* It gives some indication of the time scale involved to point out that Queen Tamara stood in the same relationship to David the Restorer as Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain to King Edward VII; although Elizabeth II acceded only forty-two years after her great-grandfather’s death, as opposed to fifty-nine in the case of Tamara.
* Here quoted from Katharine Vivian’s prose translation for the Folio Society 1977. A ‘poetic recreation’ in English by Venera Urushadze was also published in Georgia, 1979.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ISABELLA WITH HER PRAYERS
She with her prayers
He with many armed men
Juan del Encina on Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain
It was in April 1492, at Santa Fe, an encampment outside the recently conquered Moorish town of Granada, that Christopher Columbus received the final agreement to explore the new world. He set off a few months later. Columbus was granted the vital backing by a woman as well as by a man: by Isabella of Castile as well as Ferdinand of Aragon. For the two were independent monarchs and had been so since the inception of their reigns. Their extraordinary partnership had lasted twenty-odd years so far. Instead of confirming Isabella as a typically devout and secluded Spanish princess, leaving the sphere of action to her dominant warrior husband, the passage of time had actually transformed her. To the Pope himself, Ferdinand and Isabella were jointly the ‘Catholic kings’ and in a phrase euphonious to modern ears, ‘the athletes of Christ’.1
In the forging of this partnership, both destiny and the laws of inheritance played their role; and so did the necessity for armed conflict which preoccupied the royal pair from the earliest moment of their joint reign in Castile. A contemporary, Juan del Encina, described the relative contribution of Ferdinand and Isabella to their conquests in these conventional terms: they fought, ‘She with her prayers, He with many armed men’.2 But while in no way deriding the efficacy of Isabella’s prayers (a subject about which no positive information can be garnered) one must also note that she made a public contribution to their victories which puts her in a unique category in this book: the Warrior Queen as partner. Moreover the Queen’s military fervour in the cause of right both nurtured her marriage to Ferdinand and was in turn nurtured by it. Her crusades, jointly carried out with her husband, took on some of the sacramental nature of marriage itself in the eyes of a deeply religious woman. As for her contemporary reputation, the decorous wife-liness with which she conducted herself within this partnership earned general approval. At the end of the chapter this approval will be contrasted with the disapproval shown to Caterina Sforza – a would-be Warrior Queen who was neither decorous nor wifely.
Queen Isabella was a woman of forty-one – with twelve more years to live – when Columbus was authorized to return to the Indies ‘and supervise the preserving and peopling of them, because thereby our Lord God is served, His Holy Faith extended and our own realms increased’.3 She was in fact born in the same year as Columbus himself (King Ferdinand was a year younger). With hindsight, this patronage of Columbus resulting in the European discovery of America can be seen as the Spanish ‘Kings’’ most resonant achievement; but the endless sound waves which would flow from this decision were hardly foreseen at the time. Ferdinand and Isabella had already presided over one dazzlingly successful crusade: to restore the Moorish kingdom to Catholic Spain after eight centuries. At the instance of their religious advisers, they would promulgate a further internal crusade, less dazzling because less practically beneficial: to expel the Jews along with the Muslims.
The relative importance – and approval – which history would give to these respective crusades would have been incomprehensible to Queen Isabella, the denizens of one age rarely comprehending the apparently weird standards of another. To modern appraisers, the protective attitude of Ferdinand and Isabella towards their new Indian subjects – ‘What does he [Columbus] think he is doing with my vassals?’ Isabella is supposed to have asked – contrasts most favourably with their chilling attitude to the Jews who had been citizens of Spain for centuries.
After 1492 the latter, if they failed to convert, were cast out. According to the priest-chronicler Bernaldez:
They [the Jews] went out from the land of their birth boys and adults, old men and children, on foot, and riding on donkeys and other beasts and in wagons … They went by the roads and fields with much labour and ill-fortune, some collapsing, others getting up, some dying, others giving birth, others falling ill, so that there was no Christian who was not sorry for them … the rabbis were encouraging them and making the women and boys sing and beat drums and tambourines, to enliven the people. And so they went out of Castile.4
Similarly, the Moors who were originally granted generous terms after the fall of Granada in the same year, including their own laws, their own religion and their own dress, ended by being expelled in their turn if they did not accept conversion. In 1487 during the series of campaigns known as the Reconquista Queen Isabella had given money for the Moors to be reclothed in the Castilian fashion as a propaganda exercise; in 1508, four years after her death, Moorish dress, in a final insult suggesting the total suppression of a culture, was prohibited altogether.
To Isabella herself, however, the need for religious unity in Spain put these expulsions on quite a different level from the protection a sovereign must accord to distant subjects.* Furthermore the expulsions were recommended by her rigorous confessors, including the formidably bigoted Cardinal known as Ximenes (or Francisco de Cisneros). This was a woman who stepped out of the role expected of her sex in one direction – she had become a public crusader expressing such (male) sentiments as ‘Glory is not to be won without danger’. One can understand how she might compensate for this in another direction by extreme spiritual humility in private, and devotion to the will of her (male) religious advisers.
In the earlier years of her reign, such complications were not evident. Other perils had to be faced. And Isabella’s personal crusading impulse, the product of faith and determination, was not only approved by her contemporaries, but also seen as a holy destiny which might be implicit in the union of the crowns of Aragon and Castile. ‘With this conjuncture of two royal sceptres,’ wrote Bernáldez, ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ took vengeance on his enemies and destroyed him who slays and curses.’6 First, before that destiny could be accomplished, Ferdinand and Isabella had to destroy those who threatened to slay them – or at least rebelled vigorously against Isabella’s succession to the throne of Castile.
It was the death of Isabella’s half-brother, Henry IV, son of John II of Castile by his first marriage, in 1474 which provoked this crisis. Although he had acknowledged Isabella as his heir, Henry IV did have a daughter of his own. This girl however was reputedly illegitimate (either the King was impotent or his wife was wanton or both), her nickname Juana la Beltraneja making scornful reference to her supposed conception by Don Beltrán de la Cueva. Whatever the truth of Juana’s legitimacy,7 there were plenty of potentates to seize the opportunity of backing her in their own interests; particularly since she was unmarried, her hand bringing with it the possibility of the Spanish throne.
Isabella’s own husband, Ferdinand, whom she had married five years earlier, also had a claim to the throne, since he too had his place in the Castilian succession (Isabella and Ferdinand were second cousins). It is true that the royal house of Aragon was only a minor branch of that of Castile; but then he was a man. This was more relevant in Aragon where the Salic Law operated – that law originating in France in the early fourteenth century which precluded females from the royal succession – than in neighbouring Castile where it did not. Nor had Ferdinand, in his marriage treaty of 1469, pressed his public claims unduly; at that date securing marriage to the heiress Isabella, from his own lesser position, had been the prime consideration.8
As it happened, Isabella was in Segovia when her brother died, while Ferdinand was away campaigning for his father, the King of Aragon. It was in order to
cope with the threat of Juana’s pretensions – she being temporarily captive to a Castilian noble – that Isabella immediately had herself proclaimed Reina Proprietaria (Queen Proprietress). She also had herself crowned, still in Ferdinand’s absence; and she had the unsheathed sword of justice carried before her at the ceremony, a revival of an ancient practice it is true, but one that had never been performed for a female monarch before. Ferdinand, when he heard the news, is said to have cried out publicly: ‘Tell me, you who have read so many histories, did you ever hear of carrying the symbol of life and death before queens? I have known it only of kings.’9
All this was however directed by Isabella rather against Juana and her supporters than against Ferdinand her husband. In addition, the proud Castilian nobility would not welcome subjection to an Aragonese. Isabella’s personal ‘proprietorship’ of the crown, regardless of her sex, also carried an important point of principle with it for the future, as she pointed out to Ferdinand. Supposing their own surviving child or children were also female? (This was the actual case during the early years of Isabella’s reign and would also incidentally be the case at her death.) If Isabella’s personal hereditary right in Castile was not acknowledged, then the ‘Princess our daughter’s’ right would be similarly endangered at her mother’s death.
In effect, Ferdinand did always act as co-ruler with Isabella. Proclamations in Castile were probably from the very first in their joint names; both their effigies were displayed on Castilian coins; whereas when Ferdinand succeeded to his father’s throne of Aragon in 1479 (where the Salic Law ran) Isabella was merely in title his Queen Consort. Gradually as the years passed and the marriage – the partnership of state – flourished, rights and titles in both countries were ignored in favour of the delights of joint rule. The deliberate impression was given of Ferdinand and Isabella ‘sharing a single mind’. The fact that the Castilian castles and the Castilian crown revenues were reserved in theory to Isabella personally – ‘at the Queen’s will alone’ – faded in importance compared to Ferdinand’s free exercise of power in Castile; similarly Isabella, despite her technical position as a consort, was allowed to administer justice in Aragon.10 The monarchs came to resemble two great oaks whose roots were inextricably entwined somewhere below the surface.
In 1474, however, the determination which this young woman of twenty-three displayed, far from her husband’s side, was crucial in holding on to that throne of which she judged herself to be Queen Proprietress. She showed herself from the first a remarkable character as well as a redoubtable one. It was not as if Isabella had been educated in any way to handle matters of state; she had been raised in virtual seclusion by her mother, after her father’s death when she was three years old, having another elder (full) brother who before his premature death was regarded as heir presumptive to Henry IV. The rigorous intellectual training granted to the young Elizabeth Tudor for example – whatever the constraints of her situation – was quite absent from the upbringing of the Castilian Princess. As a result, Queen Isabella set herself much later to learn Latin, the language of diplomacy and statecraft, in order to talk to foreign dignitaries – a decision which will earn the sympathy of all those deprived of necessary languages in resilient youth, and condemned to learn them in far less elastic middle age. (In urging on the production of a Castilian–Latin dictionary, she would observe that it was necessary because women too often learned their Latin from men.)11 Her own daughters – including Catherine of Aragon – were notably well instructed by the great Spanish educationalist Vives; the obsessive education of daughters is often the sign of a mother who has regretted her own deprivation in that sphere.
Nor was there any sign of the Tomboy Syndrome here in childhood, no tales of a childish Isabella riding freely in the forests, no comparisons to Camilla of the Volsci. Once again it was in later years that Isabella had herself instructed in those martial arts and exercises that she would have learned in childhood had she been born a prince rather than a princess. Yet in another way Isabella’s enclosed upbringing, coupled with the subsequent scandals centred round the name of Henry IV’S queen, and the disputed birth of Juana la Beltraneja, had left a deep mark upon her.
The pious austerity for which she was renowned must surely be ascribed not only to a natural inclination in that direction but also to an awareness of the dangers brought to a queen, expected to be the bearer of a royal family, by incontinent sexuality. Isabella’s nineteenth-century biographer W. H. Prescott (whose great work can never be entirely superseded, if only for the incomparable style in which it is written) suggested that like The Lady in Milton’s Comus, Isabella enjoyed divine protection at the court, thanks to her own virtue:
So dear to heaven is saintly chastity …
A thousand liveried angels lackey her
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt.12
In the forging of this virtue, however, childhood influences must also have played their part.
Austerity in private even extended to her own personal adornment. Isabella understood perfectly well the need for public ceremonial, the jewels, the gorgeous brocades and richly embroidered velvets which must be draped heavily around the woman who wore the crown for Castile. Off-duty as it were, her tastes were very different: she once related to her confessor as a matter for self-congratulation how she had worn ‘only a simple dress of silk with three gold hem-bands’.13 (That was not a boast which would have dropped easily from the lips of Queen Elizabeth I.)
It was appropriate, given her religious temperament, that Isabella should remain devoted to her wedded husband from the moment when, according to tradition, she instinctively picked him out from among a group of other young men crying: ‘That is he! That is he!’14 With less virtue and more human feeling she also remained jealous of Ferdinand’s numerous amours. Adopting the obviously feminine role beloved of some Warrior Queens – like Matilda of Tuscany – she occupied herself in embroidering Ferdinand’s shirts, as though the flashing needle might weave him closer to her side. It was not to be. Unfortunately for Isabella, Ferdinand’s own natural inclinations were very far from lying in the same chaste direction.
Isabella’s portraits show her with a long nose and a down-turned mouth, characteristics not likely to inspire fidelity in one predisposed to philander. (Portraits of Isabella’s daughter Catherine of Aragon, in a time of youth and hope, show a certain similarity although the expression is much softer and the mouth turns upwards; Catherine’s unhappy daughter Queen Mary Tudor, on the other hand, displays quite a marked resemblance to her grandmother, including the same glum expression.) According to the evidence of their respective suits of armour, Isabella was also taller than Ferdinand by as much as an inch: a superiority not always welcome even in a royal wife.
Yet in real life, whatever her physical imperfections, Isabella must have been endowed with charm as well as authority; for goodness does radiate its own kind of charm. Her famous virtue, the key to the generally pure tone of her court (never mind the Aragonese King’s very different attitudes) was much praised. The chronicler Bernaldez called her ‘a fine example of a good wife’. Isabella, like another virtuous sovereign, Tamara of Georgia, also had her bards protesting their respectful passion. The famous chastity did not preclude such ardent literary offerings as this, probably by Alvaro Bazán, which made of the Queen the object of a cavalier’s unrequited adoration:15
When we part
Departs my heart
Glory hides
Sorrow abides.
Victory vanishes
Memory languishes
And grievous smart.
Even more significant were the comparisons literary and otherwise which made of Queen Isabella some kind of mystical figure, akin to the luminous pictures of the Blessed Virgin by Isabella’s favourite Flemish artists. The poet Montoro for example went as far as to declare the Queen worthy to have given birth to the son of God. He was not alone in the comparison. After the restoration of southern Spain to Christia
nity by her agency, Isabella was frequently pictured as a second Virgin Mary, repairing the ‘sin of Eve’, in the words of Fray Inigo de Mendoza. Following her death, there would be moves to canonize Isabella, moves not limited to distant times, but recurring in the twentieth century.16
This latter-day history illustrates how close the halo always hovers above the head of the Warrior Queen, who has presided over a war of avowedly religious purpose: the Holy (Armed) Figurehead. At the time, it was more relevant that with her authority threatened, her pretensions questioned, these comparisons undoubtedly stood Isabella herself in good practical stead.
Civil war between Isabella’s supporters and those of Juana la Beltraneja followed shortly after the death of the King of Castile. Juana, not lost for suitors under the circumstances, became affianced to King Alfonso V of Portugal; the conflict which ensued was thus in a sense as much a tug-of-war as a civil war, since the outcome would decide whether Castile in the future leaned west to Portugal or east towards Aragon.
It was Ferdinand, naturally, who was in charge of the prolonged military campaigning. As an Aragonese, he brought knowledge of new military techniques, as well as the possibility of northern alliances.17 But Isabella, as the official co-ruler – and the Castilian – also had to play a figurehead’s visible role as the inspiration of her party. She did more than that. She participated personally and effectively. It may be impossible to assess the precise military achievement of Queen Isabella, due to the general rule obtaining that any female presence or initiative upon the battlefield is greeted with a special enthusiasm born out of surprise at the successful upsetting of the natural order: as when the Venetian minister, Viaggio, wrote that ‘Queen Isabel by her singular genius, masculine strength of mind and other virtues, most unusual in our own sex as well as hers, was not merely of great assistance in but the chief cause of the conquest of Granada’.18 Nevertheless there is sufficient contemporary evidence to support the picture of a genuine contribution beyond those ‘prayers’ which the poet juxtaposed with Ferdinand’s ‘many armed men’. For one thing, it was in these first five years of that civil war that Isabella discovered in herself a vital capability for the organization of supplies which complemented the gifts of her husband.
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