Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Henry VII’s miserliness and greed were legendary, with de Puebla amazed by his officials’ ‘wonderful dexterity in getting hold of other people’s money’. But his plans for Catherine’s wedding were too grandiose for Isabella. ‘Demonstrations of joy at the reception of my daughter are naturally agreeable to me. Nevertheless it would be more in accordance with my feelings … that the expenses should be moderate,’ she wrote to her ambassador in London. ‘We do not wish our daughter to be the cause of any loss to England. On the contrary, we desire that she should be the source of all kinds of happiness … We, therefore, beg the King, our brother, to moderate the expenses. Rejoicings may be held, but we ardently implore him that the substantial part of the festival should be his love; that the Princess should be treated by him and by the Queen as their true daughter.’12 Once again, Isabella worried about whether the sea would swallow up one of her daughters, asking that Catherine be allowed to land at Southampton. This was because ‘… the most important consideration is the safety of the Princess, and … all say that Southampton is the safest harbour in England.’ Any extra costs resulting from her daughter’s journey from there to London could be kept to a minimum, Isabella added. ‘The Princess and her companions will be accustomed, during her journey through Spain, to staying at inns and in small villages.’

  Henry’s wife, Elizabeth of York, wrote warmly to Isabella, recommending that her daughter learn to drink wine because English water was undrinkable. No effort was made to teach Catherine English even though her almoner, John Reveles, was one of several Englishmen at Isabella’s court, along with the painter known as Maestre Anthony and a singer called Porris.13 Catherine had been expected in England in September 1500, when her husband-to-be turned the marriageable age of fourteen, but Isabella was in no hurry to part with her last child and held her back another eight months. The queen had planned to travel to the north coast with her daughter, but eventually settled for a less ambitious send-off from Santa Fe, claiming that she would just slow the party down. Six young Spanish girls went with Catherine to fulfil an English request that she be accompanied by ladies who were ‘gentle and beautiful or, at the least, by no means ugly’. Their sea journey turned into yet another nightmare crossing, with her vessel blown back to port in Laredo before reaching Plymouth and one fellow traveller deemed ‘it was impossible not to be frightened’ by the heavy waves they encountered on the second, successful attempt.14

  Isabella’s daughter took with her fond memories of Granada and its luxuries, using its symbol of the pomegranate fruit as her personal emblem. Her wedding to Arthur on 14 November 1501 was one of the most lavish events of the early Tudor period, though Sir Thomas More later wrote to Erasmus describing her entourage as ‘hunchbacked, undersized, barefoot Pygmies from Ethiopia’.15 Dressed in a white silk dress that was ‘very large, both [in] the sleeves and also the body with many pleats’ and with a silk veil bordered in gold, pearls and precious stones hanging down as far as her waist, she walked along the aisle of the old St Paul’s Cathedral on a 350-foot-long raised wooden platform. Her hooped Spanish skirt drew gasps of astonishment (and her ladies also wore ‘beneath their waists certain round hoops bearing out their gowns from their bodies after their country’s manner’),16 the farthingale being a novelty in England.

  Once again, disaster struck quickly. The sickly prince died just five months later in the grey, rain-lashed and inhospitable surroundings of Ludlow castle in Shropshire. Catherine, who had also been ill, was transported back to London in a black-draped carriage sent by her mother-in-law. Still aged just sixteen, she was already a widow. Isabella soon found herself embroiled in a debate over the key mystery of Catherine’s first marriage. Was she, or was she not, still a virgin? Years later a member of her Spanish household described the morning after her wedding night like this: ‘Francisca de Cáceres, who was in charge of dressing and undressing [Catherine] and whom she liked and confided in a lot, was looking sad and telling the other ladies that nothing had passed between Prince Arthur and his wife, which surprised everyone and made them laugh at him.’17 An English chronicler, however, claimed that Arthur had left their bedroom demanding beer and boasting: ‘I have this Night been in the midst of Spain, which is a hot region, and that journey maketh me so dry, and if thou hadst been under that hot climate, thou wouldst have been drier than I.’18 Catherine’s Spanish governess eventually put Isabella’s mind at rest, writing back to say that she ‘remained as she was when she left’.

  A special envoy was sent to England with instructions to demand that their grieving daughter be sent home, but this was just a negotiating tactic aimed at pushing the English king into agreeing to a new engagement to Arthur’s ruddy-faced brother, Prince Henry, who was six years younger than Catherine.19 Henry VII was in no hurry and, when Elizabeth of York died just ten months after Arthur while trying to compensate for his death by bearing another child, he came to the conclusion that young Catherine would make an excellent new bride for himself. Isabella was horrified. ‘It would be a very terrible thing – one never before seen, and the mere mention of which offends the ears,’ she proclaimed.20 ‘If anything be said to you about it, speak of it as a thing not to be endured,’ Isabella instructed her ambassador. ‘You must likewise say very decidedly that on no account would we allow it, or even hear it mentioned, in order that by these means the King of England may lose all hope of bringing it to pass, if he has any. For the conclusion of the betrothal of the Princess, our daughter, with the Prince of Wales, his son, would be rendered impossible if he were to nourish any such idea.’

  As she played a game of brinkmanship with Henry VII, Isabella even sent instructions for Catherine to pack her bags so that she could join a Spanish fleet on its way back from Flanders. A panicked Henry VII then agreed to the marriage with his other son. The seventeen-year-old Catherine suddenly found any hopes she harboured about going home dashed, and was formally betrothed to the eleven-year-old Prince Henry at the bishop of Salisbury’s palace on Fleet Street.21 Her father wrote to the pope explaining, once more, that her parents considered her to be a virgin, even if the English were insisting that the papal dispensation allowing her to marry again should state otherwise. ‘In one part [of the dispensation] it says that the marriage between our daughter, doña Catherine, and the now defunct Prince of Wales, was consummated, but the truth is that it was not and that the princess remained as whole as she was before the marriage, as is well known.’ The English, he said, had added the consummation claim to prevent any future arguments over legitimacy.22 Decades later, when Henry VIII wanted to divorce Catherine as he sought a male heir and a new wife in Anne Boleyn, this very same issue would be central to his decision to separate the Church of England from Rome.

  In the meantime, Catherine was to live at Durham House – overlooking the Thames from the Strand – under the strict eye of the ghastly, domineering governess chosen for her by Isabella, Elvira Manuel.23 Isabella received constant reports of her ill-health, eating problems and general unhappiness, while the avaricious Henry VII treated her like a piece of merchandise and quibbled over her allowance. Isabella had little time for those who thought she had condemned their daughter to misery. ‘Some people believe the Princess of Wales should not accept what the King of England offers for her maintenance,’ Isabella and Ferdinand wrote. ‘They do not understand that she must accept whatever she is given.’ Once more, one of Isabella’s daughters showed a capacity for drama and self-harm, often refusing to eat. It cannot have helped that Catherine’s Spanish doctors concluded ‘that the cause of her sickness was that she was a virgin, having not [carnally] known Arthur, and that if she married someone who had skills with women, she would get better’.24 She fasted so vigorously that Henry VII, in a letter written in his son’s name, asked the pope to order her to eat. The missive sent back gave the Prince of Wales power to prevent Catherine from fasting. ‘A wife does not have full power over her own body,’ the pope said.25 ‘And the devotions and fasting of the wife
, if they are thought to stand in the way of her physical health and the procreation of children … can be revoked and annulled by men … because the man is the leader of the woman … She may not, without your permission, observe these devotions and prayers, and fasting and abstinence and pilgrimage, or any other project of hers that would stand in the way of the procreation of children.’ Isabella would have agreed.

  42

  We Germans Call Them Rats

  Granada–Zaragoza, 1499–1502

  Antoine de Lalaing was disgusted. The young chamberlain to Isabella’s son-in-law, Philip the Handsome, was a curious traveller and talented chronicler of the things he saw. But his visit to Zaragoza’s Moorish quarter left him appalled. ‘They carried out their abominable sacrifice to Mohammed in a place they call the mosque,’ he reported.1 ‘As for their refusal to drink wine or eat pig, we have had vivid experiences of that from when we were put up in their houses; because they made sure the plates where we had eaten bacon and the pans where they had been cooked and the glasses in which we had drunk wine were all cleaned, along with the parts of the house where we had trodden.’2 Lalaing seemed to admire the disciplined way Spanish Muslims went to the mosque, washing themselves and baring their feet, but the overall impression was of an alien people with foreign habits living in the heart of Christendom. The German traveller Popplau had been even more damning when he encountered Muslims in Christian Spain earlier during Isabella’s reign. ‘We Germans call them rats,’ he said.3

  Lalaing’s amazement had long been echoed by other visitors to Spain. Hieronymus Münzer had visited Granada in 1494, when Muslims still outnumbered Christians by at least four to one, and after seeing more than 2,000 people in the main mosque, he concluded that the city’s Muslim inhabitants were ‘truly devout’.4 Some visitors may have respected Isabella’s Muslims for their religious observance, but Spain was becoming increasingly unusual in western Europe. Even Portugal had now expelled its Moors. If Isabella needed a reminder of that, she had only to recall the negotiations over her daughter María’s marriage to King Manuel – and his insistence on the destruction of Castile’s mosques. Such destruction evidently had not happened by the time Isabella moved into the Alhambra in July 1499.5 The horn blasts calling the faithful to prayer echoed across the valley of the River Darro and reverberated through the Alhambra itself. For the first time, Isabella was living in a city dominated by another religion. It is unlikely that she enjoyed the sensation.

  Isabella’s current home in the Alhambra was living proof of the artistic and architectural wealth that her country owed to its past and current Muslim population, and she was determined to conserve at least some of it. She loved the comfort and luxury of the palaces left behind by Moorish rulers, including Seville’s Royal Alcázar, often choosing it as her home on those occasions when she remained in one place for a long time. She spent generously on restoration works at the Alhambra and other Moorish or mudéjar palaces. Her enthusiasm was shared by Ferdinand, who also cosseted the towering, fortified eleventh-century Moorish playground palace outside Zaragoza known as the Aljafería. Originally called al-Qasr al-Surur, or the Palace of Joy, it had been modelled on the desert castles built in modern-day Syria and Jordan by the eighth-century Umayyad dynasty. Here the elaborate, intersecting Moorish arches, the delicate geometrical ceiling paintings and plasterwork and decorative brickwork were fused with the couple’s symbols, the sheaf of arrows and the yoke, by the mudéjar craftsmen hired to renovate it. Indeed, this love of ‘islamised’ mudéjar royal palaces made Isabella’s royal buildings – often aped by the nobles – markedly different to the Gothic styles triumphing elsewhere in Europe.6

  Even before the conquest of Granada, Castile’s small population of mudéjar Muslims (which accounted for just 25,000 people, against 4 million Castilians) was well known for its skills in the building trade. Mudéjares were, among other things, valued carpenters, plasterers, bricklayers and ceramicists. But this was an unevenly spread and powerless group, with the 150 local communities – or aljamas – in Isabella’s kingdoms varying hugely in size, importance and isolation.7 Hornachos, an otherwise unremarkable town in Extremadura, was unique in being almost entirely mudéjar – an island of Islam in an ocean of Christianity. It alone accounted for a tenth of the Muslim population of Castile outside the kingdom of Granada, with some 2,500 Muslims on lands belonging to the mighty religious military order of Santiago, which protected them. Visitors in 1494 found ‘no church or hermitage in the town or on its lands, because they are all Moors – the only exception was a small chapel in the fortress where the comendador and his men heard mass’.8 Apart from that, mudéjares were most frequently seen in the small morerías of cities in Old Castile. Avila and its neighbouring villages boasted some 1,500 mudéjares, and the three separate aljama communities into which they were split for administrative purposes accounted for almost 10 per cent of the population. They played an important part in local celebrations, with their sword dances and mummery adding folkloric exoticism to the festivities for Isabella’s proclamation as queen. Arévalo, where Isabella spent her early years, had more than 600 Muslims – an unusually large number – who occupied half a dozen streets and, from the taxes they paid, were wealthy by the mostly modest mudéjar standards.9

  Borders are almost always porous and centuries of both trade and warfare, with its exchanges of hostages and raided goods, had seen the southern towns and cities close to the old Andalusian frontier naturally assume a certain degree of cultural blending. Neither side, for example, had minded occasionally hiring mercenaries from the opposite religion. The legendary Christian knight Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid Campeador, had hired himself out to the Moors in the eleventh century, and both Granada’s ruler Boabdil and his uncle Zagal had fought for Isabella and Ferdinand when peace treaties obliged them to. The borders with the kingdom of Granada had often been unmarked, and those unfamiliar with the terrain who found themselves in ‘enemy’ territory were frequently escorted back in a courteous fashion. Towns on either side of the frontier appointed so-called rastreros to sort out, usually jointly, frontier crimes, and the alfaqueque negotiators from both sides travelled back and forth paying ransom and freeing hostages.10

  The fusion between Christian and Muslim culture was there in everything from dress to building methods, decorations and the sweet pastries that emerged from the kitchens of certain nobles who made sure they had Moorish chefs.11 There were even courtesy visits by knights from the opposing sides. Moorish knights from nearby Cambil must have looked with astonishment at the high jinks during fiestas in Jaen (just twenty miles away) when invited to witness a group fight between 150 apparently drunken Christians who beat each other over the head with dried courgettes. There was also ritual ridiculing of Muslims, with at least one game of cañas – one side dressed up as Moors, with fake beards, and the other as Christians – ending with a public ceremony to ‘baptise’ the Prophet Mohammed in Jaen’s public fountain.12

  Isabella herself was no stranger to the cultural crossovers that came with Spain’s uneasy history of religious cohabitation and competition. She and her ladies frequently wore items of Moorish dress, especially in the intimacy of her chambers. These included loose-fitting shirts, or alcandoras, with decorative trimmings and Arab letters sewn into them in gold or black thread. The thin cotton or silk veiled headdresses known as almaizares and alharemes which protected them from the sun and wind as they zig-zagged across the country on their mules were also Moorish in origin. Isabella can be seen wearing one in the reliefs in the lower choir stalls of Toledo’s cathedral, in a scene representing the surrender of the town of Vélez Blanco.13 Other garments she or her ladies used included pinafore-style marlotas and big, billowing hooded cloaks as a protective outer layer. Even the baggy leggings so typical of Granada’s Muslim women, the so-called calzas moras, were worn in the privacy of their chambers. And, of course, the soft leather borceguíes and other Moorish leather goods were always present, from
decorated cushion covers to the embossed leather, or guadamecí, used to cover trunks, furniture and, sometimes, walls. A royal penchant for silk cushions, pillows and rugs was another piece of the court’s Moorish inheritance. Isabella’s menfolk learned to ride not just in the straight-legged, long-stirruped fashion common to Castile but also in the short-stirruped a la jineta style of the Moors.14 She and Ferdinand had famously both dressed in Moorish fashion when they met at Íllora in June 1486, during the Granada War. Isabella wore ‘a Moorish-style, embroidered, cochineal [deep red] cloak’ while Ferdinand had put on the entire outfit, including a ‘head-wrap and hat’ and ‘a very rich Moorish sword’ which hung from his waist.15

  Before the Granada War, the Moorish population of Spain was mostly in Ferdinand’s lands, where they were also called Saracens. There were some 70,000 in the kingdom of Valencia alone.16 ‘He who has no Moors, has no money,’ was a popular saying, reflecting the Moors’ role as agricultural labourers.17 ‘In the country villages of Aragon the Saracens are more numerous than the Christians,’ observed Popplau.18 Even their surnames, reflecting birthplace or profession, were sometimes the same as those of their ‘host’ Christian community. The Aragonese Moors worked the land and, in some cases, traded with north Africa, where their religion gave some protection against the Barbary pirates. Like the Jews, the mudéjares were organised in their own communities, followed their own religious laws and had their own justice system. The appointment of the alcalde mayor, the head of the community in Castile, lay in Isabella’s hands. Like the Jews, too, they were not full citizens of Castile, but were under the personal protection of Isabella herself – a minority which was tolerated, or ‘suffered’, by royal order and which paid for that protection in special taxes. Many of the rules governing their behaviour were similar to those enforced on the Jews and they were often written down in the same texts agreed at meetings of the Cortes. They could not intermarry, visit Christian prostitutes, hold public positions that gave them jurisdiction over Christians19 or have them as servants or slaves.