Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  With Queen María at his side, King Manuel’s life proceeded in an orderly and extraordinarily successful way. “From 1500 on, during his lifetime, the Portuguese obtained nothing but victories from Arabia to Malaysia, thoroughly controlling the Indian Ocean,” writes the Portuguese historian Antonio Henrique de Oliveira Marques.12 Isabella’s daughter was queen over the expanding Portuguese Empire at the time when her family at home in Castile was presiding over the vast and growing Spanish Empire. The explorer Vasco da Gama had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached India by sea in 1498 and returned home to Portugal in a ship loaded with spices. Now the Portuguese had a pathway around the Ottoman bottleneck to Asia, and to its silks, spices, and other trade goods, by cruising around the coastline of Africa. The Portuguese also expanded their dominions in Brazil in South America, which was theirs through the division of the globe in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494.

  It became apparent now how much that treaty had played into Isabella’s hands because now she was queen of Spain, and her daughter was queen of Portugal. Together they ruled over much of the world, and wealth poured into their countries, which gave them the resources to do many things. “Don Manuel was at the height of his royal grandeur. Honours, wealth, all things seemed to vie in laying their offerings at his feet,” writes the historian Edward McMurdo. They lived in “truly Oriental luxuriousness and decorations. From all parts of Europe came singers and players to amuse the King, and who performed in his bedchamber to lull him to sleep. Horse races, rides along the Tagus, sumptuous banquets, bull-fights, tilts and tournaments completed the palace life.”13

  Queen María and King Manuel maintained the same focus on religious mission and Christian indoctrination in the New World as did Queen Isabella. The Portuguese sent many missionaries to Africa, South America, and Asia, swelling the number of Christian faithful. The great monastery of Belém, at the entrance to Lisbon, was, as the Cathedral in Seville had been, the starting place and final destination of every Portuguese trip to distant shores. Explorers attended mass there before setting out. Castile, of course, was similarly tying exploration to evangelization. For Queen Isabella and her daughter María, the alliance of Spain with Portugal was in all ways a success, and they attributed it to God’s favor resting on them.

  María said this explicitly. Friar Hernando Nieto once asked her if she felt grateful to God for the gifts she had received in her life—for her happy marriage, for her children, and for the riches they enjoyed. Queen María fell to her knees and raised up her hands in prayer, saying, “I give you thanks, my great true God, for all the gifts and benefits you have given me.”14

  But Queen Isabella’s work wasn’t finished yet. There was still one child left at home, Isabella’s youngest, Catalina, better known as Catherine of Aragon. During the years of deliberations over the marriage arrangements and the dowry, she had grown up being called the Princess of Wales. At last she was preparing to make the journey to England. Isabella hated to lose her and gave one excuse after another for delaying Catherine’s departure. A proxy marriage ceremony between Catherine and Arthur occurred on May 19, 1499, and in October, Prince Arthur wrote to Catherine asking her when she would arrive in person. In January 1500 the English royal family asked again. In April the Spaniards explained that Catherine’s departure had been delayed by an uprising of the Muslims, then was delayed again by stormy weather. In October the English asked once more when Catherine was arriving. In May 1501, Queen Isabella told them the girl’s departure had been delayed again because she was waiting to see her father before she left. On May 21 they said she was too ill to travel, and in July they said she was coming slowly because it was very hot in Spain.

  The truth was that by 1501, when the travel plans were being finalized, Queen Isabella was widely recognized at home as being “in ill health,” and it made her reluctant to let her intelligent and thoughtful daughter out of her sight.15 The two women were very much alike in temperament and bearing, and both knew that once Catherine left Spain, she would probably never see her mother again.

  When Catherine finally departed, in the summer of 1501, two years after the proxy wedding ceremony, her mother was too weak to accompany her to the coast to bid her farewell as she had done when Juana left for Flanders. They said goodbye in Granada. Catherine was fifteen years old when she set sail, on August 15, from Corunna, in the north. Her mother drafted anxious letters in her own hand to the ship’s pilots to ensure that Catherine would be protected as much as possible.

  The trip was dangerous, as it had been for Juana and for Margaret. Ocean voyages were treacherous because shipbuilding techniques were still primitive, and people traveled aboard tiny vessels that were only marginally safe, even in calm waters. Catherine and her entourage spent six weeks making the voyage from Spain to England, crossing first the Bay of Biscay and then the English Channel. Early in the trip they were hit by a ferocious storm that bore down on them from the Atlantic Ocean. One of the ships in their fleet was lost, causing them to rush back to port to refit before they could set out once again. It was a terrifying ordeal, although Catherine remarkably retained her composure through it all.

  Her ship dropped anchor at Plymouth on October 2, 1501. The princess was greeted by cheering crowds; King Henry VII had planned a spectacular arrival reception. He insisted on seeing the princess in person before the marriage ceremony was conducted. She raised the bridal veil covering her face for his inspection. He pronounced himself delighted and shared his exuberant reaction with her parents: “We have much admired her beauty, as well as her agreeable and dignified manners,” King Henry wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella on November 28, 1501. “… Great and cordial rejoicings have taken place.… The union between the two royal families, and the two kingdoms, is now so complete that it is impossible to make any distinction between the interests of England and Spain.”16

  Catherine and Arthur were married at Old St. Paul’s Cathedral on November 14. There was a bit of confusion about whether the consummation of the marriage had occurred. The pale, slender young blond prince was said by some to have “swaggered boastfully out of his bride’s bedroom demanding beer,”17 while Doña Elvira Manuel, Catherine’s governess, said the young woman had been left “virgo intacta.”18 But Catherine and Arthur were still young, and the problem, if there was one at all, would surely rectify itself.

  Now Isabella turned to her most difficult problem. Juana, the third-in-line, the daughter who had never been prepared to be queen, was now heiress to the thrones of Castile and Aragon, an inheritance that included Naples, Sicily, and as they were gradually becoming aware, immense lands across the Atlantic Ocean. She was bright and well-educated but had not been trained to rule, so it had been essential to recall her to Spain to begin preparing her for the huge tasks ahead. That meant she would need to travel back to Castile with her husband, the Archduke Philip.

  But something had gone wrong with Juana. Perhaps Isabella had had a premonition of disaster when she stayed with her daughter so long in Laredo before she left for Flanders. It had not been a good sign when Archduke Philip had not been there to greet Juana when she arrived. In fact, the Flemish courtiers surrounding Philip, who were in the pay of the French king, had been trying from the beginning to drive a wedge between the young couple.

  Philip’s standoffish behavior—leaving her cooling her heels while he slowly made his way to greet her—was a harbinger of worse things to come. It was a mismatch that had quickly become apparent. Juana was attractive, and Philip was quick to consummate the marriage. Soon Juana was pregnant. But the handsome and vain young archduke was accustomed to picking and choosing from among the comeliest women in Flanders and France, and in his eyes, Juana did not really measure up. Moreover, her seriousness and intense love for him left him bored and irritated. “He only cared for pleasure and amusement in his lively court at Brussels,” the biographer Christopher Hare wrote, and Juana’s “tears and complaints” of his neglect only made him impatient with her.19
r />   Juana had been raised in a harmonious court infused with a sense of mission and purpose; she had been an admired and beloved child. But in Flanders she found it difficult to navigate the treacherous shoals of court politics, where people feigned friendship while they secretly maneuvered to undermine each other. The death of Philip’s mother when he was a small child had left the archduke open to manipulation by courtiers who learned how to control him through his interests, tastes, and libido.

  Philip’s predilictions, consequently, were avant-garde verging on dissolute. He was, for example, a patron of Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch, best known for his Garden of Earthly Delights. Bosch’s works, ostensibly on religious themes, depict fantastic and lewd humans and animals cavorting in dreamlike pastoral landscapes. The frequently pornographic and sado-masochistic imagery leaves the viewer uncertain whether the paintings are portraying a spiritual lesson or contemptuously mocking conventional morality.

  The culture clash between the two kingdoms, Castile and Flanders, the latter dominated by the Burgundians, was immediately obvious, as it had been in the entourages of Princess Margaret and Prince Juan. Castile was sedate, solemn, austere, and religious; Burgundy was rollicking, sensual, and cynical. The companions whom Isabella had sent with her daughter were dismayed by what they considered the “moral corruption” at its court; the Burgundians thought the Spaniards were dowdy and puritanical.20 Flemish and French courtiers who wanted Philip to discard Juana soon found ways to discredit her and make her look foolish and, even worse, mentally incompetent.

  Following the advice of his courtiers, Philip took control of Juana’s household by appointing new attendants for her from among the Flemish nobles and deciding how much they would be paid. This created tensions within the court. In some cases, the pay of the Flemings was decreased because the overall size of the royal household had grown, and more people needed to be paid than in the past. Some Spaniards who had traveled with Juana were not paid at all, moreover, and Juana was not given money to pay them herself. The Spaniards, meanwhile, were forced to conform to Burgundian customs and living standards and were treated as unwelcome outsiders.

  The change of climate was a shock for the Spaniards as well. Juana’s Spanish entourage were chilled to the bone and demoralized by the cold and gloomy weather in northern Europe, and many of those who were able to do so went home, leaving her with a much smaller contingent of supporters. They were replaced by Flemish courtiers who took their orders from Philip, or more precisely, from the advisers who controlled Philip.

  Conditions were particularly harsh for the crew of the fleet, who were forced to bide their time over the winter waiting for Margaret’s trip to Spain. Juana sought to rush Margaret’s departure but was not successful. Philip left the soldiers and sailors who had traveled in the fleet to fend for themselves in a harsh winter on the bitter northern European coast, where nothing had been done to prepare for their arrival or accommodation. Within the next few months, up to nine thousand of them died of cold and hunger.

  This degree of intentional callousness stunned the Castilians. It had the effect of intimidating Juana’s remaining Castilian attendants and sent an important signal to the Flemings about how Spaniards could and should be treated.

  Juana had no money to provide dowries for her ladies-in-waiting, which created a crisis for some of them. At least one Castilian attendant, from the high-ranking Bobadilla family, was consequently summoned back home for a Spanish marriage. The young woman remained loyal to Juana and decided to stay, along with eight other female attendants. But financial conditions were so difficult that the situation was inevitably untenable, and one by one they dropped away from Juana. Ultimately she was left almost entirely surrounded by Flemish courtiers, many of whom were actively working against her interests. Out of the thousands who had accompanied her in her bridal entourage, only the two or three slaves who had accompanied her to Flanders remained by her side. Presumably they had little choice in the matter.

  This situation was a betrayal of Juana and a violation of her marriage contract. The accord of 1495, according to the historian Bethany Aram, had stipulated that both Juana and Margaret would receive annual allowances of 20,000 escudos to maintain themselves and their households.21 In Spain, that amount and more was liberally granted to Margaret, who received many other valuable gifts. But in Flanders, the money was disbursed to Juana through the Chambre des Comptes (House of Accounts) at Lille, which withheld it from her or allowed the money to be diverted to Flemish courtiers.

  When Isabella learned about Juana’s dire financial situation in Flanders, she pushed her ambassadors there to make sure Juana received the money she was due. They tried to bribe top Flemish officials to make sure some money went to Juana, but other patrons were paying the same officials even more to advance their own ends, and the Spanish efforts were unsuccessful. Even gifts that were given to Juana were taken from her and distributed to others.

  Philip seemed to intentionally exacerbate the situation. He refused to give his wife any money even for incidental expenses. In the eyes of her servants and Spanish envoys, she did not fight on their behalf, or did not fight effectively enough. She soon seemed resigned to the intolerable conditions.

  A Spanish ambassador who visited the court in Flanders wrote that Juana “lived in such penury” and that her servants were “dying of hunger.”22 He said that Juana desperately needed financial support from her parents. In fact, the ambassador added, Philip was not allowing him to be fed either, for which reason he was pleading for cash to be sent to him from Castile.

  Instead of giving Juana regular money, Philip lavished gifts on her, but at his discretion and his choice. He gave her valuable jewelry that had belonged to his family, and occasionally gave gifts and cash to her servants, which had the effect of making them more loyal to Philip than to her. In fact, they soon found they won more favor with Philip by circumventing Juana’s authority than by respecting it.

  It was a classic abusive marriage, which leaves the subjugated partner confused and disoriented. Philip made Juana feel fearful, intimidated, and publicly humiliated; he withheld necessities and limited her access to money, friends, and family. “Philip… honed his sadistic treatment of Juana into a high art through a combination of sexuality, tenderness and intimidation,” writes the historian Nancy Rubin.23

  Philip was himself dominated by one official in particular, François de Busleyden, the archbishop of Besançon, who had attained that same kind of control over the archduke that Álvaro de Luna had developed over Isabella’s father and that Juan Pacheco had developed over Isabella’s brother Enrique. Even the language used to describe the relationship was remarkably similar. Philip “would not know how to eat without [the archbishop] telling him to,” wrote Spanish ambassador Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida, assigned to the Flemish court.24

  Philip’s advisers controlled him by feeding his vices, as Álvaro de Luna had done with King Juan II of Castile, Isabella’s father. Juana was as little able to handle the situation as her grandmother Isabel had been when she found herself in a similar predicament, caught between her husband the king and his favorite.

  On one occasion, the Spanish ambassador Fuensalida urged Juana to be more assertive in the relationship and to demand what she needed from the king when they were alone. Juana shook her head and sadly said that whatever she told Philip in private, he repeated to the archbishop. The latter, she told Fuensalida, was “absolute master of [Philip’s] soul.”25

  There were soon signs that Philip had nefarious plans in mind for Juana. When her brother Prince Juan died in 1497, Juana went into mourning, but Philip quickly began calling himself Prince of Asturias, a title that now belonged to Juana’s older sister Isabel, who was married to the king of Portugal. Philip also began trying to find ways to get the French to support his claim to the Castilian crown, supplanting his sister-in-law Isabel, then the rightful heiress to the throne. Isabel’s death, and then the death of Isabel’s son Miguel, open
ed what appeared to Philip to be a direct route to control of all Spain. He seemed to view Juana’s existence as a nuisance. His entry into Toledo ahead of Juana in 1502 had not been accidental. He intended to displace her.

  Philip’s attitude toward his children was chilling as well. He was controlling and abusive to Juana in connection with the births of their children, who began arriving perfectly on schedule. In late 1498 everyone was waiting with bated breath for the birth of a much-desired son, but on November 15 of that year, Juana instead gave birth to a daughter, Leonor. Juana was strong and healthy, and the delivery went smoothly.

  Philip showed himself off after the delivery, dressing up in rich brocade and green silk to participate in jousts to celebrate the safe delivery of the child, earning the applause of the crowd. But he had privately told Juana that he considered the birth of a girl a disappointing failure, and that he would not provide any funds for the child’s support. According to the Spanish ambassador, the archduke had said: “Because this child is a girl, let the archduchess provide for the child’s keep, and then, when God grants us a son, I will provide it.”26

  Juana nevertheless was soon pregnant again, and this time, in the city of Ghent, she delivered the desired male child. On February 24, 1500, she gave birth to a son, whom they named Charles. This was the child whom Queen Isabella in Castile had predicted, because of his birth on the feast day of Saint Matthias, would eventually become king of Spain.

  A third baby, Isabella, was born in 1501 and was named for Juana’s mother. Sometime after little Isabella’s birth, Philip took the children away from Juana and arranged for them to be raised by others. This further traumatized her.