Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  The fact that King Juan could see anything at all was testament to his steely resolve to overcome obstacles in his path. As he entered his sixties, he had developed cataracts in both eyes and had become blind, in an era without antibiotics, anesthesia, or modern surgical skills. In the summer of 1466, when he was sixty-eight, he had decided to put himself into the hands of a skilled Jewish physician trained in the ancient Hindu and Roman techniques of removing cataracts by inserting a sharp, red-hot needle into the eyeball. Juan’s family tried to dissuade him from the operation, warning that the surgery was too dangerous, particularly for a man of his age. Even the doctor hesitated. But Juan had been willing to jeopardize his health in order to regain his sight, and the operation was a complete success. It was a hallmark of a life of tenacious determination and of a willingness to risk everything for what he wanted.

  King Juan had been born to a Castilian royal family that was adept at making the best of opportunities. His father had been the uncle of King Juan II, Isabella’s father, and became king of the combined neighboring Kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia through a political deal. Juan, in turn, had been the third of seven children, but he, too, wanted to be a king. At age twenty-one, in 1419, he married a thirty-two-year-old childless widow who was queen of the Kingdom of Navarre, and through this marriage, he became king of Navarre. But he was only the king-consort, not the real monarch, and he spent most of his time in Aragon. Together they had three children, Carlos, the heir to the throne of Navarre, and two daughters, Blanca and Eleanor. But instead of focusing on what he had—his growing family and the administration of Navarre—Juan tended to obsess about what he did not have.

  When the queen of Navarre died in 1441 at age fifty-four, King Juan kept the title of king, though by right it belonged to his son Carlos, who was twenty. Then King Juan remarried, this time to a nineteen-year-old Castilian noblewoman named Juana Enríquez, and together they had two more children, Ferdinand and Juana. This second family was twenty years younger than the first, and from early on, King Juan showed his preference for them in countless ways. He was especially close to his son Ferdinand, who was to become Princess Isabella’s husband, with whom he always shared a natural affinity.

  Juan of Aragon’s obsession with Castile had started when he was very young because two generations of his family had dreamed of ruling the kingdom. Juan’s father—another Ferdinand—was a younger son of the Spanish royal family. He got a taste for power while serving as regent for Isabella’s father, King Juan II of Castile, who had inherited the throne of Castile and León at age six, when he was too young to rule. Serving merely as regent was a bitter pill for Ferdinand, and he longed to rule in his own right, so when the king of the adjacent Kingdom of Aragon died without an heir, and his subjects offered Ferdinand the opportunity to become their ruler, he eagerly accepted and moved his family from Castile to Aragon. He became Ferdinand I of Aragon. But Aragon was hardly the paradise he had hoped. It was an unwieldy amalgam of three separate realms—Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia—and had a daunting set of problems, making it difficult and stressful to govern.

  Ferdinand I served only briefly as king of Aragon before he died, leaving the kingdom to his son Alfonso, Juan’s oldest brother, who used it as a base to conquer Naples, a large and prosperous city on the shores of the Italian peninsula. Captivated by the cultural and intellectual delights of Italy, its food and its congenial climate, King Alfonso found one excuse after another to delay his return home, leaving his wife and his younger brothers, including Juan, to administer Aragon in his name. For these brothers, as it had been for their father Ferdinand, the pleasure of regency proved decidedly second rate, given the grinding governmental problems of the kingdom.

  Juan and his brothers in Aragon began to reminisce about the fine life they had left behind in Castile and began conspiring how best they could retake power there. They cast covetous eyes on the Castilian kingdom of Isabella’s father, who by now had grown to adulthood, and imagined themselves replacing him. King Juan’s poor management of Castile convinced them that they could do better, given the chance.

  Consequently, throughout his entire life, Isabella’s father had had to watch over his shoulder for incursions by these men, his cousins. This was one reason he had come to rely so thoroughly on Álvaro de Luna, because Álvaro had effectively defended his interests. Matters had come to a violent head in 1445, six years before Isabella’s birth, when the Aragonese cousins invaded Castile and tried to seize control. Álvaro de Luna had bravely defended Castile and defeated them. One of Juan’s brothers died of wounds he suffered in the battle, important allies were taken prisoner, and Juan retreated alone to Aragon, returning to his life as regent and brooding darkly over the public humiliation.

  For the next two decades, as Isabella grew to adulthood, Juan had been plotting his revenge. He intended to obtain through duplicity what he had been unable to seize by force. Now his plan was to reclaim Castile through his descendants, by marrying his favorite son to Isabella.

  Juan’s first attempt at dynastic control had involved marrying his daughter Blanca to Enrique, back in 1440. But Blanca’s failure to produce children had dashed that dream.

  Moreover, King Enrique’s unhappy experience with King Juan of Aragon as a father-in-law had made him wary of any further entanglements with him. Enrique’s thirteen-year marriage to Blanca had not been consummated, and in all likelihood, he suffered continuing scorn from Blanca’s father. It was King Juan of Aragon who had stalked the halls outside Enrique’s first bridal chamber on his nuptial night thirty years earlier, when he had been unable to perform.

  Now Ferdinand’s marriage to Isabella gave King Juan a second chance at achieving his goal. Getting control of the princess who was heiress to the throne would be another path to controlling Castile, now finally within reach. This was one reason Enrique had so strenuously opposed the marriage between Isabella and Juan’s son Ferdinand. Even Isabella’s loyal friend Beatriz de Bobadilla had sought to impede the match by reporting on Isabella’s whereabouts, possibly motivated by concern that Isabella could be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

  In other words, through her marriage Isabella had expanded her family and asserted her independence from her brother, but in the process she had taken on some risk to herself. Her new father-in-law was a vicious, vengeful, and selfish man who would do anything to attain control of her lands—and whose nickname in Aragon was “Juan the Faithless.”

  Juan’s faithless qualities were evident even in his family dynamics. He had a strained relationship with his oldest son, Carlos, who was a very different type of man from his father. Carlos was courteous, cultivated, and intellectual, a Renaissance prototype, which made him enormously popular in an era of changing tastes, while his father Juan seemed much more a product of the Middle Ages, a fearless warrior who preferred life in the saddle to reading a poem or attending a play. Carlos’s preferences made him enormously popular in Aragon and in his uncle Alfonso’s Italian dominions. In fact, Carlos had traveled to Naples to live with Alfonso, where the two men shared a gentlemanly passion for art, literature, poetry, and music, irritating Juan to his very core. “Whereas Juan had little taste or time for the arts in any form, Carlos’s avowed interest in them struck a welcome chord with his cultured uncle,” writes the historian Alan Ryder.1

  King Juan had found a kindred spirit in his second wife, Juana Enríquez, whom he married in 1447, three years after his first wife died, and seven years after Enrique and Blanca were married. Juana Enríquez shared his vision for reclaiming Castile, and in the words of an Aragonese historian, her “intrepid spirit and unprincipled ambition” matched his own.2 Their first child together, Ferdinand, was born in 1452, and their daughter, Juana, a few years later.

  Jealousy was a hallmark of this new family, and Queen Juana looked upon Carlos with the malevolent resentment of a stepmother who saw the children of a first marriage receiving the advantages of placement and position. She wa
nted the kingship of Navarre for her own son, not for the child of Juan’s first wife. King Juan also came to resent his popular eldest son, who seemed to win friends with amazing ease, and he began to plot ways to advance Ferdinand, whom he preferred. The family was a smoldering cauldron of hurt feelings and insults, with the older children recognizing that they had been displaced in their father’s heart by the new family.

  King Juan’s daughter Blanca, from his first family, complained plaintively of her father’s treatment of her after Enrique set her aside for nonconsummation of the marriage. Instead of helping the unfortunate princess mend her wounded spirit when she came home, Juan saw her as an embarrassing failure, although she had done nothing wrong. In a mournful document issued near her death, Blanca wrote that the “aforesaid King, Don Juan had forgotten the love and paternal affection” he should have had for his children from the first marriage.3

  Matters in Aragon came to a head in 1458, when King Alfonso, still enjoying life in Italy, finally died. His brother Juan was his heir and assumed the rule of his dominions in Iberia and Sicily, while Alfonso’s children retained control of Naples. Juan should have publicly named his oldest son Carlos the next heir, both of Aragon and Navarre, but he declined to do so.

  Meanwhile the family’s Aragonese subjects had become increasingly restive over all the foreign adventuring and interfamily squabbling, which was taking place amid a disturbing economic decline. Barcelona, the hub of the principality of Catalonia, its largest city and historically its most prosperous, had seen its foreign trade decline, and Catalans had come to believe they were the victims of neglectful, shortsighted, and absentee administration. The city’s two hundred richest families, who lived primarily on their investments, had seen their incomes erode over the last century, and they had been waiting eagerly for Carlos to assume control of the realm. Instead they faced the dawning realization that King Juan had no intention of transferring leadership to Carlos.

  This recognition raised real concerns for the citizens. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the Trastámara family moved to their new kingdom, Catalonia had been prosperous and solid, carrying on a brisk trade in cloth, coral, spices, silks, and cottons. But King Alfonso had sailed off for Italy, claiming Naples and Sicily and shifting his interests to that peninsula. No one seemed to be looking out for Aragon’s best interests anymore.

  By the time of Ferdinand’s birth in 1452, the Aragonese, particularly the Catalans, felt their nation was disintegrating. “This is Catalonia, the once fortunate, glorious and most faithful nation which in the past was feared by land and sea,” the despairing bishop of Elna, Joan Margarit, told legislators in Barcelona in 1454. “Now it is seen totally ruined and lost through the absence of its glorious prince and lord, the lord king. Behold it bereft of all strength, honor and ecclesiastical jurisdiction; powerful barons and knights are ruined; cities and towns, corrupting the common weal, are torn apart; knights’ steeds have become mules; widows, orphans and children seek vainly for consolation; corsairs and pirates plunder the ports and roam through all the seas.”4

  The principality also suffered under a particularly cruel set of government policies, known as the mal usos, that made life miserable for the bulk of the population. It was an enforced serfdom that dominated economic life in Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. This system had been common elsewhere in Europe but not in Castile, where peasants were not serfs. There, they were free to move around, marry whom they chose, and pursue the occupation they preferred, although most in reality had very limited options, given the overwhelming and disproportionate power of the nobility, who controlled 97 percent of the realm’s wealth.

  In Catalonia, however, conditions for peasants were far bleaker, having deteriorated over about five centuries. In the ninth and tenth centuries, Catalonia had been settled by free peasants who established their own small farms, dispersed widely over the countryside. Women at that time had inherited equally with men. Married women had maintained control of the property they brought into a marriage and possessed a right to 10 percent of their husband’s holdings at his death, which gave most women some financial security in old age.5

  But as Europe came under assault from invaders, many castles were built so that residents could better defend themselves. By the late eleventh century, there were more than eight hundred castles in Catalonia, many spaced only three to five miles apart. Residents clustered their homes in the shadows of these fortifications for protection, or around churches, because they believed that people who lived within thirty paces of a church would be immune to violence, enjoying the same sanctuary as within the religious edifice itself. This arrangement made the peasants increasingly dependent on their protectors, either the secular leaders or the church elders. These local chieftains came in turn to see themselves as holding rights over the residents who became their subjects.

  Aristocratic power grew, and the position of women deteriorated. The dowry, a payment made by a bride’s family to the groom’s family, grew in importance, which had the effect of making female children less economically valuable than males. Then it became increasingly common for inheritance systems to favor one child over the others, which was good for maintaining a strong family estate but bad for the family’s younger children.

  Consequently, ever fewer people held ever greater power over others. Peasants were compelled to place themselves under the power of a lay or ecclesiastical lord, acknowledging they were subject to his authority. Peasants were commonly required to live on their land. Property transactions included the right to control not just the real estate but also the lives of the people living on the land. To move away, peasants had to pay money to purchase their freedom, called redemption. Some peasants were required to name the person, specifically which of their children, would succeed them as serf on the land. They were fined if their wives committed adultery or if a building on their property burned down.

  Disease had a more disastrous impact in Aragon than elsewhere in Europe, according to Aragonese historians. In the mid-1300s, when the Black Death that swept through Europe killed off at least 25 percent of the population, Catalonia, a trans-Mediterranean shipping center that was a hub of world trade, was even harder hit, losing up to 50 percent of its population in the decades following the first outbreak.6 But while the reduction in the labor force gave workers increased power in many places, it had the opposite effect in Aragon because it came at a time when the underlying economy was crumbling as well. The aristocrats responded to losses of income with increasingly oppressive treatment of the surviving peasants.

  Many farms were depopulated, because of either death or desertion by the peasants who lived there, and nobles began to pursue serfs who had abandoned the fields. Peasants who wanted to leave had to pay increasingly high prices for their freedom. Taxes were also raised on women who wanted to marry men from other lords’ territories. Some lords refused to accept these payments and thus barred people from leaving. In addition, new laws made it illegal for peasants to bring lawsuits against their lords if they disagreed with the oppressive conditions. They were required to comply with the lords’ demands whether they felt they were fair or not.

  In other words, the nobles in Catalonia responded to the epidemic of plague by finding new ways to make money off the declining number of serfs. In 1402 Queen María of Aragon had written to Pope Benedict XIII of the desperation among the peasantry, calling the situation “pestiferous” and noting that the church itself was the largest holder of peasants.7 But conditions only worsened.

  The system grew increasingly harsh and exploitative, developing the name mal usos or “bad customs.” According to a report prepared in 1462, nursing mothers in Aragon were commonly required to serve as wet nurses for their lords’ children, which had the effect of leaving less milk for their own offspring. The peasants reported that lords were in the habit of requiring newly married women to lie with them the first night of their marriage, a charge that the lords said was untrue, but that
they agreed to outlaw.8

  The Aragonese branch of the Trastámara family, Kings Ferdinand, Alfonso, and Juan, recognized the problems inherent in the system, but they were reluctant to take measures to solve the problems. On the contrary, they took advantage of the situation to blackmail both lords and serfs into payoffs that supported their foreign adventures. “Alfonso also frequently promised to come back from southern Italy to attend to matters in his increasingly desperate capital,” writes the historian Alan Ryder, “but from the time of his expedition to Sicily in 1435 until his death 23 years later he never returned, ruling Catalonia in absentia and in an increasingly tenuous fashion.”9

  The Trastámara rulers in Aragon instead shifted back and forth on this issue. They banned the mal usos in 1455 but repealed the ban a year later to win favor with the nobles. The policy changed again in 1458. Similarly, in December 1461, Queen Juana, King Juan’s second wife, ordered the nobles to cease their oppression of the peasants, but the next month she reversed herself. She praised the nobles for their efforts to restrain the peasants even as she took advantage of her peasant support to rally an army to defend herself against nobles who were growing increasingly disgusted by their vacillating ruling family.10 Soon the Trastámara family had to deal with both restive peasants and restive nobles.

  As King Juan attempted to cope with these issues, his popular and amiable son Carlos was always a thorn in his side. In October 1459, after his brother Alfonso died in Italy, Juan attempted to have himself and his wife crowned rulers of Aragon in the capital city of Zaragoza, but the Catalans protested that it could not occur unless Carlos, the Prince of Viana, was present. The prince came back to Barcelona from Italy in 1460.

  That was the time Prince Carlos decided to try to strengthen his claim to the crown of Aragon by marrying Princess Isabella of Castile. He was enthusiastic about the match, referring to Isabella as a “muy excelente princesa.”11 King Enrique of Castile had for a while energetically promoted the marriage of Isabella and Carlos, partially to avenge himself on his former father-in-law King Juan, who had been hoping that Isabella would marry his favored son Ferdinand.