Rivers of Gold

by Hugh Thomas

  Fernando accepted these arrangements, though he disliked some of the concessions that Isabel’s advisers had persuaded him to accept, and he made plans to abandon Segovia. Archbishop Carrillo, angry at not having been consulted, berated both Isabel and Fernando, and announced that he, too, was leaving. Isabel ignored the Archbishop, but begged Fernando to remain. He did stay, and Isabel accepted some small changes in the agreed declarations; for example, they would have a joint coat of arms, one seal only would be used, and both their portraits would appear on coinage. They would also have a joint household.49 These institutional arrangements, with Castile as the dominant partner in a unique union, endured.

  Isabel was thereafter guided by two men, apart from her astute husband: first, Mendoza, the Cardinal, now Archbishop of Seville; and second, Hernando de Talavera, the Jeronymite prior of Our Lady of the Prado in Valladolid, her confessor after 1475.

  The able, subtle, and handsome Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, the aristocrat of the Spanish Church, the “third King of Spain,” as he would soon be known, in his red hat and cloak, presided over the Council of the Realm, just as he would ride by the Queen’s side in battle. Aged sixty-two in 1491, he was the ninth and youngest son of the enlightened Íñigo Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana, a poet and humane aristocrat, a man cultivated enough to rival any prince in Italy. Las Casas, in his history, wrote of the Cardinal’s “great virtue, prudence, and fidelity to the monarchs,” as well as “his generosity of spirit and lineage.”50 Few would dwell on his private virtues but his other qualities were difficult to contest. The Mendoza family was the most powerful in Castile, with members of it in influential positions everywhere. The brothers, sisters, nephews, and nieces of the Cardinal were the masters of church and state.

  The young Mendoza had been sent as a boy to live with a cousin, Gutierre Gómez de Toledo, Bishop of Palencia, though he lived in Toledo. After reading law at the university of Salamanca, the future cardinal became, first, parish priest of Hita, fifteen miles north of Guadalajara, of which city he then was named archdeacon. He learned both Greek and Latin so well that his magnificent father asked him to translate the Iliad for him, as well as the Aeneid and some poems of Ovid’s. In 1454, Mendoza became Bishop of Calahorra, in effect a family see. He moved to the court, negotiated an understanding between his family and the King, now that his father, who had once been a rebel, was dead, and he baptized King Enrique’s presumed daughter, the unfortunate Juana.

  Mendoza sought a compromise in the feud between the nobles and Enrique, warning that those who did not obey even a bad king were schismatics. Thanks to the friendship of a clever, if self-indulgent, visitor from the Vatican, Rodrigo Borgia, already a cardinal, who was in Castile in 1472, Mendoza became “Cardinal of Spain.” From 1474, Mendoza was the Queen’s right-hand man, a more modern minister than the formidable Archbishop Carrillo, though the latter had greatly helped Isabel ten years before. He also fought at Toro, where he was wounded. In 1485, he became Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of All Spain.

  Mendoza was assiduous in ensuring offices for his protégés who were, however, usually the best men for the work concerned. He was active in the war against Granada, at one time holding field command; and, after the surrender of Guadix and Almería, he commissioned the carving of depictions of the surrender of fifty-four Moorish cities for the choir of Toledo Cathedral. This work, by many hands, but much of it by the imaginative Rodrigo Alemán, was unfinished in 1491, as was the campaign that inspired it. The Cardinal is to be seen, in a bas-relief by Felipe de Borgoña, riding next to the monarchs, a most determined warrior-bishop, a coat of mail over his surplice. We can see him depicted, too, in stone before the high altar of Granada, mounted on a mule, in gloves, his “pinched, aquiline face,” as Richard Ford had it, contrasting with the chubbier features of the monarchs.51 Even more warlike is his portrait on the ceiling of his own College of San Gregorio in Valladolid.52

  Mendoza was selective in his loyalty to religious doctrine. He maintained the most succulent table in Spain. He had illegitimate sons by Mencía de Lemos, one of the wild maids of honor of the libertine Queen Juana, conceived while he was Bishop of Sigüenza; and Queen Isabel, though strait-laced, once asked her confessor if “the sins of the cardinal do not seem very pretty.”53 Mendoza arranged the legitimation of these children, and the eldest, Rodrigo, became Count of Cid and Marquis of Cenete.

  Close to Mendoza in those days, and constantly available, was Fray Hernando de Talavera, the Queen’s confessor. Like that of most royal confessors, his influence was immense if mysterious. He had Jewish blood and one day would suffer a little in consequence.

  But earlier, he, a protégé of Mendoza, wrote his sermon on the theme “How all loyal Christians should renew their spirits during Advent” as a “mirror of princes” for Isabel, binding royal power to virtue, arguing that

  if you are a Queen, you ought to be a model and inspiration to your subjects.… Rise, rise in the air and contemplate the crown of glory … for, through these works and considerations, you will preserve, like the eagle [the symbol of St. John the Evangelist, whom Isabel had adopted as an inspiration], the strength and vigor of your youth. Renew your noble spirit through God, and gain perfection, for you have the condition of a mistress and lady so perfect and are as full of virtue and goodness as is the eagle among birds.54

  Talavera entered the Council of the Realm on Mendoza’s suggestion and remained a powerful influence both there and on Isabel for twenty-five years, doing all he could for her, even drawing up a schedule of the best way of organizing her time. It was widely said that whereas confessors usually knelt to hear confessions of royal personages, Talavera stood while Isabel was on her knees. In 1475, he wrote a guide for the spiritual life of friars; Isabel asked him to explain the same to her. He demurred, saying that what was good for religious people did not apply to the secular world. She insisted that Fray Hernando write nine chapters for her spiritual guidance.55

  Isabel herself was serious, decisive, unbending, resolute. She was also straightforward. She did not smile readily, though she had a taste for irony. She admired learning and could read Latin; she loved music, often traveling with a choir of twenty-five or more. She listened often to the music of vihuelas, old guitars, and, later, to the Cancionero del palacio of the delightful Juan del Encina, sung, like most of his poems, either to the six-stringed viol or the lute. What, one wonders, would she have made of his:

  Más vale penar,

  sufriendo dolores

  que estar sin amores.56

  Better to suffer pain

  To live in grief

  Than to be without love.

  Isabel saw ceremony and music as useful in assisting government and increased the luxury of the royal style of living accordingly. For that reason, she spent liberally on clothes, although by the time of the siege of Granada, she usually wore a gloomy black.57 But she also was said to have liked fancy-dress balls. She admired Flemish painters and bought at least one Memling (now in the royal chapel in Granada). She loved dogs and parrots, and would often be accompanied by civets. She could be vengeful, but was almost always pious. She was more cultivated than Fernando, her husband, and had four hundred books in her library, a great number for that day. She also encouraged the new art of printing. Her Italian chaplain, Lucio Marineo Sículo, said that in the 1490s she would hear Mass daily and would pray the canonical hours as if she were a nun. She remembered the adage: “Those monarchs who do not fear God fear their subjects.” It is possible that she became a tertiary Franciscan in the Convento of San Juan Pablo of Valladolid. Another Italian, Peter Martyr de Anglería, wrote: “Even the Queen herself, whom the whole world in part respects, in part fears, and in part admires, when you have been permitted free access to her, you find her closed off in sadness.” Was it, he wondered, that she thought that with so many deaths in her immediate family (three of her children would die before her), God had abandoned her?58

  The work of
Isabel in the first ten years of her time as both heiress and Queen of Castile was, however, remarkable by any standard. No woman in history has exceeded her achievement.

  A popular song ran:

  Flores de Aragón, flores de Aragón,

  Dentro de Castilla son

  Flores de Aragón en Castilla son.

  Flowers of Aragon, flowers of Aragon,

  Inside Castile

  The flowers of Aragon are growing.

  Fernando, when he became a knight of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece, adopted as an emblem the Yoke and Arrows, the yoke indicating the union of the realms, the F signifying Fernando, the Y standing for Ysabel.

  These two monarchs launched their kingdoms on a collaboration that, if not always happy, was immensely important and profitable for both realms. Yet the troubles of Spain were not over with the seizure of authority by Isabel. If most of the north of Spain supported her by celebrations, much of the south was equivocal. A new Marquis of Villena, Pacheco’s son, was firmly for the twelve-year-old Juana, the dead King Enrique’s daughter, who was in his control and who was referred to by Isabel’s friends with the ambiguous designation “the Queen’s daughter.” Pacheco’s lands in the south and east were themselves able to provide an army. He was now supported by a disgruntled Archbishop Carrillo; the Count of Benavente, a power in northwestern Castile; Rodrigo Ponce de León in Seville; and Álvaro de Stúñiga, Duke of Béjar, in Extremadura. King Afonso of Portugal announced his intention to marry Juana, and war broke out, many more towns declaring for her. A Portuguese army entered northwestern Castile. Some have suggested that this was a frivolous war.59 But had the Portuguese and La Beltraneja won, the future of the peninsula would have been quite different for there would have been a Portuguese-Castilian union in place of an Aragonese-Castilian one. The benefits of the first consummation would not have been worthless. But they would have changed history.

  After much skirmishing and maneuvering, some incursions into Portugal, and efforts by Isabel and Fernando to negotiate peace, the latter met Afonso in battle in March 1476 at Peleagonzalo, outside Toro, the walled frontier city on the River Duero. Though his men were tired and his artillery did not arrive in time to be used, Fernando’s victory was overwhelming. The war continued for a time off the coast of Africa, and fighting in Extremadura persisted. But Juana’s cause was lost.60 Afonso, who had already given up the throne of Portugal to his son, attempted to persuade France to help him, without success.

  Next year, Fernando succeeded his father on the throne of Aragon. He was as tireless in pursuing the interests of that realm as he was in serving those of his wife.

  As a man of Castilian blood, but brought up in Aragon, Fernando was ideal for his complex role. He brought knowledge of successful Aragonese and Catalan practice to serve Castile. He was more easygoing than the Queen, but was also more ruthless, more calculating, and more cynical. These qualities fitted well with the prophecies by some friars that he would be the king who would win back the Holy Land for Christendom.61 He was hardworking and efficient, though with a sense of humor that his wife did not seem to share. His wise instinct was to seek moderate solutions to problems, in the expectation that they would thereby last longer.62

  Fernando could be sententious if it seemed necessary: “In all my realms, I am always accustomed to look at the public good rather than my private interest,” he once wrote to his best general, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, “El Gran Capitán,” who had suggested special concessions in relation to the provision of wheat in Sicily.63 Despite his frequent affectionate words to his wife, his instincts were those of a calculating machine rather than of a man of passion. The German traveler Munzer, however, recalled him as always hovering “between gravity and laughter.”64 In his and Isabel’s time, Spain was starting to look outward, not toward the Mediterranean where Aragon had been active for generations, but at the Atlantic. The conquest of the Canary Islands seems a minor matter. Yet just as in winter a shaft of sunlight suggests the approach of spring, so did the Spanish concern with the Canary archipelago promise a genuinely international vocation. The Italian courtier Peter Martyr thought that as a result of the achievements of the two monarchs, Spain was “the only happy country.”65

  3

  “Great tranquility and order”

  The Catholic monarchs were very celebrated in those days for their wisdom and for having brought great tranquility and order into their realms.

  Guicciardini, HISTORY OF ITALY

  In their years of joint power, Fernando and Isabel achieved singular success. It is hard to distinguish important matters on which they differed. Their motto “Tanto monta, monta tanto, Isabel como Fernando” (“It comes to the same thing, Isabel is the same as Fernando”) indicated their equality: that both monarchs could rule in both their realms and also in that of the other. But it was, to begin with, a personal device of Fernando’s, suggesting that if something was complicated, it was better to cut through it, as Alexander cut the Gordian knot.1

  Both Isabel and Fernando inherited from their ancestors a belief in royal justice that sought to protect the weak without ceasing to reward the successful. They had as serious a sense of their obligations as of their glory. They also had a gift for inspiring confidence even among their poorer subjects. They brought to an end the chronic civil wars that had characterized the relations of monarchs and noblemen in both their realms. Every chronicler of the time testified to the violence of the old days, even if their accounts should sometimes be discounted because of their desire to please the new régime.2 Their achievements have been compared to those of their contemporaries in France and England, in both of which countries monarchs restored civil order after years of civil war. But in neither of those two other realms was there a new unification such as that which now existed between Castile and Aragon.

  By traveling continually, by harsh suppression of revolts, and by the judicious use of rewards and titles, the two monarchs were reducing the nobility to an estate of the realm when it had previously been a rival to the Crown. Castilian noblemen might still dominate local politics, but they no longer dictated national affairs. For example, they had in the past constituted a majority in the Council of the Realm. But after the Cortes of 1480, of Toledo, that body had a prelate (Cardinal Mendoza, to begin with) as its chairman, with eight or nine learned civil servants (letrados) as members, together with three knights. Nobles and senior churchmen could continue to attend, but without voting. It was a committee that, having once been judicial, was to become the directing element in administration.3 More and more legal work was meanwhile performed by the supreme court (audiencia real) whose judges (oidores) met at Valladolid.

  The appointment of the corregidor (co-councillor)4 already to be found in most large cities, strengthened royal power, for this representative of the Crown, often a member of the lesser nobility, presided over meetings of the town councils. A typical corregidor (that of Toledo) was a poet, Gómez Manrique, whose brother was the Master of the Order of Santiago.5 There were in 1490 about fifty corregidores dotted throughout the realm, spokesmen for centralizing power—in often unpromising territory such as the marquisate of Villena.

  The Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini, a diplomat in Spain in 1512, wrote that the two sovereigns were “very celebrated in those days”—his days, he meant—“for their wisdom and for having brought great tranquility and order into their realms that had formerly been most turbulent.”6

  Until the days of Fernando and Isabel, most of the royal income had come from taxes on sales (alcabala) or customs duties (almojarifazgo). Although the united monarchy did not neglect those, new men now devised new ways of raising money, in theory for the war against Islam, but which they expected to maintain afterwards (a tax known as the cruzada, the crusade; a share of tithes and subsidies from ecclesiastical assemblies; and direct levies both on bishops and on towns). The Crown also devised profitable arrangements with the Mesta, the board that controlled
the two and a half million or so merino sheep of Castile.7 In 1488, the Crown tried to regularize the diverse methods of weighing produce, with many variations between different ounces, by decreeing that all weights should conform to recently established national standards.8 Fernando was also seeking to make himself the Grand Master of all three of the important military orders (Santiago, Alcántara, and Calatrava), bringing him wealth as well as power, for those undertakings held much land and, in the past, had constituted the reason for the power of the greatest noblemen, such as Álvaro de Luna and Juan Pacheco.

  The Crown in Castile was thus able to dispense with the Cortes for long periods, for it had less need to seek grants than was the case in Aragon. No Cortes in Castile was summoned between 1480 and 1498. That assembly was anyway, as mentioned earlier, less influential than the similar bodies in Fernando’s realms. Attendance of clergy and nobles was not required and was therefore rare. The cities that sent procuradores (representatives) to the Cortes were only seventeen,9 and for much of the fifteenth century, these men had been limited to two per city. That meant that when the Queen felt she should call a Cortes because she needed money for war, she had merely to face and persuade thirty-four men, of whom a few were her friends, and others might be persuaded to be so.

  Internationally, the King of Portugal was restrained after his defeat in the 1470s and no longer constituted a threat to Castile—or, for that matter, to the Canary Islands, which were now largely under Spanish direction (as was that part of the coastline of Africa opposite)—even if of those isles, Tenerife and La Palma still remained to be conquered. Peace reigned, too, with France, though the future of Perpignan and Roussillon (conquered by France in the 1460s) was uncertain. England was tied to Castile by a treaty of mutual protection against France, signed in Medina del Campo in 1489. These diplomatic successes were partly the consequence of Fernando’s establishment of regular ambassadors in five European capitals. That enabled him to be better informed than his fellow monarchs. The success was also a consequence of the fact that Castile and Aragon, however separate domestically, already counted as one power internationally.