Isabella herself may have seen somewhat less of the city, though her pride at having conquered it was evident. Monarchs were not expected to spend their time among the city people, especially if they were Muslims and defeated enemies who posed a threat. She would have remained mostly in the Alhambra, carrying out her daily administrative duties, saying her prayers and enjoying the peaceful sophistication of Nasrid architecture and the carefully tended beauty of the Generalife gardens. Her view of the city was from on top, looking down from the Alhambra, occasionally from the belvedere called Ain dar Aisha – the eye of Aisha’s room.3
By the time Isabella had installed herself in the Alhambra, the call to prayer was no longer being shouted out. The words ‘There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger’ were unacceptable to Christian kings and, indeed, had been expressly prohibited by Rome in the fourteenth century – though it was up to individual monarchs and local lords to apply the rule in Europe. One Muslim visitor saw it as part of a gradual erosion of traditional rights after the fall of Granada, with ‘even the call to prayer from the minarets being suspended’. Instead, Granada’s mosques used long horns to remind the faithful that it was time to pray. Even that, however, was a daily reminder to Isabella that, although Granada was hers, it was still a mostly Muslim city.4
The journey cannot have been easy for Isabella, who was now often sick. Anghiera put this down to the tragic deaths of Juan and Isabella, her two most adored children. ‘We are with the queen who, because of her grief at the death of the daughter who, being so discreet and good, was her favourite, is [now] sick in bed,’ he had written eight months before she set out for Granada. Little Miguel, the tiny new jewel in Isabella’s crown, travelled with them, along with her two remaining unmarried daughters, María and Catherine. The boy’s father had been happy to leave him in Isabella’s care and her mood was both lightened by Miguel’s presence and darkened by his fragility. ‘He was born weak, fragile and sickly,’ warned Anghiera, who was nevertheless relieved that an heir was at hand. ‘With the child’s birth, whatever his state of health, all debate over primogeniture is over.’ Isabella fretted over the small, precious boy who had been sworn in as heir to her crown by the Cortes early in 1499.5
Grief did not, however, mean that Isabella could afford to stop thinking about international politics and the alliances needed to safeguard an inheritance which, after the deaths of Juan and the younger Isabella, was losing solidity. Two attempts at tying Portugal close through marriage had been stymied by fate with the deaths of Isabella and, previously, of her first husband, Prince Afonso. Now they sought to re-establish the alliance. Fortunately they had a deep stock of daughters. Within nine months of the younger Isabella’s death, the Spanish sovereigns were negotiating with her widower husband, the Portuguese king Manuel, to take their third daughter María as his new bride. Once again religious conditions were laid down before the marriage in October 1500. This time it was the Portuguese king who decided to set terms, as he competed with Isabella over the issue of religious purity.6 Just as Isabella’s family had bullied him over heretics during the negotiations for his first marriage, so Manuel now added his own demands to his second marriage. Isabella and Ferdinand, he insisted, must swear that they would destroy all mosques and ban Muslim prayers. ‘Mosques will be torn down and we will not consent that in our kingdoms and lands there are ordained houses for the Moors to pray in,’ Isabella promised in a handwritten document given to Manuel’s ambassador which claimed, nevertheless, that they were already committed to this.7 Castile’s own mudéjar Muslims, had they found out, would have shaken their heads with bewilderment. The horns calling the faithful to prayer, after all, still blared out over Granada and visitors found plenty of mosques in Ferdinand’s kingdoms.8 Münzer had come across the shouted call to prayer in several places. Manuel later claimed that his demands had been far tougher, including ‘not just that orders be given to destroy the mosques of the Moors in the kingdom of Castile but that their small children also be taken from the parents and baptised as Christians’.9 Isabella may even have felt a pang of competitive envy. Manuel, after all, was claiming to be a better Christian monarch than she and, with God taking away her favourite children, she might have wondered whether she was doing enough to please Him.
Isabella kept Miguel close by, watching carefully over the little boy who brought innocent joy to an otherwise gloomy household where the normally colourful velvet, silks, cottons, wools and linens that she ordered from north Africa and Europe now mostly arrived in a single colour – the black of mourning. Little Miguel was sworn in as heir to the crown of Castile but remained sickly. Isabella fretted over him, but he died in July 1500, just twenty-two months old. It was yet another terrible blow. His death took away both her main source of consolation for her other recent losses and her final hope of a male heir. The next in line to the thrones of Castile and Aragon was the weak and unhappy Juana. It was, perhaps, the greatest of all the tragedies in her life. Bernáldez called it ‘the third knife-thrust of pain to pierce the Queen’s heart’ after the deaths of Juan and the younger Isabella. Isabella plunged deeper into despair. ‘The death of the infante Miguel has profoundly cast down both grandparents. They have evidently been unable to bear with equanimity so many strokes of fate,’ wrote Anghiera. ‘They dissimulate and present themselves in public with smiling, calm countenances, but everyone can see the darkness. It is not hard to guess what they are feeling inside.’10 A portrait painted by Juan de Flandes suggests that, in Isabella’s case, the darkness was overwhelming. Painted around her fiftieth year, it shows a wan, aged-looking woman, with an expression that is at once placid and pained, as if she has accepted the permanent martyrdom of bereavement and suffering. It was, perhaps, a role that constant reflection on the suffering and passion of Christ had already prepared her for and into which she slipped easily. Finely plucked eyebrows make her face seem even more pallid, while the still gloriously coloured reddish-auburn hair is mostly hidden under a bonnet and a gauze veil. The queen herself was ill and sliding into depression, the same problem that had afflicted her mother. ‘From then on, she lived without joy,’ recorded one chronicler.11
When María left for Portugal in September 1500, Isabella and Ferdinand could no longer gather the energy or enthusiasm for the elaborate send-offs they had given to Isabella and Juana. The rules of mourning, in any case, would have prevented major festivities. This time, after she had married by proxy in Granada, they simply rode out the short distance to Santa Fe with María and her court of fifty-two Spaniards, stayed with her there for a week and then waved her goodbye. Only one child, Catherine of Aragon, remained in the queen’s house.
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The Dirty Tiber
Rome, June 1497
Isabella already felt contempt for the pope’s gaggle of illegitimate offspring, but when she heard that the bloated corpse of his murdered son Juan Borgia had been pulled out of Rome’s filthy River Tiber on 16 June 1497, she must have thought that the family’s reputation could fall no further. The ‘haughty, cruel and unreasonable’ Juan was also a Spanish nobleman, holding the title of Duke of Gandía, and had left a son and pregnant wife in Spain when called back to Rome by his father the previous year. The twenty-one-year-old duke had last been seen two nights earlier when he dined with his brother Cesare at their mother’s house near San Pietro in Vincoli. As they trotted back Juan told his brother he had private business to attend to and, accompanied by his groom, he rode off. The pope was informed the following morning that his son had not returned home, but shrugged it off. ‘He persuaded himself that the duke had been delayed at a party at the house of some girl,’ reported Burchard, his master of ceremonies.1 ‘And that he would not leave this house until later in the day.’
Search parties were sent out on the Friday, finding Juan’s wounded groom – who was unable to speak – and his horse. The same day a timber merchant called Giorgio Schiavo told of a scene he had witnessed two nights earlier when he had stay
ed on his barge to watch over a cargo of wood. Shortly after midnight he had seen two shifty-looking men emerge on foot from an alley beside the hospital of Schiavoni at San Girolamo. They walked along the river road, looking around them suspiciously to see if they were being watched before returning to the alley. Two other men appeared and carried out the same inspection, also returning to the alley. ‘A rider on a white horse appeared, with a corpse slung over the horse behind him, heads and arms on one side, feet on the other,’ Burchard reported. ‘The first two men were walking beside the rider in order to keep the corpse from slipping. The horse was ridden further along to the place where the sewer emptied into the river … the two men on foot then lifted the body, one taking the arms and the other the legs, and threw it into the Tiber with as much force as they were capable. The man on the horse asked if the operation had worked and they answered, “Yes, Lord.” ’ The corpse’s coat had then floated to the surface, requiring them to hurl stones at it to make it sink. Juan’s body was eventually fished out of the water near Santa Maria del Popolo.2 He had been stabbed nine times before his throat was cut. The list of enemies and potential assassins was long, but the murder boded badly for the stability of Italy, whose fortunes were tied up with those of the papal brood. And with Italy now vital to Spain’s foreign policy, Isabella and her husband must have fretted about who had murdered Juan Borgia, and why.
Fingers were immediately pointed at Lucrezia’s husband Giovanni Sforza, who had good reasons for hating the Borgias, especially as the pope had decided that his daughter could find a better match. He was insisting that Sforza, whose first wife had died in childbirth, now publicly state that he was impotent and had been unable to consummate the marriage. Lucrezia had dutifully signed a document declaring that their three-year marriage had been ‘without sexual relations or carnal knowledge’. It would have taken great courage to hold out against the Borgias, and Sforza had no stomach for a suggestion made by his uncle Ludovico that he should disprove the allegations by having sex with Lucrezia, or any other woman, in front of witnesses. The more exaggerated rumours in a city that routinely took speculation to lurid extremes included that ‘the Duke of Gandía had had commerce with his [Sforza’s] wife [Lucrezia]’.3 Even incest, it seems, was routine grist for a Roman rumour mill that churned out tattle about alleged sexual relations between Lucrezia and almost every man in her family, including her father. Sforza may have started these rumours himself, exacting a far more durable form of revenge on the family than mere murder. Either way, Lucrezia’s separation was announced soon afterwards.
Another suspect was the youngest of the Borgia brothers, the ‘lascivious-looking’ fifteen-year-old Jofre, since his wife Sancha de Aragon was far more likely to have been one of Juan’s many mistresses. In her home city of Naples, it was said, a guard had been placed at her bedroom door to block the flow of young men. A more general, but equally unproven, theory was that Juan had been murdered by his other brother Cesare, possibly in a row over Sancha – who was also meant to be Cesare’s lover. This was certainly believed by María Enríquez, Juan’s Castilian wife. She commissioned an altar cloth which depicted Cesare stabbing his brother to death.4
One reason for Rodrigo Borgia wanting to end his daughter’s marriage was that he was now intent on building an alliance with Naples. In July 1498 Lucrezia remarried, this time to a member of the royal family of Naples, Sancha’s seventeen-year-old brother Alfonso of Aragon. The pope also wanted Cesare to abandon the church and marry the current king of Naples’s eldest daughter, Carlota. This was a step too far for Isabella and Ferdinand, who were seen to be behind the moves to block the marriage, even though they knew that stymieing Rodrigo Borgia’s ambitions for his children was a dangerous strategy and that they risked being made to pay for it.
The confrontation was far more serious than it might seem, because the fickle Borgia now switched sides in the battle between France and Spain. Cesare duly renounced his cardinal’s hat in August 1498 and headed for France, where King Louis XII, who was intent on regaining the ground lost by his predecessor in Italy, made sure he was immediately given a French dukedom. Isabella and Ferdinand were outraged, and the Venetian ambassador to their court reported that they refused even to pronounce Borgia’s name, while saying ‘very bad things’ about Cesare, now known as the Duke of Valentinois.5
The Spanish ambassadors in Rome expressed horror at this confirmation of the papacy’s new alliance with France. Allegations were hurled backwards and forwards during an audience in December 1498 when Borgia was accused of buying his election, while he in turn accused Isabella and Ferdinand of usurping a Castilian throne ‘to which they had no title and against [good] conscience’. It was a rare reminder of Isabella’s coup against La Beltraneja. The murder of Borgia’s son Juan, her ambassadors retorted, had been divine punishment for the pope’s scandalous behaviour. Borgia was furious. ‘Your monarchs have been punished more by God, which is why they have no [male] descendants,’ he said.6 Isabella’s son had died only the previous year and nothing could have been more calculated to wound her pride. A second meeting ended just as badly. ‘After a long speech from the ambassadors a violent and abusive argument developed between them and the pope,’ Burchard reported.7 ‘The Spaniards demanded that a notary be summoned. The pope replied that they could write up the minutes themselves later, but they could not do this in his presence. It is said that the ambassadors were demanding that the pope recall his son from France and restore him to his dignity as cardinal.’ Borgia told them that if the murderous Cesare had been present in Rome ‘he would have replied in the way they deserved’. A final meeting ended with threats to hurl the ambassadors into the Tiber and, according to the Venetian ambassador, with insults directed against Isabella because of her holier-than-thou attitude. ‘The queen is not the chaste woman that she claims,’ the pope said, though he did not elaborate on the theory. Rome’s frightened Spanish population chose to remain indoors during the carnival celebrations the following February.8
The Borgia pact with France, meanwhile, grew stronger and Spain’s monarchs wisely stepped back, securing a deal that gave them control over just Calabria and Apulia – which occupied the toe and the heel of Italy’s ‘boot’ but were close to the Aragonese lands of Sicily and Sardinia. This foreign carve-up of the kingdom of Naples saw Machiavelli comment that ‘thanks to foreign troops, Italy has been conquered by Charles VIII, pillaged by Louis XII [and] raped by Ferdinand of Spain’.9
As France flexed its muscles in Italy, Isabella continued to concentrate on securing England as an ally. Her daughter Catherine had long been engaged to Henry VII’s eldest son Arthur, but an alliance would not be secure until the wedding took place. Isabella had remained nervous about the Warbeck affair, worrying that the impostor might unseat Henry VII. The English king knew of her concern and when Warbeck first fled and then was recaptured in 1498 he made sure her ambassador Rodrigo de Puebla was informed immediately. ‘The same hour that he was arrested, the King of England sent one of his gentlemen of the bedchamber to bring me the news,’ de Puebla wrote in an urgent despatch, saying that Warbeck was now in the Tower of London ‘where he sees neither sun nor moon’. Later on, Henry VII interrogated Warbeck in person in front of de Puebla. ‘I, and other persons here, believe his life will be very short,’ the ambassador reported afterwards. When Warbeck and the simpleton Earl of Warwick, another potential claimant to the English throne, were both executed in November 1499 he wrote that there no longer remained ‘a drop of doubtful royal blood’ in England. The pretenders had been executed, in part, to calm Isabella’s worries.10
English excitement at the tie-up with the now legendary crusading Spanish monarchs, a powerful ally against the old enemy in France, was enormous. Even Henry VII, notorious for his stinginess, was preparing to dig deep into his exchequer. As the son of an iron-willed woman, Margaret Beaufort, he was fascinated by the Spanish royal women, telling one visitor that he would give up half of his kingdom if Catherine
was like her mother. Catherine exchanged formal love letters with Arthur in the Latin she had learned at Isabella’s school for young ladies. ‘I have read the most sweet letters of your highness lately given to me, from which I have easily perceived your most entire love towards me,’ the thirteen-year-old Arthur replied in one letter that reached the Alhambra. ‘Let your coming to me be hastened, that instead of being absent we may be present with each other, and the love conceived between us and the wished-for joys may reap their proper fruit.’11 The final line was a reminder that Catherine’s prime duty – apart from boosting Castile’s standing in England – was to provide heirs to the shaky new Tudor dynasty. Isabella had raised cultured, intelligent and high-minded daughters, but their main role in life was still biological.
Isabella of Castile Page 44