Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  This sense of moral conviction made her a woman of action rather than of thought. When doubt is banished, action is easier to pursue and objectives are more easily obtained. The profound reforms to Castile marked Spain’s future and that of an empire that would soon stretch across large parts of the American continent and (within seventy years) as far away as the Philippines. Accidents of history allowed her legacy to survive more or less intact, with Ferdinand taking over the government of Castile after Philip’s sudden death in 1506 (as Juana famously traversed the country accompanied by his corpse). Extracted wealth would flow east across the Atlantic for the next two centuries, funding a golden age of Spanish power and prosperity. A literary flowering led by Miguel de Cervantes and the playwright Lope de Vega also became part of the wealth eventually generated by a confident, global powerhouse.

  Lying in her sick-bed in Medina del Campo, Isabella could intuit only a fraction of this. Her intimate thoughts, plastered over by the considerations of state and administrative minutiae of her will, are not available to us – though they were as likely to dwell on the already dead among her family and offspring as on the future of Castile. Of those she would be leaving behind, Ferdinand was the most obvious regret. He came from a much longer-lived family and she might have to wait many years for him to be laid beside her. He might also remarry and choose to be buried with someone else. Nor, finally, was there was any guarantee that her death would provide a release from her suffering, with purgatory a terrifying thought.

  These, then, may have been some of her final concerns as the days drew shorter, the shimmering heat of the meseta summer became a distant memory and the sharpness of the central Castilian winter set in. As October rolled into November and the palace fires roared louder, a sudden slew of worries began to trouble her conscience. They were a mixture of things grand and small, earthly and heavenly – but she felt they needed dealing with. On 23 November, shortly after the traders had disappeared from Medina’s squares and streets, she wrote an appendix to the main will. Some of the alcabalas, or sales taxes, that were her main source of income might be unfair, and needed looking at, she admitted. She had failed to complete the drawing up of a unifying law book, being either too busy or too ill, and urged her successors to do so. More importantly, because this would be a real sin, she was worried that she had abused the income given to her through the sale of Crusade Bulls. This was meant to be spent on crusading, but had also been used on the conquest of the Canary Islands and on Columbus’s expeditions. Any wrongful spending should be reimbursed. Likewise, the spending of the military orders of Santiago, Alcántara and Calatrava was meant to be in God’s cause. If that, too, had failed, it must be remedied. She was still not worried about the excesses of the Inquisition, but fretted that some of those reforming the monasteries for her had been overzealous. That would also need checking, she said.

  On the whole, these were all personal matters of conscience between her and God. Politically and socially, she remained without regrets, except for one large doubt that appeared at the last minute. She had conquered unknown lands across the ocean, winning new converts for Christianity. These people were her subjects, apportioned to her by the pope so that she could convert them. It was legitimate, now, to have doubts about whether this was what had really happened or whether they were simply being destroyed, enslaved or bled for gold, pearls or whatever riches could be taken from them. She now begged Ferdinand, Juana and Philip to make sure that this pattern was broken. ‘That should be the main aim, and you should be diligent about it, and not permit that the Indians, neighbours and inhabitants of the said Indies and Mainland that have been, or will be, discovered, are abused … but are, rather, treated fairly and if any have been mistreated that you remedy it, making sure that [this treatment] does not go beyond what is spelt out and ordered in the papal grants conceded to us,’ she wrote. Isabella, in other words, was concerned that, in this enterprise at least, she had failed to do right by God. She also suddenly remembered the dead in her wars and others who had died in her service,10 ordering another 20,000 masses (the same number she had already ordered up for herself alone) to be said for them. Finally, she named Ferdinand as administrator in her kingdoms until Juana’s arrival.11

  Three days later, in the morning, Isabella’s concerns about unfair taxation were formally aired when a document she had written two weeks earlier was read out at the royal court. Isabella was too ill to attend. That same day, Catherine of Aragon sat in her rooms at Durham House in Westminster and wrote two separate letters to her parents, demanding news. Juana had told her that they were both sick. She had not heard from Ferdinand ‘since a year ago’, she said. Catherine told Isabella that she could not ‘be satisfied or cheerful’12 until she saw a letter from her mother telling her that she had recovered.

  It was too late. That morning, Isabella remained ‘awake and with contrition’ in her room as she received the sacraments from her confessor. It was typical that, on her death-bed, she reportedly refused to allow the priest to raise her clothes above her ankles as he anointed her. The end, she knew, was approaching and it was comforting to receive the last rites. The hard work of repentance and preparation for death was now mostly done. All that remained was the God who had overseen her great enterprise in Castile and into whose hands, the priest reminded her, she was now being delivered.

  On hearing this, Isabella sighed heavily and crossed herself. Shortly before midday, the priest proclaimed to her that ‘all is over’. The queen of Castile took a final, shallow breath and died – bringing an end to three decades of rule and thirty-five years of marriage to Ferdinand. ‘Her passing is for us the deepest grief that could ever happen to us in this life, for we have lost the best and most excellent wife that a king ever had,’ he said. It rained for weeks after her death.13

  AFTERWORD

  A Beam of Glory

  Hispaniola, 1504

  In 1504, while Isabella lay in her sickbed in Medina del Campo, an ambitious eighteen-year-old Castilian called Hernán Cortés reached the island of Hispaniola. This young, capable man from a modest family of hidalgos from Extremadura was a product of the newly self-confident and adventurous Castile created during Isabella’s reign. He had grown up on tales of Caribbean escapades and decided to take advantage of his monarch’s offer of free farming land for new arrivals. He was fortunate, also, to be a distant relative of the then governor, Nicolás de Ovando, and went on to become a keen participant in expeditions to conquer the as yet uncolonised parts of Cuba and Hispaniola. Reasonably well educated and with an obvious talent for leadership, Cortés rose rapidly through the colonial ranks and, early in 1519, he raised a force of 600 men and thirty-two horses before setting sail for the coast of what is now Mexico.

  In the quarter of a century since Isabella had sent Columbus off on his first voyage of discovery, Spain’s colonists had drained the Caribbean islands of the most easily available gold and its native population was being decimated by war, hunger and European diseases such as influenza and smallpox. All that was left, or so it seemed to many of the colonists, was the dull business of farming or the quest for fresh lands to conquer and exploit. Fortunately for Spain, there was no lack of these – nor of men like Cortés who, imbued with the bold and sometimes foolhardy Castilian spirit of adventure promoted by Isabella and Columbus, would become the so-called conquistadores of Latin America.

  Cortés was meant to trade and explore, but instead conquered an entire empire. Having scuttled his ships at Veracruz, he led his small band of men inland to the great city of Tenochtitlan, where the Aztec ruler Montezuma awaited. Cortés kidnapped the latter and, over the next few years, skilfully and daringly used the advantages of Castilian steel weapons, gunpowder, Aztec infighting and his own ruthless guile to subdue an empire that boasted a fighting force estimated at up to 300,000 men.

  A decade later his feat inspired a distant cousin, Francisco Pizarro, to sail south along the Pacific coast and then strike inland – where, with ev
en fewer men and horses, he overthrew the ancient Inca empire that had its centre in modern-day Peru. It took him just a few years to bring most of South America’s largest empire – with a population of around 20 million – under the Spanish yoke. During that time Pizarro captured the emperor Atahualpa, extorted a huge ransom in gold for his release and then garrotted him anyway. Suchwere the cruel, if efficient, methods of Castile’s new conquistadores – men who had assumed the triple objective of Isabella’s colonial adventures: of seeking personal glory; of winning prestige and gold for Castile; and of delivering fresh souls for their Christian God. ‘We came here to serve God and his Majesty, and also to get rich,’ one of Cortés’s men later admitted.1 Anyone who opposed this divine mission could be treated with the disdain and violence reserved for an enemy of Christianity.

  Eventually, it took just a few thousand Castilian soldiers to conquer lands and peoples that were many times bigger than Spain itself – and to start the process of creating a continuous stretch of Spanish-ruled land that ran from Florida and California to Chile and Argentina. Spanish explorers seeking the wealth of mythical civilisations such as El Dorado struck deep into North America, to modern-day North Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas. To the south, only the indigenous peoples of Chile were able, initially, to stop their progress. By the middle of the sixteenth century, after a Spaniard called Bartolomé de Medina invented the so-called ‘patio process’ – using mercury amalgamation rather than laborious and inefficient smelting to extract silver from the ore found in Mexican and Peruvian mines – bullion fleets were delivering anaverage of 2 to 8 million ducats of silver to Castile every year. They continued to do so for an entire century. Castile, in return, shipped foodstuffs and other goods to the colonists who flocked to the Americas, bolstering the economy further.

  The influx of silver had an impact far beyond Spain, with some blaming it for a long period of high inflation, while also boosting onward trade to silver-hungry China. More importantly, it added to Spain’s status as the new political powerhouse of Europe, often in competition with France. Spain’s rulers were rich. They were also ambitious and, as a result, profligate. Between them, Isabella’s grandson and great-grandson – Charles I and Philip II – were to take Spain to the height of its glory in the sixteenth century. It was a giddying rise to global prominence. ‘For a few fabulous decades Spain was to be greatest power on earth,’ says the historian J. H. Elliott.2 No Europe-centred culture had been so successful, in terms of the lands it controlled, since the Romans.

  Yet, as we have seen, the future of Castile – and of Spain – had looked precarious on Isabella’s death. Philip ‘the Handsome’ arrived to claim the Castilian throne in his wife Juana’s name in April 1506, forcing Ferdinand to retire to his own kingdoms. Spain’s union under a single crown – the result of Isabella’s choice of the future king of Aragon as her husband – was broken. But fate soon fixed that. Philip died six months after reaching Spain, apparently after partying too hard with his delighted followers. Queen Juana, by now deemed mad, eventually installed herself in Tordesillas. Castile’s nominal monarch was a tragic figure who lived for another forty-six years, but she had been side-lined by her husband and would be equally ignored by her father, Ferdinand, when he took over once more after Philip’s death. The unique partnership between Isabella and her husband meant that theirs had always been a joint project, and Ferdinand’s return provided continuity. The same principles that had driven the young couple during their early years in power thus remained in force from Isabella’s accession in 1474 until Ferdinand’s death in 1516, meaning that the project ran for four decades. In 1512, Ferdinand conducted a rapid annexation of Navarre, thereby putting the final piece of the jigsaw of contemporary Spain into place. Elsewhere, Ferdinand continued both the good and the bad. Exploration and trade with the Indies was built up, and systems of royal control put in place. The Inquisition continued to torture, repress and persecute. Slaves were shipped from continent to continent. Purity of blood rules, designed to exclude converso families from power or privilege, were extended. Yet by the time Ferdinand was laid to rest beside Isabella in Granada few doubted that Spain was the major power in Europe.3

  Fate meant that their successor would be a man who had grown up in northern Europe and spoke no Spanish – Juana’s son, Charles I. As Isabella had feared, the crown was now in the hands of someone ‘of another nation and another tongue’. As the grandson of the rulers of Aragon, Castile, Burgundy and the Habsburg lands in and around Austria, Charles I was the lord of several large, but very different, parts of Europe. He soon followed his grandfather Maximilian, the archduke of Austria, into the role of Holy Roman Emperor – increasing his focus on northern Europe and provoking a short-lived rebellion in Castile, where the so-called comuneros demanded a return to the home rule and the ‘secure liberty’ of Isabella’s time. Charles, they insisted, should follow the customs of ‘Don Ferdinand and Doña Isabella, his grandparents’. Charles’s election as Holy Roman Emperor – making him the leader of the German princes whose lands were loosely gathered together in the Holy Roman Empire – cast him more deeply into his role as the defender of Christianity against Islam and the Ottoman Turks. This was a cause which the crusading Castile that Isabella had taken to its peak of glory was happy to embrace, even if the king himself spent only sixteen of his forty years’ rule in Spain.

  The battle to stop Islam advancing further into Europe, which had seen the Ottomans besiege Vienna unsuccessfully in 1529, reached a maritime peak after the accession of Charles’s son, Philip II, to the crown in 1556. An encounter in the Gulf of Corinth near Lepanto in 1571 saw some 250 Christian galleys led by Spain engage in one of the greatest sea battles of all time. The number of vessels on each side was even, but the Turkish fleet was defeated, with part of it sinking to the bottom of the sea. Ottoman expansion into Europe had reached its limit. Both the Ottomans and the Habsburgs then found enemies of their own religions – Protestants in Europe and Persians in Asia – to concentrate on. Isabella and Ferdinand’s reform of the church had readied Spain for the battle against Protestantism, making it a principal bulwark of the Counter-Reformation. Internally, the all-seeing Inquisition that Isabella had so vigorously helped to invent squashed the merest hints of Protestantism in Spain.

  On his abdication and retirement to a Spanish monastery in 1556, Charles’s sprawling empire – really a disjointed set of territories – was split in two. His son, Philip II, was given Spain (including the Aragonese kingdoms that covered most of modern-day Italy) and the Netherlands, while Charles’s brother Ferdinand received Austria and took over as Holy Roman Emperor. It was now that Spain became the proper centre of empire, increasingly focused on the New World, though it also began to settle the Philippines (which were named after Philip) and trade with them from Mexico. Castile’s wealth also helped bring it another prize, with Portugal accepting Philip as its king in 1581. Philip’s already impressive empire now included Portugal’s territories in Brazil, Africa and Asia. England’s Lord Chancellor, the philosopher Francis Bacon, observed that this was an empire (the world’s first) made up of dominions on which ‘the sun never sets … but ever shines upon one part or other of them: which, to say truly, is a beam of glory’.4

  The king himself built an austere, massive monastery at El Escorial, on a hillside thirty miles from Madrid, where he fretted over the endless paperwork of his empire. He also launched bold attempts to invade England (where, as Queen Mary’s husband, he had briefly been king consort when younger) with his doomed armada and tried to halt the spread of Protestantism in the Netherlands. Spain grew in power, but paid a price – devoting considerable resources to these projects and to the administration of empire. Debt-ridden and overstretched, it eventually proved incapable of holding on to its lands. Spain’s European pre-eminence vanished just as quickly as it had emerged. Eventually the country found itself being left behind by other parts of Europe and constantly asking itself how it had wander
ed from the glorious path that Isabella and her husband had set out on.

  It is easy to make the present day look as if it all depends on a particular moment or event in history – a trick that, among other things, ignores what else might have happened without that event. Yet the arrival of three Castilian boats in the Caribbean, with Christopher Columbus and his eighty-eight sailors on board, had an obvious and tangible impact on the world over the following centuries. Consider, for example, some simple assumptions about the ‘native’ produce and cultures of different countries. By the nineteenth century potatoes had come to occupy a third of Ireland’s arable land, but this would never have happened – and nor would the country have suffered the famines that killed a million people and drove 2 million to emigrate – had potatoes not been brought back from the Americas. The North American indigenous peoples who roamed the plains on horses, occasionally chasing buffalo or fighting settlers, were able to do so because Columbus and the conquistadores who followed him had introduced horses into the American continent, and these soon ran wild. The list goes on. Tomatoes are a central part of the traditional Mediterranean diet in Italy, Spain and elsewhere, but were unknown in Europe until Castilian boats brought them from America. The master chocolatiers of Switzerland and Belgium would never have developed their famous goods without cacao – another product that began to travel to Europe on the same boats. Tobacco, the fashionable pastime – and then the scourge – of Western society was another import. Even Africa, which would embrace maize and manioc, eventually saw its agriculture transformed.