pastimes, which by now appeared mostly to be hawking and crawling into bed with Margaret. He may also have been suffering from smallpox (he had already had a bout in 1488) or consumption. It probably had not helped that, shortly after his marriage, a horse he was riding through the streets of Burgos after attending mass with Margaret bolted, dumping him in a water channel and ‘putting him in grave danger’. He had to be fished out by a senior knight, the Adelantado de Cazorla, Hurtado de Mendoza.18

  Juan’s illness worsened at a worrying rate. He stayed as a guest of his former tutor, Friar Diego de Deza, who was now bishop of Salamanca. Isabella must have read with terrible concern a letter from Deza that reached her on the Portuguese frontier. It was dated 29 September and warned that the prince’s condition was serious.

  It is the world’s worst burden to see his appetite so poor and his highness barely able to help himself. If this illness had come upon him at a time when your highnesses did not have to be absent, you would be the remedy, because your highnesses’ presence helps him a lot, and he is more obedient to the doctors and receives more support and happiness. I beg your royal highnesses to say what should be done with the prince in this state; and if by doing this I am serving your royal highnesses poorly, I beg your forgiveness. I am exhausted and do not know what it is best.

  Ferdinand galloped back to Salamanca and appears to have arrived in time to give his dying son some comfort. Bernáldez’s version of his last words to his son, which were probably invented, reflect the drama and tragedy of the day: ‘Beloved son, be patient because you are being called by God, who is the greatest of all kings, whose kingdoms are far greater and better than those you have or awaited … Prepare your heart to receive death, which all of us are obliged to do just once, with the hope that you will be forever immortal and will live in glory.’

  Isabella did not see her son before his death, at the age of twenty, at the bishop’s palace in Salamanca on 4 October 1497. His short, passionate marriage had lasted less than six months.19 ‘This death left his mother and father disconsolate, as it did Margaret, his wife … who was pregnant,’ reported Bernáldez.20 The death was a personal tragedy for Isabella, and a political drama with echoes that reached far beyond the country’s frontiers. A Jewish songwriter in north Africa, almost certainly one of those expelled five years earlier, imagined the drama of Isabella’s failure to make it to her son’s death-bed. ‘Where were you, my mother, my unfortunate mother? Pleading with God in heaven … But you were too late, mother – the sentence had already been handed down.’21 It was, above all, a moment for intimate family grief. The day after his son’s death, Ferdinand set out to see Isabella. He may have delivered the news of their son’s death personally. ‘He gave his
soul to our lord with such devotion,’ Ferdinand wrote in a letter shortly before he set out.22 ‘May thanks be given for everything, and now I must leave and take the road along which the Queen will come, because it seems to me that, for such news, I should be with her.’

  Her son’s death brought a quick, painful end to Isabella’s joy at the second marriage of her favourite daughter. ‘And so they went from the happiness of the wedding to the tears, crying and mourning for the Prince – all in one week,’ said Bernáldez.23 Isabella’s public reaction of maintaining a serene and unflappable regal exterior was noted by Anghiera, who found it unconvincing. ‘The sovereigns try to hide their deep sorrow. But we can see that, inside, their spirits are dejected,’ he wrote.24 Isabella and Ferdinand found support in a marriage that had lost none of its complicity. ‘When they are in public, they do not stop looking at each other, which is when the feelings that they hide inside become obvious,’ said Anghiera. Isabella’s only reference to her own suffering comes in a later letter, signed jointly with Ferdinand, in which they take some consolation from the fact that Juan was able to confess and receive the last rites. ‘Such a Catholic end as the one he managed gives us great consolation, but such a great loss cannot but cause us great distress.’

  The coffin was laid out under a canopy in Salamanca’s cathedral. So many candles were placed around it that wax had to be brought in from surrounding cities. Strict instructions were issued by Salamanca’s authorities. No one was to wear gold, silver, silk or colourful clothes but ‘only black cloth of grief and sorrow’. Pipes, tambourines, drums and fiddles were banned from weddings and baptisms. The corregidor also took advantage of the situation to insist that the local mudéjares wear not only mourning clothes, but also the blue half-moons on their shoulders that were meant to mark them out as Muslims.25 The most devoted mourner, according to Oviedo, was Prince Juan’s dark-brown and white lurcher, Bruto. ‘He lay down on the ground, by the head of the tomb, and no matter how many times they moved him from there, he always returned to the same spot,’ wrote Oviedo. ‘Eventually, seeing him insist on accompanying the royal corpse, they put down a cushion for him to lie on, and he was there – day and night – as long as the body was there, and they gave him food and water, and after he went off to urinate, he always returned to the same place.’ Both Ferdinand and Isabella’s younger daughters, María and Catherine, were so amazed by the lurcher – who perfectly mimicked the dogs included on so many royal tombs as a symbol of loyalty – that the queen insisted on adopting it. ‘And that is why, from then on, the queen always had that dog near to her chambers,’ recalled Oviedo. Bruto joined Hector, Isabella’s other favourite dog, who lived like royalty, and they devoured half a sheep between them every day.26

  The body was moved to Avila as Spain continued to mourn. ‘How fast the horrendous face of fortune has changed,’ wrote Anghiera. ‘All that was previously joy is now converted to tears.’ Isabella, Ferdinand, their family, the court, nobles and many people around the country dressed in black or wore white tunics as a sign of respect.27 Black flags hung from the gateways of cities and towns as Spaniards mourned the young man whose destiny, now frustrated, had been to unite them all. In the southern city of Córdoba local authorities closed dance schools, banned parties, stopped barbers from shaving people, prohibited the wearing of silk and brocade for a year and ordered people to stop adorning their horses with colourful trappings, ‘on pain of 50 lashes’.28

  Isabella diverted her grief by devoting herself to looking after the widowed Margaret. Her concern was driven by genuine affection for her daughter-in-law, but she was also hoping that the child in Margaret’s womb might prove to be a replacement male heir. ‘Our devotion to the princess only grows, as she tries hard and so sensibly, just as [the person] she is, and we will work to console her and to make her happy as if she had lost nothing,’ the sovereigns wrote on 8 December, from Alcalá de Henares. ‘She is healthy with her pregnancy, thank God, and we hope that – by His mercy – the fruit that emerges from her will be consolation and repair for our woes. We care and will care for the princess just as if her husband were still alive, for we hold her in that place and love for ever.’29

  Amid the breast-beating over Juan’s death, the idea that Spain’s crusade would extend to Jerusalem re-emerged. ‘He was feared at the same time by the Jerusalemites, the Turks and the Moors, because he was the enemy of all Christ’s foes,’ the epitaph on Juan’s tomb read. An anonymous poet, or copyist, in the Aragonese town of Daroca, wrote down a simple poem of national grief. ‘Never will there be another like him, nor by searching could we ever find one, even if we looked from here to Germany,’ he said. The same poet wept for Margaret, but hoped that she would ‘bring us consolation’ with a new heir. It was not to be. After seven months of pregnancy Margaret miscarried a baby girl. ‘Instead of bearing the much desired offspring, she offered us a dead child,’ reported Anghiera bluntly. Bartolomé de Las Casas, the chronicler of the Indies, was kinder in his description, saying that Isabella had reacted with dignity and concern for her daughter-in-law. ‘The sovereigns showed great patience and, as prudent and spirited princes, consoled all [of Spain’s] peoples in writing,’ he reported.30 Margaret spent several months with them before returning home in March 1500.31 Another short, childless marriage, to the Duke of Savoy, awaited her – though she would refuse to marry again after losing her second husband, eventually becoming one of the most powerful women in Europe as regent of the Netherlands.

  A distraught Isabella now placed her hopes for a male heir on her eldest daughter Isabella, who was also pregnant. This was, potentially, an even more dramatic union. If it was a boy, he would inherit not just the crowns of Castile and Aragon, but that of Portugal as well, bringing the entire Iberian peninsula together under one monarch. Isabella travelled to Zaragoza to give birth to a baby son on 23 August 1498. Her prediction that childbirth would kill her was proved tragically correct and an hour later she died. ‘She foresaw her death, the death that she had so often announced would come with the birth. That is why, before the day of the postpartum arrived, she made sure that the final communion was well prepared and continually made priests come to her so that she could confess. And if, by mistake, she made some error she would plead, weeping on her knees, to be given absolution,’ reported Anghiera in one of his letters.32

  Anghiera counted up the blows to Isabella’s morale: the attempt on Ferdinand’s life, Juan’s death and Margaret’s miscarriage had already left her battling with accumulated fright and grief. ‘A fourth wound was now inflicted on our sovereigns with the death in childbirth of your Queen Isabella, our wise heiress and, in the qualities of her soul, a wondrous copy of her mother,’ wrote Anghiera to the Portuguese archbishop of Braga.33 He contrasted her physique with that of the now thickset Isabella: ‘The mother was large, while the daughter was so consumed by her thinness that she did not have the strength to resist the birth … Scarcely had the child emerged from her uterus than the mother’s spirit was extinguished … Despite this, let’s fix it so that this tragic tale ends with a [more] musical refrain. There is compensation for so much misfortune, an important lightener to such deep pain: she gave birth to a son.’ Isabella and Ferdinand, in other words, had a new male heir. But the psychological blow of such dramatic losses began to show, with Isabella’s health declining, and it seemed as if the glories of her reign could no longer quite compensate for the pain of personal bereavement.

  The younger Isabella had ordered that if she gave birth to a girl, the child should be named Ana, and if it was a boy, he should be Miguel.34 Anghiera was among those who immediately saw the potential in a little boy who stood to inherit in Castile, Aragon and Portugal. ‘If he lives, he will have such great kingdoms,’ he wrote. Queen Isabella, struck with grief at the loss of two children in less than a year, grasped at this straw of hope. Little Miguel now carried on his tiny shoulders all the hopes for the future, including for her own personal happiness, of a woman who felt far safe
r depositing her legacy in the male sex than in her own.

  40

  The Third Knife-Thrust of Pain

  Granada, July 1499 to September 1500

  The cavalcade traipsed slowly south through the summer heat across the flat, ferrous-soiled plain of La Mancha, with its windmills and herds of sheep, a chain of pack-horses and mules strung out in its wake. Towns and villages along the way must have been thrilled, frightened or both at hosting Isabella’s demanding Castilian court, which brought colour and excitement but exhausted local provisions. Towards the end of June 1499, Isabella encountered the undulating olive groves of Andalusia; and, a few days later, the vast bulk of the Sierra Nevada mountain range reared up through the summer haze. As they closed in on Granada, the city of 200 mosques, she eventually spied the rust-red walls and towers of the Alhambra, perched high on their rocky spur. Her peripatetic life, which had seen her spend twenty of the previous twenty-five Christmases in different places, was coming to an end. The Alhambra, which she reached on 2 July 1499, was about to become much more than a cherished reward for finishing a centuries-long crusade. It was now her home – a place that, barring a few short expeditions elsewhere, she would alternate with Seville’s Royal Alcázar for the next two and a half years.1

  It was a suitable resting place for a visibly tired queen. Anghiera considered Granada Spain’s most beautiful city and the land around it among the most fertile in Iberia, full of market gardens and orchards of figs, cherries, oranges, lemons, apples and pears. ‘The atmosphere is pure and healthy; it boasts not just mountains but also an extensive plain; it has wonderful orchards, and its gardens compete with those of Hesperides,’ he said. Münzer had visited five years earlier, when Muslims still outnumbered Christians by four to one. ‘I believe there is no greater city in Europe,’ he declared. For a northern European this was an exotic world of pomegranates, saffron, artichokes, almonds, raisins, wild palms, olives and fresh trout. Goats and, for the Christians, pigs provided plentiful meat, along with wild boar, deer and partridge. Münzer had estimated the population of the city at a little over 50,000 people, though its narrow, well-organised streets contained empty houses for many more. ‘They almost all have [running] water and cisterns,’ he said. ‘Pipes and aqueducts are of two types: one for clear drinking water; the other to take away dirt, excrement, etc … There are channels in every street for dirty water, so that those houses which, because of their inconvenient position, do not have pipes, can throw their dirt into the channels at night.’ Around the main mosque he found – apart from the standard washing facilities – urinals and blocks of squatting toilets that fed straight into an underground sewer. On Fridays ‘the shouting from the towers of the mosques was hard to believe’ as the faithful were called to prayer, with more than 2,000 people packed into the main mosque. He also recalled the early-morning calls to prayer and the veiled women in long white robes of silk, cotton or wool.2