Anghiera travelled to Venice where he boarded a three-masted galeazza, a huge trading vessel with 150 men handling fifty-foot-long oars that typically needed seven or eight people on each one. The vessel was part of a fleet of up to fourteen that made regular trips to the Syrian port of Beirut and to his own destination of Alexandria, from where he planned to travel to Cairo to see the sultan. ‘It is said that he is threatening all the Christians so that, rejecting the laws of Christ, they embrace Mohammed,’ Anghiera explained in a letter. ‘The excuse is that the Granadans have abandoned Mohammed, and have done so because they have been forced to with violence.’ The large Venetian galeazze usually took expensive cloth and other goods, returning with precious stones, perfumes (‘which effeminate the men and produce wantonness’) and Arab medicines to distribute around Europe. Anghiera was impressed by Venice’s industry, its bustling port, busy dockyards and huge vessels, sailing off to trade in such far-off spots as Constantinople, Beirut, Alexandria, the Black Sea, the (Russian) Don River, London and the ‘glacial ocean’ in the north.2
Anghiera’s trip to Cairo may have been triggered by an appeal for help sent to the Mamluk emperor by some Spanish moriscos, in the form of a qasida, a rhyming 105-line poem in Arabic, written in 1501. This explained, in tragic terms, the fall of Granada and the plight of the self-styled ‘slaves who have remained in the land of exile, in Andalus in the west’ on whose behalf the appeal is written. These included ‘old men whose white hair’ has been plucked out, women whose ‘faces have been bared to the company of non-Arabs’ (though the morisco women sketched by Christoph Weiditz two decades later still had their faces half hidden by veils, at least in public),3 girls driven by priests into ‘beds of shame’ and others ‘forced to eat pork’ and other meat from animals that had not been ritually killed.4 The poet had told the sultan that Isabella and her husband had ‘converted us to Christianity by force, with harshness and severity, burning the books we had and mixing them with dung or filth, though each book was on the subject of our religion’. These had been ‘cast into the fire with scorn and derision’ while their names had been changed for Christian ones ‘without our consent’.
Anghiera reached Alexandria early in January 1502, and was welcomed by the local consul from Barcelona. He was forced to wait for permission to travel up the Nile towards Cairo – which he called ‘capital of this empire and previously of Babylonia’ – in order to see the sultan. He wandered like a tourist, admiring the port and the water tanks filled by aqueducts from the Nile, but aware that the city’s glory days were over. ‘From looking at its ruins, I would say that Alexandria once had 100,000 houses or more,’ he wrote. ‘Now it barely has 4,000. Instead of being inhabited by people they are nests for pigeons and doves.’ The sultan did not, at first, want to see him, something that Anghiera blamed on expelled Spanish Jews. ‘Quite a few have sought refuge in these regions,’ he explained. Anghiera sent two Franciscan friars to inform the sultan that these Jews had been expelled by Isabella and Ferdinand ‘like a dangerous plague’ and were ‘enemies of peace and goodwill between sovereigns’. Anghiera was also warned that other north African kings had sent envoys to the sultan ‘instigated by those expelled from Granada, with terrible complaints’.5
Isabella and Ferdinand’s envoy was amazed that the relatively few Mamluks – originally soldier slaves imported from as far away as the Balkans and Georgia – managed to enforce their authority over the nomadic Arabs. ‘These Arabs, in the judgement of all including the Mamluks, are noble and industrious, while the Mamluks are, in their great majority, ignoble mountain types mostly brought here by pirates,’ he said. ‘Every Mamluk has such power over the people that they can hit anyone they want with the wooden stick they carry, out of pure whim or with the feeblest of pretexts.’ He was eventually taken before the sultan at sunrise at a palace that he compared to the Alhambra, through patios and past eunuchs guarding the doors to the harem. ‘The sultan … was already aware of how powerful you are,’ Isabella read in one of the reports he sent back. ‘That is why, against the customs of his forebears, he allowed me to be on the carpets laid out in front of him in his half of the patio.’ He was also let off some of the bowing and scraping normally required of ambassadors. The sultan was himself a Mamluk, allegedly from a former slave family from Scythia, at the eastern end of the Black Sea. His headpiece sprouted cloth horns that seemed absurd to Anghiera. ‘I can only imagine that these barbarians have modelled these ridiculous horns on spring snails, as I have never seen anything else like it before,’ he sniffed. But the sultan seems to have liked Anghiera, and treated him well – much to the fury of the court’s Mauritanian and Numidian (Berber) ambassadors, who reminded everyone that Granada’s Moors were being forcibly converted or expelled. Anghiera reported back that Isabella and Ferdinand’s reputation was ‘that you are tyrannical, violent sovereigns and lying perjurers’. The sultan, fearing that his presence might provoke a rebellion, eventually ordered Anghiera to sneak out of Cairo by night, but the latter sent his messenger back, reminding him that he represented the sovereigns of a vast swathe of land that stretched from ‘the world’s most distant shores … to the part of the kingdom of Naples that looks east over the Adriatic Sea’ and so was not far from Egypt itself. A secret pre-dawn meeting then saw the sultan quizzing him, above all, about the forced conversions.6
‘You complain that my Catholic sovereigns have taken the city of Granada from the Moors, along with other fortified cities … that they have not respected the religions of the conquered and that many thousands have been forced to become Christians; then you have threatened to make them regret their decision,’ Anghiera replied. ‘You should know the following: that the Catholic king and queen of Spain have sent me to ask favours on behalf of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, not to recount their own victories … They are [now] so powerful that they fear no man … From the [Atlantic] Ocean where the sun hides below the sea, to the Adriatic, to the Italy that overlooks his [the sultan’s] lands, via the columns of Hercules [the Strait of Gibraltar], to Sicily, Calabria … and Apulia, all is subjected to my sovereigns.’7 It was an impressive list, unthinkable in the years before Isabella had claimed her throne, and the sultan knew he should listen.
Anghiera insisted that the Granadans themselves had begged Isabella and Ferdinand to baptise them after rebelling and realising that, as the vanquished, they could be enslaved. ‘Baptism! Baptism!’ they had shouted, or so he claimed. ‘Our religion openly demands that nobody dare use violence or threats to incite people to change religion,’ he added. Proof of this, he said, were the thousands of Moors and Jews who had chosen to move to the sultan’s kingdoms. ‘Surely they would have been forced into baptism if our religion permitted it,’ he said. He also reminded the sultan that tens of thousands of Muslims still lived in the kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon ‘with no less freedom than Christians’. It was a useful reminder to the sultan that any persecution of Christians in his lands could still be answered with the persecution of the remaining Muslims in Spain. Anghiera predicted that the sultan would rue having allowed Spain’s Jews to settle in his territory, and urged him to ignore their complaints. ‘Why would you worry about them? They were eliminated from their kingdoms by my sovereigns like a poisonous pest,’ he said. ‘One day, if the Fates give you long life, you will realise what kind of men you have given protection to … and then you will admit how wise my sovereigns were precisely because they decided to get rid of such despicable and sickly animals.’8
His most persuasive arguments, however, were to do with power – for the Mamluks were as worried about Ottoman expansion as Christian Europe was (and with good reason, given that they had held off the Ottomans during a war a decade earlier but the latter would overrun the Mamluk lands within fifteen years). The Spaniards had helped him during the previous Ottoman war and a good sultan always had to be prepared for domestic rebellion. ‘In the [Spanish] fleets anchored at Apulia and Calabria [in southern Italy] experienced troops are read
y, and if any rebellion against you should erupt or war break out, they can come rushing here to your aid,’ Anghiera promised. ‘The mere news of our friendship, indeed, could be useful to you, given our power on land and at sea.’9
The strategy worked. ‘The sultan is prepared to do everything I asked in your name,’ Isabella read in a triumphant report sent home by Anghiera. He continued his tourism, wandering off to marvel at the pyramids – which he described as ‘the monuments of ancient Egypt’ – while documents were drawn up that reflected Isabella’s long-standing concern for the remnants of the Christian community in the holy lands, pledging to protect those who were in the sultan’s lands.10 They included safeguards and reduced taxes for pilgrims as well as the right to restore Christian churches and monasteries in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Beirut ‘and wherever else there are remnants of Christ’s work’. Many of these buildings had been falling into ruin for centuries but could not be restored without permission. ‘And now, you can do that,’ Anghiera reported. Isabella and Ferdinand’s joint lands stretched from the islands of the Caribbean to the southern point of Italy. Now their influence was also being felt further east and, most importantly to the queen, in the holiest of places as Arab Christians benefited from her power and protection. The sultan sent Anghiera off with gifts that included a sea-green linen tunic and matching silk robe, and a garment interwoven with gold thread, with Arabic letters embroidered on it and bordered with fur. The envoy sailed back up the Nile, convinced that Christians should set about retaking the Holy Land.11
Anghiera eventually travelled to Toledo to inform Isabella of his experiences.12 ‘I have dropped anchor in the securest of ports … before the Queen who, as you know, is the greatest of all the feminine sex; she not only emulates men, but in spirit, prudence and strength – not exactly a feminine quality – she matches the great heroes; she has received me four times, affably and with a serene and pleased look,’ he wrote to a friend in September 1502. Isabella had obviously not lost her capacity to scare even her own servants, and Anghiera’s paean to the queen may have had something to do with the fact that she obviously did not always find him entertaining. ‘I have pleased her sublime ears by telling her new things,’ he added. ‘She finds me more agreeable than usual.’
45
Like a Wild Lioness
Ghent, February 1500
The ring that Isabella’s oldest surviving daughter Juana now kept with her had been worn by the Virgin Mary when she gave birth to Jesus Christ, or so the monks at an abbey near Ghent had claimed before lending it to her as she herself prepared to give birth in the city.1 The child in her womb was not the first of Isabella’s grandchildren. That honour belonged to Leonor, born two years earlier in 1498. On that occasion Juana’s father-in-law Maximilian had been making his way towards Brussels for the baptism, but turned around after a girl was announced. Her husband Philip had reacted in an equally high-handed manner. ‘As this one is a girl, put her on the archduchess’ estate [her expenses]; when God gives us a son, put him on mine,’ he said.2 This time Juana was praying for a son and Philip began preparing the carriages, jewels and other finery that would provide the pomp to accompany the birth of a boy. In February 1500 she finally gave birth to the much desired male heir, who would be christened Charles. Juana’s normally thoughtless husband was delighted, gifting her an emerald embedded in a white-gold rose.3
Juana’s status at Burgundy’s court improved marginally, but she was unable to exert the kind of pro-Spanish pressure that Isabella had hoped for. The previous year Isabella had sent an ambassador to tick her daughter off, presumably for not doing more to fight for Spanish interests. ‘She took it well, kissing your royal hands [metaphorically] for advising her on how to lead her life, and she thanked me a lot,’ the ambassador, Friar Tomás de Matienzo, reported back. ‘She told me that she was so weak and cast down that whenever she recalled how far away she was from your highness she could not stop weeping.’ But she could exert very little influence over her husband. ‘All those on the archduke’s council … have the lady so scared that she cannot lift her head,’ Matienzo added. A second ambassador, Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida, urged her to fight for more power. ‘It seemed to me that she should no longer countenance these people [the Burgundians], since they had no manners at all,’ he reported back to Isabella and Ferdinand. The straight-talking and undiplomatic Fuensalida also, however, judged her to be far from the mentally unstable woman who was to go down in history as ‘Juana the Mad’. ‘I do not think that so much sense has been seen in anyone of so few years,’ he reported. Another special Spanish envoy who met her at about the same time agreed, calling her ‘very sensible and practical’ but pointing out that ‘nobody helps her’.4 There was little Isabella could do, however, beyond sending envoys to encourage her daughter.
After the death of little Miguel in July 1500, Isabella lobbied hard for Juana and her husband to travel to Spain in order to be sworn as heirs to the thrones of Castile and Aragon. Yet another pregnancy, and the machinations of Philip’s pro-French advisers, saw the trip delayed. ‘The gentlemen [around Philip] abhor this journey because their customs in all things are as different from Castilians as good is from evil,’ observed Fuensalida, adding that Philip himself ‘would rather go to hell than to Spain’. A protesting Juana was taken to Brussels to give birth after the city had offered 4,000 florins or more if the child was born there. On 18 July 1501, she delivered what could have been considered a double snub – the baby was a girl, and she was christened Isabella after her Spanish grandmother.5
Juana, whose devotion to her philandering husband was becoming legendary, found herself torn between her two duties – to Philip and to Isabella. ‘The sovereigns are convinced that their daughter will agree only to follow her husband,’ wrote Anghiera. The Italian humanist was himself playing a careful political game of patronage-seeking and could see that Philip might become Spain’s ruler when Isabella died. He was careful, therefore, to stress Juana’s devotion to Philip rather than the fact that she, not he, was the heir to Spain’s crowns. ‘She is lost in love for her spouse. Neither ambition for such kingdoms nor the love of her parents and other childhood companions would move her,’ Anghiera wrote in one of his letters. ‘Only attachment to the man, whom they say that she loves with such ardour, would draw her here [to Castile].’6
When Juana and Philip eventually set off in November,7 it was without her three children, providing yet another reminder that even domestic power lay firmly in her husband’s hands.8 And if Isabella and Ferdinand had hoped this would be the moment when Philip abandoned a worrying pro-French stance, they were wrong. He announced Charles’s engagement to Louis XII’s daughter and also made sure they travelled overland, ignoring the vessels sent for them from Spain, in order to pass through Paris and Blois, where Louis and his wife Anne of Brittany awaited. Juana found herself constantly struggling to force French protocol not just to recognise her as an archduchess, but also to acknowledge her newly elevated rank as heiress to the crown of Castile. She even dressed up in Spanish clothes (a trick that her sister Catherine would likewise use at meetings with the French) to emphasise the fact.9 Crossing the frontier into Castile at Fuenterrabía, in January 1502, the Burgundians had their prejudices confirmed immediately. They had to abandon their sophisticated carriages and wagons (one hundred of which had set out from Flanders) and ride mules through the icy mountain passes on to the meseta. One obstinate Burgundian noble insisted on keeping his carriage as they struggled through the Basque Country. ‘Monseñor de Boussut managed to get his carriage across the mountains of Vizcaya, something unheard of in living memory. And as the peasants had never seen carriages in their country, they showed utter amazement,’ reported Antoine de Lalaing, who accompanied the party. He may also have been as amazed by the ancient and unintelligible language of the Basques. ‘It is the strangest I have ever heard,’ an Italian visitor observed, remarking that the women rarely spoke anything else.10 ‘It has no words from Castilian
or any other tongue.’ Lalaing noted, too, that Alcalá de Henares, like Seville, was one of the few cities they passed through with paved roads ‘in the manner of our own country’. Among other entertainments along the way, the Duke of Benavente showed off his pet camel.11
When they finally entered the city of Burgos, it was Philip’s own squire who carried the ceremonial sword belonging to the heir to Castile’s throne, suggesting that he saw himself as the future ruler. Party-loving Philip was also quick to enjoy Spanish customs. Bullfights were a particular favourite, as was dressing up in Moorish costume to take part in games of cañas involving more than 500 horsemen. Lalaing was impressed by Isabella and her fierce reputation. He considered her the prime mover behind everything from the marriage to Ferdinand and the war on Granada to Columbus’s journey of exploration. ‘I believe that this queen of Spain, called Isabella, has had no equal on this earth for 500 years,’ he said. ‘She is obeyed in all her kingdom, and no great Lord on receiving her orders, even if they come from her lowest servant, has ever dared to disobey; because [they know] she would punish those who disobey harshly in order to make them an example to others.’12
Isabella waited to receive their daughter and meet her son-in-law for the first time in Toledo, where the visitors did not appear until May. By then the plans for their reception had been spoiled by the news that Catherine of Aragon’s young husband Arthur had died. Toledo ran out of black cloth and Isabella ensured that an elaborate show of mourning was put on. Above all, she wanted news of that to drift back to England in order to keep Henry VII on their side in their growing rivalry with France. Ferdinand was keen to woo Philip away from Louis and made sure it was Juana’s husband who walked with him under a golden canopy after they met at the gates of Toledo rather than the heiress. It took Isabella to correct things, bringing Juana under the ceremonial canopy after she met them for a mass at the Marquess of Villena’s Toledo house, where they were staying. ‘The queen … embraced them both with much love, and took her daughter by the hand to her own chamber,’ reported Lorenzo de Padilla, author of a later chronicle about Isabella’s son-in-law Philip.13
Isabella of Castile Page 48