Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

by Leslie Carroll

  The union of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville is one of the few in the sordid history of royal marriages to have begun as a love match. It survived numerous wars, incarceration, agonizing months of separation, the temporary loss of the throne, as well as Edward’s frequent and flagrant infidelity; and yet their relationship remained fruitful and passionate until his death. A “happy” marriage? Who can say for certain? But it was undoubtedly a successful one.

  FERDINAND II OF ARAGON 1452-1516

  and

  ISABELLA OF CASTILE AND LEON

  1451-1504

  CO-RULED CASTILE AND LEON: 1474-1504

  CO-RULED ARAGON: 1479-1504

  FERDINAND RULED ARAGON: 1504-1516

  married 1469-1504

  “It has to be he and absolutely no other.”

  —Isabella to her half brother, King Enrique IV of Castile, regarding her choice of Ferdinand of Aragon as her bridegroom

  “Common people may look for handsome wives, but princes do not marry for love; they take wives only to beget children.”

  —Ferdinand of Aragon

  SCHOOLCHILDREN SAY THEIR NAMES IN A SINGLE BREATH, as if they were one person: FerdinandandIsabella. Regardless of what may have transpired behind closed doors, including Isabella’s feelings about the four illegitimate children her husband begot with as many lovers, the monarchs were the ultimate power couple in medieval Europe. They were careful to present an image of complete conformity—an indivisible unit and a united front, in person, and on coins and official seals. This strategy made their marriage, and their reign, unique in its day.

  According to the Crónica incompleta, “Between the King and the Queen there was no discord . . . they ate together in the public hall, talking of pleasant things as is done at table, and they slept together . . . their wills coincided through intimacy born of love.” And the royal chronicler Fernando del Pulgar wrote, “if necessity separated their persons, love joined their wills together.” In fact, the sovereigns’ royal motto was Tanto Monto, Monto Tanto, which has often been translated to “it amounts to the same thing.” Although the motto’s origin had nothing to do with joint sovereignty, being an allusion to the Gordian knot—“Cutting as Untying”—the monarchs did nothing to dispel the subliminal meaning.

  According to Fernando, Isabella was seen as a good queen because she was “Catholic and devout.” And the image of Isabella as the Queen of Heaven on Earth, a second Mary, as reflected in Spanish art and poetry of the day, is not coincidental. It was all part of a clever marketing strategy that underscored the concept of royal infallibility and helped Isabella—the rare medieval queen regnant—to maintain her subjects in a state of fear and awe during an age of institutionalized misogyny.

  The rational, disciplined, and assertive Isabella, described by a contemporary as having “the heart of a man, dressed as a woman,” wielded more clout than her husband did. Her kingdom of Castile, insular and aristocratic, covered a vast swath of the western part of modern-day Spain, stretching from the Bay of Biscay to the kingdom of Granada, the Iberian Peninsula’s last Muslim stronghold. It was all Isabella’s, but she’d spent the first few years of her reign fighting to hold on to it. After the death of her father, Juan II of Castile, in 1454, Isabella’s half brother Enrique had inherited the throne. Isabella’s mother, Isabella of Portugal, widowed at the age of twenty-seven, became a recluse, incapable of offering her daughter any guidance as she grew up. According to the court chronicler Alfonso de Palencia, she “closed herself into a dark room, self-condemned to silence, and dominated by such depression that it degenerated into a form of madness.”

  King Enrique IV, nicknamed “the Impotent,” was believed to be homosexual; it was widely accepted that the real father of his daughter Juana was the queen’s lover, a Castilian nobleman named Beltrán de la Cueva—earning the little girl the nickname of “Juana la Beltraneja.”

  In January 1469, Isabella of Castile willfully ignored Enrique’s plans to marry her off to the King of Portugal, insisting that she would only wed the King of Sicily—Ferdinand, the son of King Juan II of Aragon. “It has to be he and absolutely no other,” she told her half brother. And on October 12, she informed Enrique that her choice had not been guided by lust, but by pragmatically weighing her options; Ferdinand was the right husband for the good of the kingdom. Isabella affirmed that Ferdinand was also the first choice of the Castilian grandees—the nobility—who much preferred an Aragonese match to a Portuguese one. Additionally, Isabella believed that if she didn’t marry Ferdinand, Enrique would disinherit her, after dynastically wedding Juana la Beltraneja to him instead.

  But because Isabella and Ferdinand were second cousins, they were related within the proscribed degrees of consanguinity; therefore, a papal dispensation was necessary in order for them to marry. Both were descendants, through different wives, of a son of Edward III of England, John of Gaunt, the 1st Duke of Lancaster. And there are conflicting versions of events regarding the dispensation. Some scholars claim that the document was read aloud on October 18 by the Archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso Carrillo de Acuña. Yet another report claims that the royal couple lacked the appropriate exemption, and so they presented the priest with a phony document. Both accounts could be true if the Bishop of Toledo was reading a forgery.

  Although Isabella had yet to meet Ferdinand when she made her decision to wed him, when they finally came face-to-face, the attraction was both powerful and mutual. At the time of her marriage Isabella was eighteen years old, plump and auburn-haired with fair coloring and intelligent blue-green eyes. Seventeen-year-old Ferdinand was well built, of medium stature, with straight dark hair, twinkling eyes, and a mile-wide charismatic streak. According to a contemporary, “He had so singular a grace that everyone who talked to him wanted to serve him.” Among those devotees would have been the two mothers of his pair of bastard children, sired before his marriage to Isabella. His illegitimate daughter, Juana of Aragon, was born in 1469 (the same year he wed Isabella); and his natural son, Alfonso of Aragon, came into the world the following year.

  Ferdinand was the heir to a kingdom in the northeast part of Spain that was about a quarter of the size of Isabella’s vast realm of Castile, with one-tenth of Castile’s population. From Isabella’s perspective, she brought more to the marriage and from the outset she made sure that Ferdinand knew it.

  At their first meeting a notary recorded Ferdinand and Isabella’s promises to marry. And on the morning of October 19, 1469, they were publicly wed in Valladolid. Two thousand guests from all estates—the nobility, clergy, and commoners—attended the ceremony performed by a priest named Pero López de Alcalá.

  The wedding festivities lasted all day and the union was consummated that night according to witnesses, who waited expectantly in the hall below for the opportunity to inspect the telltale stains on the bridal bedsheet.

  Luckily, Ferdinand was accustomed to strong women. His headstrong and protective mother, Juana Enriquez, acted as her husband’s regent while Juan II of Aragon was in his sister kingdom of Sicily. Ferdinand was five years old when his father ascended the Aragonese throne and immediately became embroiled in a civil war, leading his troops into battle, despite being half blind from cataracts. Juan II then became totally blind for three years, until a Jewish doctor performed an operation that restored his sight, which might have been one reason that decades later Ferdinand would favor conversion over expulsion of the Jews until his wife convinced him to agree with her.

  But there were other points of divergence that surfaced early in their marriage. Although they deliberately gave their subjects the impression that they would be coequal rulers, Ferdinand’s desire to be King of Castile, and Isabella’s resolve to preserve her rights as queen regnant, was a perennial bone of contention between the spouses. Because Isabella brought more wealth and territory to their union, she adopted a “What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine, too” philosophy regarding their marriage contract. To that end, Isabella would
be entitled to jurisdiction in her own right in parts of Ferdinand’s kingdom of Sicily, while it was Ferdinand who, at their wedding ceremony, vowed to observe Castile’s laws and customs, appoint only Castilian officers, reside in Castile, and not remove Isabella from her sovereign territory except for brief visits elsewhere. In addition, while the pair would sign everything jointly and share all titles, Ferdinand was to make “no movement” in Castile without Isabella’s counsel and consent. He would inherit his father’s realms, of course, and if he predeceased Isabella she would rule them during the remainder of her lifetime. But when it came to the inheritance of Castile, Isabella did not name her husband as her immediate successor.

  Their quarrel over Ferdinand’s rights was eventually submitted to formal arbitration, which led to a co-sovereignty whether the couple was together or apart. The equality of the dual monarchs was rare enough in medieval Europe, but even more exceptional was that the administration of Castile was executed by the queen in her own right. And until she bore a son, she intended for her oldest daughter to follow in her footsteps.

  The couple had five children—four girls (Isabella, Joanna, Maria, and Katherine) and a boy, Juan, who was born eight years after their first daughter.

  Supporters of Juana la Beltraneja’s claim to succeed Enrique IV on the Castilian throne were delighted that Isabella’s first child, born in 1470, was a paltry girl. They became even more gleeful when they discovered that the valid papal dispensation relied upon to unite Isabella and Ferdinand had not been presented at the time of their marriage ceremony. The actual document did not arrive until June 18, 1472, when Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, the future Pope Alexander VI, delivered the long-awaited papal bull absolving the pair from wedding without the proper dispensation. It still boggles the mind that incest was okay as long as the Pope said so.

  By then, Ferdinand had been in Aragon since February, the first of many absences from Isabella. But when they were apart, he would send her romantic letters. During the War of Castilian Succession in the 1470s, in a letter conferring about military strategy, Ferdinand wrote to her, “. . . In getting together we help each other more than anything in life. . . .” And on July 14, 1475, on the eve of another foray, fearing he would never see his wife again, he sent her a passionate note from his camp: “God knows it weighs on me that I will not see your Ladyship tomorrow, for I swear by your life and mine that never have I so loved you.”

  The couple enjoyed a healthy sex life—but Ferdinand was not entirely faithful. According to Palencia’s successor, Fernando del Pulgar, “Although he loved the Queen his wife greatly, he gave himself to other women.” Needless to say, as with most royal marriages, extramarital dalliance was good for the gander, but the goose would have been roasted for trying it herself. During her husband’s absences, Isabella slept in an all-female “dormitory,” so there were always several witnesses who could attest that her marital fidelity had been preserved.

  But as powerful as Isabella was, she was not immune to jealousy. Passionately in love with her husband, she kept an eagle eye out for signs that he was straying. If she thought he had a tendre for any woman at court, the queen found a way to remove her rival.

  The early 1470s were a time of civil strife in both Castile and Aragon, but Isabella began to gain the allegiance of several Castilian cities and towns that preferred to see her—and not Juana—succeed Enrique. He died on December 11, 1474, at the age of forty-nine, leaving no will, but allegedly declaring “my daughter [Juana] heiress of these kingdoms.” His remark was still no proof that the girl was legitimate.

  Isabella received the news on December 12. She immediately donned mourning garments of white serge and went to mass—after which she changed into a sumptuous gown accessorized with gold and glittering gems. At the portal of the church of San Miguel in Segovia, she mounted a hastily constructed platform and proclaimed herself Queen of Castile and Leon, since Enrique had recognized her rights of succession back in September 1468. Her power grab would spark the five-year War of Castilian Succession. Isabella finally emerged victorious in 1479, and Juana la Beltraneja was packed off to a convent for the rest of her life.

  Ferdinand was amazed that he had to learn of Isabella’s proclamation ceremony from someone else and was surprised to hear that it had taken place at all. He rode straight into Segovia with banners flying, not expecting his wife to hold him to his formal prenuptial capitulaciones. Palencia wrote that Ferdinand was confident “in conquering with patience and felt certain he would triumph through satisfying assiduously the demands of conjugal love, with which he could easily soften the intransigence that bad advisers had planted in his wife’s mind.” But Ferdinand was either very optimistic or very misguided if he thought that whispering a few sweet nothings in his wife’s ear, followed by hot sex and a few more sweet nothings, would sway Isabella politically.

  Part of Isabella’s rationale in claiming the crown quickly—and alone—was that her only child was a daughter, and she wanted to forge a precedent for her. Although women could not succeed to the throne in Aragon, Castile did have a history of proprietary queens, and never would a spouse inherit his wife’s throne if they had a legitimate daughter. Isabella patiently explained this law to Ferdinand, reminding him that her kingdoms would go to their children, adding that she had taken the crown alone because in the future, “should the Princess Isabel marry a foreign prince who wants to take over Castile’s fortresses and royal patrimony, the kingdom would come into the power of a foreign dynasty, which would weigh heavily on their consciences and be a disservice to God.”

  Isabella managed to steer a delicate course between asserting her political supremacy and her traditional view of gender roles when it came to personal matters. She did not openly challenge the commonly held credo that the male should always be the dominant partner in a marriage, and assured her nobles—who worried about what information she might be persuaded to share with her husband during pillow talk—that the rights of matrimony had no bearing on the rights of lordship or of royal power.

  “The instilled pride of the queen,” in Palencia’s words, was often at odds with the image of joint sovereignty that she and Ferdinand were so keen to maintain. In 1475 she returned documents for redrafting because her husband’s name was written before hers. Accusing her of impugning his masculinity, Ferdinand sulkily threatened to leave for Aragon, to which, according to Palencia, Isabella protested “that she would never for any reason have wanted to cause the least humiliation to her most beloved consort, for whose happiness and honor she would sacrifice willingly not only the crown but her own health.” She pleaded with Ferdinand “not to leave his beloved wife; for she would not or could not live separated from him.”

  And in 1479, the misogynistic Palencia wrote, “The queen had been preparing for a long time—since just after she was married—something that in the judgment of any prudent man was not fitting for the future succession in these kingdoms: reducing the influence of her husband, in case, as a result of her death, any contingency presented itself in the regular course of the inheritance, if she was survived by her husband.”

  Perhaps one reason Ferdinand had trouble understanding his wife’s point of view on the subject of her royal authority was because they’d achieved their respective crowns in different ways. Although Ferdinand had to wait to inherit Aragon until his father died in 1479, he always knew the throne would be his. Isabella had to win her throne, or at least cement her claim to it, by the sword. But neither monarch ever questioned their divine right to rule.

  Although their marriage was unique because of the way it impacted the sovereignty of Spain, the historical significance of several of their political achievements has earned the royal couple a double-wide niche in the pantheon of European monarchs.

  Between 1390 and 1420 there had been a series of anti-Semitic riots or pogroms in Spain, after which many Jews chose to convert to Christianity as an act of self-preservation. These former Jews became known as conversos. On November
1, 1478, in response to a petition from Isabella complaining that the conversos were reverting to the beliefs and practices of their former religion, Pope Sixtus IV issued the bull that would become the foundation of the Spanish Inquisition. Although both Ferdinand and Isabella had ancestors who were Jewish conversos, cleansing Spain of its heretics became a cornerstone of their reign. Isabella had no second thoughts about consigning people to the flames. In her view, ridding Spain of “judaizers” was God’s work.

  By 1492 the sovereigns were determined that the only effective method for ridding Spain of its Jews and lapsed conversos and marranos (secretly practicing Jews, or “crypto-Jews”) was expulsion. A decade later Ferdinand and Isabella would reach the same conclusion about Spain’s Muslims and moriscos (the Muslim converts to Christianity) and expel them as well.

  It was a tenet of the monarchs’ marriage obligation to make war against the Moors. Beginning in 1481, in what became known as the Reconquest, Isabella and Ferdinand sought to annex the Andalusian lands that remained in Muslim hands, claiming them for Christianity. Ferdinand was the ace general, leading his soldiers into battle, while Isabella acted as a sort of managing director and quartermaster, drawing up military and financial plans, mustering and supplying the armies, and coordinating troop movements. Even when she was pregnant, the queen rode to the front lines to boost morale. The war against Islam was a matter of vital concern for Spain because of the increasing threat from the Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean. If the Turks made it into Spain, they would undoubtedly try to reverse the land gains made by the Christians during the two previous centuries.

  The Catholic Monarchs, as Pope Alexander VI would formally title them in 1496, viewed the Reconquest as a crusade or holy war. Isabella in particular believed that she served a divine purpose in recapturing the Muslim territories. But her ultimate goal was far more ambitious. Their unification of Spain would be the beginning of a new, Catholic empire that would spread southward onto the African continent, westward to the Caribbean, and eastward to the Indies and the Middle East, ultimately snatching the jewel in the imperial crown—Jerusalem—from its Muslim rulers, claiming it for Christendom.