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

by Leslie Carroll

  After a decade of war, on November 25, 1491, terms were negotiated for a surrender of Granada. At dawn on January 2, 1492, Boabdil, the last emir of Granada, surrendered the keys of the Alhambra, the fortress enclosing the royal palace, to one of Isabella’s retainers. Four days later, on the Feast of the Epiphany, the Catholic Monarchs made their official entry into Granada.

  The reign of Ferdinand and Isabella also coincided with the great Age of Exploration, as Spain endeavored to beat Portugal for the discovery—and therefore, control—of lucrative trade routes to the Orient, and the colonization of whatever lay to the south and the west of Iberia. The Spanish conquests would result in a pattern of violence against the native populations of the Canary Islands and territories in Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean islands, and the Mediterranean. Resistance to Catholic conversion or refusal to accept the sovereignty of the foreign invaders too often resulted in slaughter.

  Isabella and Ferdinand had a banner year in 1492, beginning in January with the achievement of the conquest of Granada. Finally, Spain was unified as a Catholic kingdom. Present for the January 2 celebration below the Alhambra was the navigator who had appealed to them to finance his voyage to the Indies. The queen had twice denied Christopher Columbus the funds because the ongoing holy war was sapping the royal treasury. But with their victory in Granada, Columbus was green-lighted to equip a fleet of ships for his voyage to what he and the monarchs referred to as the New Jerusalem—another realm to conquer in the name of Christianity. Columbus’s caravels hoisted anchor on August 2, the last day that Spain’s Jews were allowed to remain in the kingdom, pursuant to the expulsion edict issued on March 31 of that year. He would eventually make four voyages on behalf of the Spanish crown.

  But 1492 would bring catastrophe for the royal spouses as well. On December 12, Ferdinand narrowly survived an assassination attempt when the heavy gold chain he wore about his neck deflected the blow from a dagger. Nine days after the attack Ferdinand still burned with fever and his tongue was so swollen that he couldn’t speak. According to Isabella, “the wound was so great . . . that I had not the heart to see it, so large and deep, of a depth of four fingers, of such size that my heart trembles in saying it. . . . But God made it with such compassion [that it was] in a place where it could be done without danger . . . the pleasure of seeing him get up was as great as had been the sadness.”

  Ferdinand survived the attack, remarkable enough in an age where infection might kill a man just as easily as a sword could do so; and during the ensuing years the couple continued to implement their grand plans for Spanish hegemony until 1504, when illness took its toll on the formidable queen.

  During the last months of her life, Isabella remained bedridden, riddled with physical ailments, including a fever that started in July 1504 and never broke. On October 12, she made her will, naming her oldest surviving daughter, Joanna (“Juana la Loca”), heir to the throne of Castile. In the event of Joanna’s incompetence to rule, Ferdinand was to act as governor of the kingdom during her lifetime, but the Castilian crown would pass to Joanna’s son Charles.

  Isabella died between eleven a.m. and noon on November 26, 1504, at the age of fifty-three. In 1972, the Vatican commenced the process of her “beatification,” the first step on the road to sainthood. But because of her role in the Spanish Inquisition, which resulted in the torture and judicial murder of hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews, Jewish groups have opposed it. Her sanctioned brutality against the native populations of Spain’s “discovered” territories is also a bone of moral contention.

  Yet according to Ferdinand and Isabella’s court chronicler Fernando del Pulgar, “It was certainly a thing most marvelous that what many men and great lords did not manage to do in many years, a single woman did in a short time through work and governance.” For this reason, Isabella’s reign and her role within her marriage are groundbreaking. In the words of the Renaissance humanist Ambassador Pietro Mártire d’Anghiera, Isabella was “stronger than a strong man, more constant than any human soul, a marvelous example of honesty and virtue. Nature has made no other woman like her.”

  By the time Isabella died, her husband securely held the crown of Naples, thanks to a treaty with France, whose ambitions in Italy rivaled Spain’s. Wishing for an heir of his own to “leapfrog” over Joanna’s rights of succession to the Castilian throne, Ferdinand remarried the following October, taking for his bride Germaine de Foix, the teenage niece of King Louis XII of France. On May 3, 1509, she bore Ferdinand a son, Juan, Prince of Aragon, who died shortly thereafter.

  From 1513 on, Ferdinand showed little interest in politics. He became testy and cantankerous, possibly due to the inefficacy of the bull’s balls he’d been ingesting to enhance his virility. On January 23, 1516, Ferdinand’s asthma and dropsy caught up with him. At the age of sixty-three, he died while traveling to Seville with the future Pope Adrian VI for the purposes of assembling a military expedition to be deployed in North Africa, or against France or Italy.

  Having usurped his daughter Joanna’s rights of succession in Castile, Ferdinand was succeeded by fifteen-year-old Charles, the oldest son of Joanna and Archduke Philip of Burgundy, who acceded to the Aragonese throne as well. In 1519, Charles would also become Holy Roman Emperor. Reigning as Charles V, he ruled most of Spain, as inherited from his mother and maternal grandfather; the Netherlands, inherited from his father; and huge swaths of Germany, inherited from his paternal grandfather, the previous Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian.

  By then, Joanna was queen in name only, imprisoned by her son, ostensibly for her own good. Ferdinand and Isabella’s other surviving child, Katherine, was Queen of England, the wife of Henry VIII.

  A contemporary chronicler fudged the truth a bit when he wrote of the Catholic Monarchs that “King and Queen together, they were chosen by God, united by Him, who joined together in this way, ruled and governed thirty years, and although two in body, in will and unity they were only one.”

  FerdinandandIsabella indeed.

  JOANNA OF CASTILE

  ( “ J OANNA THE MAD” OR “ JUANA LA LOCA” )

  1479-1555

  RULED SPAIN (THEORETICALLY): 1504-1555

  and

  PHILIP THE HANDSOME,

  DUKE OF BURGUNDY/PHILIP I OF CASTILE

  1478-1506 married 1496-1506

  “. . . it would be the total destruction and loss of these kingdoms due to her illnesses and passions, which are not expressed here for modesty.”

  —language from a 1506 secret treaty signed by Joanna’s husband, Philip of Burgundy, and her father, Ferdinand II of Aragon

  “HOW SHARPER THAN A SERPENT’S TOOTH IT IS TO have a thankless child!” So declares King Lear. But how much more painful and deadly it is to have a thankless husband and a thankless father as well!

  Joanna the Mad, or Juana la Loca, as she is known in Spain, was the second daughter born to the Catholic Monarchs, Isabella of Castile y Lyon and Ferdinand of Aragon. From an early age, she demonstrated a fascination with the macabre. She once told her governess that she wanted to try on her skeleton and burst into tears when she was informed that it was already inside her. She collected talismans, was morbidly superstitious, and obsessed with death. Pretty and mild-looking, pale and serious, the auburn-haired Joanna had wanted to become a nun, but Isabella and Ferdinand couldn’t afford to marry her to God; their empire had to be strengthened and preserved through strategic dynastic alliances.

  In the late summer of 1496, a fleet of 133 ships carrying an entourage numbering between 15,000 and 22,000 accompanied the sixteen-year-old Joanna to Flanders, where she was to meet her eighteen-year-old bridegroom, Archduke Philip of Burgundy, the only son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. At the time, it was the most lavish procession of its kind. But the vessel carrying Joanna’s wardrobe and many of her personal possessions struck a sandbank and sank with all hands on board. Joanna’s journey seemed even more ill-starred when her groom was not there to greet her as she
stepped ashore, sending his sister Margaret instead.

  The reason for Philip’s absence was that some of his advisers were against the match with Joanna. In his day, the archduke was not known as “Philip the Handsome” but as Philippe le Croit Conseil—Philip the Believer of Counsel—because he was so malleable.

  But Philip’s advisers hadn’t brokered his marriage and therefore could not prevent it, regardless of their opinions on the subject. So, on October 20, 1496, Philip and Joanna were married in Lier, Belgium, by the Bishop of Cambray. It was a double wedding; Philip’s sister Margaret married Joanna’s only brother, Juan, Prince of Asturias and heir to the thrones of Aragon and Castile. In accordance with the treaties signed by their parents, which twisted the rules regarding one of the most common marriage traditions, the two brides were awarded no dowries. Instead they were to receive a set amount of revenues from their husbands’ respective lands. In other words, the two grooms were expected to pay their wives’ dowries!

  Philip’s mother, Mary of Burgundy, had died when he was four years old and he was raised in a decadent court filled with diversions, sports, and banquets. Archduke Philip of Burgundy was a spoiled and rakish youth who had already earned a reputation as a ladies’ man. But when he and Joanna laid eyes on each other, it was lust at first sight for both of them, and the randy teens urged the local priest to pronounce them man and wife as hastily as possible so that they could hotfoot it to the royal boudoir.

  Coming from the sober and rigid court of Spain, Joanna, innocent of the ways of the world (and men), could not have known that her new husband considered her no more than another attractive and willing body. All the poor girl could tell was that the sex was terrific. And frequent. And she did fall in love with Philip. But the archduke did not equate sex with love, and he soon returned to the dissolute philandering of his bachelor days. Joanna was fanatically jealous of Philip’s other women and felt betrayed by his abandonment and his numerous infidelities. But, at that point, anyway, she wasn’t “mad”—she was angry.

  A Burgundian chronicler described the young Archduchess of Burgundy as “illustrious and virtuous” and “of handsome bearing and gracious manner.” But those qualities must not have been alluring enough to Philip, because Joanna went to extreme measures to keep her husband enticed, changing her sleeves and the trains of her gowns several times a day and wearing dresses with a thousand slits. The gentleman she had married preferred blondes, so she dismissed the fair-haired women in her retinue; when Philip found his yellow-tressed conquests somewhere else, Joanna lightened her own hair.

  At the time of her wedding, Joanna was a dynastic cipher, with an elder brother who was the heir apparent to her parents’ kingdoms (and whose offspring, it was expected, would continue the line). She also had an older sister. But just because Joanna was positioned a few rungs down on the ladder of succession, it didn’t mean that her marriage to Philip of Burgundy was not politically or dynastically motivated; their union was intended to check French interests by forging an alliance between Castile and the Emperor Maximilian. However, when Joanna arrived in Flanders she was dismayed to discover that her new husband’s advisers were all pro-French. Additionally, she had a hard time assimilating into the Flemish court; the only aspect she picked up with ease was the fashions. Part of her difficulty in adapting was financial. Joanna had no money to feed her starving Spanish entourage because Philip had not made her dowry payments, and her parents refused to ameliorate matters by sending her the funds to sustain them.

  In October 1496, the same month as his daughter’s marriage, King Ferdinand dispatched an ambassador to Flanders to insist that Philip pay Joanna her allowance. But the sums set aside in Joanna’s name were paid into Burgundy’s general treasury instead. And Philip emphatically refused to give her any funds for incidental expenses.

  With no friends and no money, the high-strung Joanna grew lonely, which only increased her natural moodiness and irritability. Philip abused her mentally and physically. When they quarreled—often over his penchant for buxom blondes—he would punish her by avoiding her bedroom, which only sent Joanna spiraling further into depression. Weeping and railing, she would throw herself against the wall.

  Joanna was also perpetually pregnant, bearing six children during the ten years of their marriage. Her first child, Leanor, was born in 1498; hormonal changes during or just after her pregnancy may have exacerbated her depression. Joanna even had a difficult time getting her husband to finance the expenses of the nursery. Philip maintained that because she had given birth to a daughter, the infant’s care should be her responsibility, declaring, “Because this child is a girl, let the archduchess provide the estate, and then, when God grants us a son, I will provide it.”

  When their son and heir, Charles, was born on February 24, 1500, Joanna’s status temporarily increased. Ever the politicians, her parents urged her to use that cachet to further Spanish interests in Flanders. But Joanna insisted that she could do nothing without her husband’s favor, promising them she would win Philip’s will when they were alone together, “because [she] knows that he loves [her].”

  Joanna’s moods rose and fell according to her husband’s passions and his rejections. She both loved and feared him; and during the final two years of their marriage, she raged against Philip’s indifference to her. More jailer than husband, he controlled Joanna’s access to her own mother and tried to distance her from Isabella. When Joanna resisted, her conduct was branded as out of control. On many occasions her behavior was indeed excessive, even paranoid, but it was not without reason.

  After their third child, Isabel, was born, Philip began asserting dominion over the nursery, choosing their offspring’s governess and attendants. In October 1501 he sent all three children, under the supervision of his retainers, to visit their paternal grandmother in Mechlen.

  Joanna’s brother, Juan, had died in 1497, soon after his marriage to Margaret of Burgundy, and Joanna’s older sister, Isabella, died in childbirth in 1498. Isabella’s son, the Infante Miguel, never made it past his second year. When Miguel died in the summer of 1500, Joanna became the infanta—the heir to the crowns of Aragon and Castile.

  In 1501 the royal couple traveled to Spain to tour their future kingdom; it was the first time that Joanna upheld her rights as the proprietary heiress of her parents’ dominions. But Philip, who had signed a treaty with Louis XII in July of 1498, refused to alter his allegiance to France in preference to his Spanish in-laws. Joanna and Philip then visited the French court to hammer out the marriage negotiations of their son, Charles, to Louis’s daughter Claude.

  Before returning to Spain, Philip and Joanna stopped in Bayonne, where she began negotiations to wed their infant daughter, Isabel, to the heir to the King of Navarre. Far from being “mad,” by arranging brilliant matches for her children, Joanna was doing everything that was expected of a royal mother.

  In 1502, after Joanna gave birth to another daughter, she and Philip left their young brood in Flanders and returned to Toledo, where Joanna was proclaimed Princess of Asturias, the title held by the heir to the Spanish throne. Accordingly, both the Castilian and Aragonese Cortes, the national legislative assemblies, recognized Joanna as her parents’ heir, but the Archbishop of Saragossa made it clear that the rights of succession could not be altered without a formal agreement between the Cortes and King Ferdinand. Offering Joanna an unfortunate taste of things to come, it was Ferdinand who shared the canopy of state with Philip, cutting Joanna—who was compelled to enter the city of Toledo behind them—out of the picture.

  The young royals remained in Spain throughout 1502, but Philip made it increasingly clear that he hated it there. The climate during the summer was brutal, and the Spanish court too strict, meaning that it was too hard to seduce the ladies. He became even more miserable when he contracted measles. Toward the end of the year he and Joanna had another violent argument, possibly about Philip’s desire to leave Spain. In any case, that’s exactly what he did, de
parting for Flanders in December 1502.

  Joanna wished to follow him immediately, but she was several months pregnant, so her parents refused to let her leave. In March 1503, after she gave birth to a son, Ferdinand, she reiterated her desire to join her husband, but her parents locked her up in the castle of La Mota. By now, new hostilities between Spain and France made travel risky. Thinking like a canny politician instead of a compassionate mother, Isabella also feared that Philip’s pro-French advisers would try to influence Joanna if she were to return to him. So Isabella told her daughter that it was crucial for her to remain in Spain to prepare for the day when she would become queen.

  Joanna’s depression increased, although her despair was diagnosed as “lovesickness” by the court physicians. Finally, she received a letter from Philip and was determined to return to his arms. In November 1503, Joanna’s orders for a ship to bring her back to Flanders were ignored. Unwilling to be thwarted, one windy and cold night, half-dressed and barefoot, she tried to escape from La Mota, but was halted by the guards, who closed the gate. Joanna threw herself against the iron bars and hurled abuse at everyone within earshot, including a bishop who tried to calm her down, threatening him with torture and death for keeping her confined. Refusing to go indoors, she stationed herself atop the ramparts “like an African lioness in a fit of rage” according to a contemporary chronicler. At two in the morning she finally retreated into a fruit shed and crouched under a table, which is where her mother found her and finally persuaded her to take shelter.