Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  Medina itself was a reminder of many of the things that had happened during her thirty years on the throne. She had first visited its great fair as a child on trips from Arévalo. Now the fair, which lasted for two stretches of fifty days, had grown so much that wood for stalls was running out. Isabella and her husband had issued orders to replant local woodland and dig ponds for visiting merchants to water their horses and mules. During her reign the town’s streets had been paved, but two fires, in 1479 and 1491, had done terrible damage. Isabella had responded by suspending the tax on building wood and then ordered that high walls be built every few streets to block the progress of future fires.2

  Among the smells wafting up through the new windows in her room – and towns like Medina were not famously salubrious in this respect – would have been the complex aromas of incense and spices, the warm scent of wax, tallow or pitch, the sharp tang of recently cured or tanned leathers and the earthiness of cattle, mules and horses. The conquest of Granada, ease of trade with Aragon, peace with Portugal and increasing access to the trade routes east of Italy had helped drive the fair’s growth. Flemish merchants bought bulk orders of merino wool for their own textile industry, with up to 40,000 bales a year making their way to Bruges and Antwerp. They brought finished cloth and materials with them to sell, competing for trade with French silks and Syrian carpets. Medina del Campo was now considered one of the great trading fairs of Europe, comparable to those of Genoa, Lyon and Antwerp and a sophisticated banking centre was being developed, providing credit, foreign exchange and financing that helped attract merchants from Italy, France and elsewhere.3 Trade with the Americas was still embryonic, but the extraction of gold and silver and the future exploitation of crops like sugar meant that Isabella had already ushered in a century of unprecedented growth in Medina del Campo and across Spain.

  Isabella and Ferdinand had both fallen ill with fevers in July 1504. The king eventually shook his illness off, but Isabella had barely recovered when she was hit again by alternating fevers and chills.4 By the end of September she was noticeably worse – and showed few signs of getting better.

  Ferdinand wrote to his ambassador in Flanders on 26 September, telling him to warn Juana and Philip to prepare for the worst. ‘Keep secret what I am about to tell you. No living person apart from the princess and the prince should know,’ his letter started. ‘I have not wanted to write about the illness and indisposition of the serene Queen, my very dear and much loved wife, before because I thought that our Lord would give her health … but given what has happened and her current state, I am very fearful … our Lord might take her.’ Ferdinand wanted Juana and Philip, to whom he now mostly directed his words, to be ready to travel to Spain urgently. All preparations had to be secret, he emphasised, but they must react swiftly when the fateful day came and should avoid any route through France, since they risked being captured or detained by Louis XII.5

  Ferdinand also tried to ensure that he held on to some of his power when his wife died, at least as an adviser to the man who would govern in Juana’s name. ‘I know what he and the princess need to do to keep peace and justice in these kingdoms and I know well the people who would be good to serve him,’ he wrote. ‘With my advice – so that they do not make mistakes – they will be better able to handle affairs and fill positions here.’ Above all, he did not want them to appoint officials – especially foreigners – before they travelled. It was not a piece of advice that his son-in-law, and those surrounding him, showed much sign of wanting to follow. If Isabella died, they knew, Ferdinand would instantly lose his formal powers in Castile.

  Isabella, meanwhile, was preparing to die. Just as she felt no need to retreat to one of her more glorious palaces at this crucial moment, so she now made it clear that, in death, she sought humility. In October 1504, as the sound of bartering drifted up from the plaza in the various languages of Spain and elsewhere in Europe, she completed her will. Isabella was fearful of very little and repentant of even less. But God and Judgement Day scared her. Wearing a crown did not guarantee a place in heaven, she knew, though it did enable her to set aside money so that 20,000 masses could be said in her name after her death. She also wanted to clothe 200 poor people and pay the ransoms for 200 Christian captives held in north Africa. All this would help when she faced ‘that terrible judgement and strict examination, which is even more terrible for the powerful’.

  Her last testament was a chance to amend errors, but also to reaffirm the rightfulness of her actions and her place in history. Isabella was now fifty-three years old. Her thirty-year reign had been replete with historic events, many the direct result of her own will and effort. She had, through her marriage, brought together most of Spain’s kingdoms in a curious and unique form of shared monarchy. That meant that they might, one day, be fully united through her children or – more probably – her grandchildren. She had finished off a seven-century crusade, absorbing the kingdom of Granada into Castile, and had expanded Christendom even further, to those mysterious lands across the Atlantic Ocean. She had purged much of the corruption out of the church and had begun the work of centralising power and building a modern state, taming the uppity Grandees and crushing her rival, the rightful heiress Juana la Beltraneja.

  Severity, even cruelty, had been present in many of these ventures. Jews and Moors had been expelled, ending centuries of religious tolerance or, as she preferred to see it, sufferance. A royal-led state inquisition sought heresy among those whose chief crime appeared to be their tainted blood and Jewish forebears. Even old Christians stood in fear of her heavy-handed justice. Yet the medieval world from which Europe was slowly emerging was already famous for its ‘violent contrasts’ and outbursts of public brutishness.6 Excessive punishment was a far more efficient way to provoke the ‘love and fear’ that an effective monarch was expected to arouse than generosity, compromise or blandishments. The line between strong rule and tyranny was wafer thin, and there is no doubt that Isabella crossed it.

  She had built a nascent European superpower. More remarkably she had done this as a woman, inverting the status quo without ever challenging it. Isabella had demanded the obedience of men, and had received it. As she looked through her will in the mouse-infested palace in Medina del Campo, it is perhaps not surprising that she should associate this almost miraculous set of achievements with her pleas to God. Her prayers had been answered – even if she had had to bear the tragic deaths of her favourite daughter, her son and her cherished infant grandson Miguel. But for someone who took her religion seriously and literally, suffering was an understandable, even virtuous, price to pay for doing God’s will. That, to her, was the true meaning of the word ‘passion’.

  All this had been enough to fulfil her ambitions as queen, but she now had to ask herself whether it would also secure her entrance into heaven. She declared herself sick in body but not in mind, and determined to put her house in order since ‘we must all die, but never know when or where that may happen’. Her will showed her still busy centralising power in the monarchy and tidying up her administration. Political expediency had forced her to buy support, giving away too many royal rents and lands, she admitted. Isabella listed the ones that she most regretted on a separate document and asked that they be returned to the crown. And where she had pawned off lands and income in order to fund her war in Granada, these must also be reclaimed, where possible, for the crown. Her long memory was both grateful and vengeful. She demanded that the lands of the marquessate of Villena, formerly held by the still wealthy Pacheco family, never be given away again. It was a way of punishing the family of Enrique IV’s valido, and her own enemy, Juan Pacheco. But she also remembered long-term loyalists like the converso Andrés de Cabrera and Beatriz de Bobadilla, the couple who had helped her take control of Segovia at a crucial moment. They were to be rewarded ‘for the loyalty they showed so that I could take possession of my kingdoms, as is well known’.

  If there had been errors, she believed, these were few
and far between. The Inquisition was a necessity. ‘Always support the things that the Holy Inquisition does against the depraved heresy,’ she urged her daughter Juana. Some of her officials, she admitted, had been overzealous, self-serving or corrupt – and they must be dealt with. Apart from that there seemed little worth repenting for.

  Most of all, she wanted her debts paid off. They were to sell, or use, all her possessions – barring the jewels that were for Juana and the gold and silver for the church in Granada – to do this. But Ferdinand had a right of veto and could keep any jewels or other objects ‘if, on setting eyes upon them, they bring to mind the special love that I always felt for him and if that memory allows him to live a holier and more just life, bearing in mind that we must all die and I will be waiting for him on the other side’.

  She named Juana as her heiress, but obviously feared that Philip would govern instead and warned against bringing foreign officials to rule over Spaniards or their church. Her advice to Juana and Philip was a short lesson in her own attitude to effective government. They must, first of all, show loving respect to each other. This had been the bedrock of her own successful period as queen with Ferdinand as her partner. They should enforce the law, be just, tax effectively but fairly, listen to Ferdinand’s advice, keep the Grandees and other nobility under control and avoid giving away royal rents or property. They must make sure that the new lands across the Atlantic, and those still to be found, belonged to the crown of Castile – while allowing Ferdinand half of the crown’s profits. And they should try to continue Spain’s crusade, taking it across the Mediterranean into Africa. Finally, she must be buried in the Alhambra – a reaffirmation of her most important achievement – wearing the plain habit of the Franciscan order. Her burial was to be ‘simple, without excess’ (thirteen torches would, she thought as she sank automatically into the minutiae of administration, be more than enough). The money saved could go to the poor. If Ferdinand wanted to move her later so that they could lie together, that was fine.

  The will that she finished in her rooms in the small palace at Medina del Campo was typical of Isabella. Humble before God, she remained proud, resolute and unrepentant before men. As queen, she had tried to carry out God’s will. Only He could now judge whether, in fact, she had achieved that.

  Monarchs on their death-beds must think, too, about their legacy. This was magnificent, yet fragile. In her will, Isabella had shown no concern about the expulsion of Jews or the forced conversion of Muslims, but the latter remained a recalcitrant and repressed minority. Unlike the conversos, many of the new morisco Christians were clearly pretending and, an Italian visitor would observe, were ‘not well treated’ by Isabella’s other subjects. Sporadic rebellions would continue until some 250,000 moriscos were finally expelled just over a century later. The Inquisition, meanwhile, would continue to invent crimes, inflicting pain and death or simply ruining reputations, until it became a byword for the worst forms of paranoid and tyrannical state repression. Even her beloved Friar Talavera, that most upright of churchmen, would bear witness to this after her death as he himself was persecuted amid claims that his nieces criss-crossed the country on the backs of billy goats, drunk and practising sorcery. ‘Certain people who are envious of his good works, in an attempt to pay goodwith bad, have tried to stain his holy and incorruptible life,’ a furious pope eventually wrote. ‘And as they cannot find anything bad to accuse him of, they have locked up his elderly sister and his nephews and other servants and officers, who – though Christians – were tortured and tormented in such a cruel fashion that nobody would be able to bear it.’7 This was the Inquisition that Isabella had bequeathed to her country, and which would survive for another 300 years.

  Isabella was unforgiving and, as those conversos who fought the Inquisition in Rome or people who dared criticise her in public found out, protest was not tolerated. In a regime that preferred justice to be excessive rather than fall short, only the brave or foolhardy raised their voices. Those Christians who had complained about the expulsion of the Jews, for example, also found themselves being pursued by the Inquistion. It is no surprise that, despite the relative absence of recorded protest during her life, not everyone was sad at the thought of her dying. They included a man whom she may have seen while in Medina, the town’s future corregidor – or chief royal official – García Sarmiento. ‘She oppressed the people,’ he said after her death, perhaps thinking that this meant he would avoid punishment.8 ‘The queen is in hell. She and the King of Aragon with her [did] nothing more than steal and ruin these kingdoms, and she was very tyrannical.’

  Isabella and Ferdinand had never made a formal attempt to unite their kingdoms, preferring to leave that to biology and the course of time. On their deaths, they had originally hoped, the combined kingdoms of Spain – barring Navarre – would pass into the hands of their heir. But that now looked unlikely. Aragon’s traditions had always prevented the crown being passed to a woman, and they had no surviving sons. At best, it would go to one of Juana’s sons. The eldest, Charles, was just four years old. At worst, it meant that some other branch of the Aragonese royal family would claim the crown on Ferdinand’s death, or even that he would marry again and produce his own male offspring with rights over Aragon, but not over Castile. The unity of Spain was by no means assured.

  All that, however, was down to fate. There was nothing Isabella could do to influence the future of Aragon – and so the joint project of Spain – after her death. Even the future of Castile looked uncertain. Superficially, Juana’s position at the beginning of her reign was far stronger than Isabella’s. She was not a usurper, nor was there any other challenger for the throne. Castile itself was under firm royal rule, meaning there were no válidos or privados – men like Pacheco or Luna, who governed in the monarch’s name – with the power to bend events towards their own objectives. That should have allowed a simple handover of power from one queen to another. But Isabella knew that this would not be the case. She had cleverly bolstered her own position as a female monarch, via a well-negotiated and well-managed marital alliance with Ferdinand, but she had done nothing to promote the position of royal women beyond improving their education. As a traditionalist, she had no interest in changing the status quo and, indeed, would much have preferred to have a male heir.

  Isabella had married her daughters off to foreign princes whose cultures were different to those of Castile. As such, she must share the blame for Juana’s predicament. For, while Isabella was an equal to her husband, their daughter was the very junior partner in a marriage in which the husband expected to hold all the power, including over his wife’s titular lands. That meant a foreigner was about to take control of Castile, for the first time since Isabella’s English grandmother, Catherine of Lancaster, had been regent. Even then, though, the regency had been shared and the outcome was always set to be the return of a Castilian man to the throne. The idea of being ruled over by a northern European who might drain the country’s resources to bolster his power in his own lands was unsettling.

  The fact that Juana looked as though she would be blocked from power was, in itself, a measure of Isabella’s own greatness. Her singular achievement was to be a successful, powerful female monarch in Europe. Even by male standards, however, she had been a remarkable ruler. Had it not been for her sex, indeed, some might have seen her as a candidate for the Last World Emperor, that mythical monarch who was expected to save Christendom. A decade later the Florentine ambassador to Spain, the historian Francesco Guicciardini, summed up her achievements and the wonder provoked by a woman’s ability to make them happen. Under her guidance, he said, Castile had shed its poor reputation, expanded its lands and been reduced to obedience to its monarchy ‘in such a way that Spain has been enlightened and has left behind its natural darkness’. To the ambassador’s surprise, he found many people happy to attribute most of the success to Isabella rather than her husband. ‘In all these memorable events the glory of the Queen was no less [than
that of Ferdinand], but rather everyone agrees that the greater part of it all should be attributed to her, because the affairs of Castile were governed mostly through her authority and control. She oversaw the most important matters, and for the lesser ones it was never less useful to persuade her than it was to persuade her husband … She stands up in comparison to any great woman of any previous era.’9

  Yet there is an irony to this groundbreaking achievement as a woman, for she herself would never have seen it in those terms. As a powerful European queen regnant Isabella was undoubtedly the first of that small group of similarly successful female monarchs, but she neither knew that others would follow nor would have valued the gender aspect of her accomplishment. In her own mind she had simply been God’s chosen one – the person whom He had decided should be placed on the throne of Castile. For some reason, God had wanted her – a woman – to lead her country back to glory. That belief and an unshakeable sense of entitlement, grandeur and self-confidence had spurred her to take strong, firm decisions. It drove, initially, her dubious claim to the crown. Victory on the battlefield, another divine decision, had proved what she was already convinced was the truth – that she was no usurper. This was no convenient invention of her own, but a generally accepted test of the rightness of a claim.

  If God’s decisions were absolute, they were also clear-cut. Relativism and moral doubt were never part of Isabella’s make-up. That explains the unflinching manner in which she ordered that the Jews be expelled, the conversos persecuted or the Muslims forcibly converted. Between them, and given that even the purest and most powerful conversos lived in fear of the Inquisition, these measures afflicted one-third of Castile’s population. Indeed, in purely numerical terms – if we add in the priests, monks, friars and nuns affected by religious reform and those helped or pursued by the Hermandad police and a newly strict system of royal justice – the weight of her decisions must have been felt directly by a large part of Castile’s population. That made her a real, concrete presence in ordinary lives – rather than the distant, if feared, figurehead of many a medieval monarchy.