Iberia

by James A. Michener

  By the time I picked her story up again at the little town of Toro, perched on a cliff overlooking the Río Duero, which crosses northern Spain to enter the Atlantic at Porto, her luck had changed dramatically. She had taken matters into her own hands and had found a husband for herself, the dynamic and gifted Fernando de Aragón, two years younger than she but a handsome, daring fellow who was to prove so adroit in manipulating Spanish interests in Italy that Niccolò Machiavelli would use him as the archetype of the cynical ruler in The Prince. It was a love match, at least on Isabel’s part, but also a miraculous union of equals; Fernando was probably the best man in Europe for Isabel to have married and together they made a formidable team.

  Never did Fernando look better, either to history or to his young wife, than at Toro, for here by his gallantry he ensured her crown. Her incompetent father, Juan II, had died. Her half brother, King Enrique IV, had also died. Her full brother, who might have inherited the throne, had died earlier; but this did not leave Isabel next, because Enrique had left a daughter Juana, who if she were legitimate would become queen. Juana was born in wedlock, of that there was no question, but nobles who sought to place Isabel on the throne pointed out that during Enrique’s life he had been known openly as The Impotent, and a credible rumor was started: ‘Juana is the daughter of the queen but not of the king.’ Matters were complicated when the King of Portugal, seeing a good chance to meddle in Spanish affairs and perhaps win the throne for himself, announced his betrothal to Juana and his intention of using the Portuguese army to put her on the throne. This the nobles supporting Isabel could not permit and war became inescapable. After much jockeying back and forth, the two armies finally faced each other here at Toro in the year 1475.

  I was fortunate in Toro in finding as guide—impromptu friend might be the better word—an old man some five feet tall and weighing about two hundred and twenty pounds. He was remarkable both for his information and for his trousers, which had to be ample to cover his girth but which also came nearly to his chin. He was encased in wool and his fly was at least twenty inches long. He was in love with Toro and its distinguished old buildings but his field of specialization was the Battle of Toro. ‘It determined the course of Spanish history,’ he said. ‘If Portugal had won, no Isabel the Catholic. No Carlos Quinto. And Portugal would have won except for two Spanish heroes. You ever hear of Cardinal Mendoza of Toledo? Our warrior cardinal? His bravery helped save the day. But our hero was Fernando. How lucky Isabel was to have chosen such a man. What he did here at Toro will always be remembered.’

  What my roly-poly guide told me next was so improbable that I did not believe him, convinced that he was repeating a legend but later when I looked it up in histories I found that he had been telling the truth. In 1475 Fernando made this proposal to the King of Portugal: ‘Since our armies cannot seem to reach a conclusion, let you and me duel in the old manner, the lady of the winner to become Queen of Spain.’ At first the Portuguese agreed and plans were made for what would have been the last time in history when two sovereigns met in single combat to decide the inheritance of their nations, but at the last moment the King of Portugal withdrew, not surprisingly, since he was forty-three while Fernando was only twenty-three. Later in 1476, when battle between the armies could no longer be avoided, Cardinal Mendoza’s firmness and Fernando’s fine generalship gave victory to the Spaniards, and Juana, whom many modern historians accept as the rightful heiress to the throne, was driven from Spain. Isabel, by right of conquest, was Queen of Castilla, and as soon as the Moors could be driven out of Granada, would be Queen of Spain as well.

  Standing on the cliff at Toro, looking down at the Duero below me, I listened as my fat guide with the amazing pants said, ‘To think that the history of an entire peninsula should have been decided here … in a little town like this,’ but when I questioned him on details, he had to admit that the battle hadn’t occurred exactly at Toro. ‘Farther down the river … toward Portugal … and if the truth were known, Queen Isabel wasn’t here during the battle. She was back in Tordesillas, waiting, waiting. King Fernando rode down that road over there to take her the news, and when he reached her and assured her that she was to be queen, she wept. It was a very good marriage, that one.’

  I was much taken with Toro, for it was an excellent town, far enough from the main road to receive few tourists yet so filled with memories that those who did come could see shadows of kings as they prepared for hand-to-hand combat. At dusk one night I crossed the river to travel out to the scene of battle, and I understood then how Fernando had utilized the river to advantage, and when I turned back, there was Toro atop its eroding red cliff, magnificent in outline against the dark sky of evening, its turrets jagged, its crumbling walls still defiant. Next morning I went on to Medina del Campo, coming in sight of this once-great city not long after dawn.

  I stopped on a slight rise to imagine what it must have been like, in the sixteenth century, to be a merchant coming to Medina del Campo from Flanders. The journey across France and the Pyrenees had been difficult, but the fair at Medina was so important that one dared not miss it, for here the commerce of Europe was largely determined. From a hill like this, one would have seen a dozen informal caravans converging on Medina: Italians on horseback, Germans on foot, Frenchmen in a brotherly union of merchants and churchmen, all on their way to the fair. Off to the left, down from the upland plains of Castilla, there would be herdsmen from Extremadura bringing cattle. As many as fifty thousand traders converged on Medina each year in its days of greatness.

  But when I reached the city I could find no evidence of that glory. No restaurants were open, no bars, but I did find a bridge that crossed the Río Zapardiel, a stream I had often read about: ‘From Antwerp and London came the merchants to set up their booths along the banks of the Zapardiel.’ I had imagined a broad, flowing river. It was four feet wide, six inches deep and its banks were lined with rubbish, but at one end of the bridge there was a churro shop, and even though I knew I would be sick the rest of the day, I entered.

  ‘Señor! You’re a norteamericano but you know what’s good, eh?’ The speaker was a robust woman barely visible through clouds of smoke coming from deep pots in which boiling oil was being used to fry churros. The smell was overpowering but it did have a certain enticing quality, as if to say, ‘You know damned well churros are inedible, but don’t they smell good?’

  At a chrome-plated machine the woman was cranking a handle which extruded a flour paste about the diameter of a quarter, but with fluted edges. This she cut off in ten-inch lengths, twisting their ends together and plopping them into the crackling fat, where they fried for a few minutes to emerge an appetizing brown. She sprinkled them with a coarse sugar and set two before me.

  ‘Chocolate?’ I nodded, and into a small cup she poured a chocolate thicker than most soups and as delicious as it was aromatic.

  Churros and chocolate! I suppose if one searched the restaurants of the world one could not find a worse breakfast nor one that tasted better. The churros were so greasy that I needed three paper napkins per churro, but they tasted better than doughnuts. The chocolate was completely indigestible, but much better than coffee. And the great gobs of unrefined sugar were chewy. Any nation that can eat churros and chocolate for breakfast is not required to demonstrate its courage in other ways.

  I remember Medina del Campo as fifty-percent churro indigestion, fifty-percent frustration, for when the town was awake I went into the plaza and began asking people, ‘Where is the old palace in which Queen Isabel died?’

  ‘She died in the castle up there on the hill,’ they all said, pointing to one of Spain’s better-preserved fortresses, and it was appropriate to think that a girl who had lived so long in a similar castle at Arévalo had died in this enormous pile of rock, but I knew that this was only legend. Records proved that Isabel had died in a small place somewhere inside the gates of Medina del Campo and I wanted to see where.

  ‘Wait till the stor
es open,’ the policeman said, so I wandered in the plaza and came upon something I had not expected, four low pillars not more than two feet high, connected by heavy chains, inside which stood two large ruined pillars and a plaque which read:

  DURING THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES, WHICH MARKED THE APOGEE OF THE CLASSICAL FAIRS OF MEDINA DEL CAMPO, AT THIS POINT IN THE PLAZA MAYOR THE MONEYCHANGERS AND BANKERS OF THAT TIME INSTALLED THEIR BOOTHS OPEN TO ALL THE WORLD. MEDINA WAS, DURING THESE CENTURIES, COMMERCIALLY ECUMENICAL AND HERE THE LETTER OF EXCHANGE WAS CRYSTALLIZED IN ITS DEFINITIVE FORM.

  More important than the cattle fair or the assembly of merchants had been this yearly meeting in Medina of bankers from all over Europe for the purpose of determining the relative values of national currencies and the clearing of loans against one another. For example, a merchant in Antwerp could promise a customer, ‘I will pay your banker in London three hundred pieces of gold at the fair of Medina del Campo.’ Or a banker in Naples could say, ‘Three hundred coins, their value to be determined by the price of gold at Medina.’ Here also were developed, as the signs said, the sophisticated instruments of international banking, for just as the university at Salamanca had constituted a kind of clearing house for ideas, so Medina had set standards for commercial dealings. While I was in Medina a conference of international bankers was being held in Madrid, but they did not take a side trip to Medina, where their profession began, and I thought that a pity.

  When the stores opened, so did my confusion. ‘Isabel’s palace was over there,’ I was told, but that was wrong. ‘It’s over there,’ another said, but that was wrong too. Finally a friend had the good idea of inquiring at a bank, and by luck we hit the nephew of Medina del Campo’s cronista that is, the town’s historian, poet, bibliographer and publicist—and the young man said, ‘You won’t believe what I’m going to show you, but it will be the palace in which Isabel died.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’ I asked.

  ‘My uncle is the cronista. He knows everything.’ And he led us to a crumbling building at one corner of the plaza, and no one could have guessed that this had once been a palace fit for the death of Europe’s noblest queen. Inside the creaking door a temporary wooden booth had been erected for the sale of tickets to a comic bullfight; ‘The Fireman Bullfighter! Estupendo! 75¢!’ A fine old wooden stairway led to a second floor littered with all kinds of filth, and the rooms which once had housed the queen and her attendants were now barred, for a century ago the palace had been converted into a jail. Men who had stolen sheep or murdered tailors had spent their last days in the room which Isabel had used for her dying. With the coming of indoor toilets one closet had been redesigned, but it had degenerated into a state of filth. And so it went through all this historic site. It was ironic, I thought as I left the palace, that even the nearby church, which Isabel had done so much to save, was the ugliest I was to see in Spain, a true masterpiece of junk.

  But her monument is not a broken-down palace in Medina del Campo nor an ugly provincial church nearby. Spain is her monument, united and Catholic, as she had determined it should be. Her administration was the best the country would know, for she kept little books in which she listed the names of all the capable men she met, so that when a vacancy occurred in any department she had an immediate replacement, who rarely proved unworthy. Militarily, financially and spiritually she left Spain a bulwark among nations, and I judge her to have been twice the ruler that her grandson Carlos V was and also better than her great-grandson Felipe II.

  It was an Italian humanist, Pedro Mártir de Anglería, servant at the Spanish court since 1487, who wrote in a private letter the eulogy which most Spaniards accept as the final word on Isabel:

  The pen falls from my hand and my strength fails through grief: the world has lost its most precious ornament, and the loss should be mourned not only by the Spaniards, whom she has so long led along the road to glory, but by all the nations of Christéndom, because she was the mirror of all virtues, the refuge of the innocent, and the scourge of the evil; I doubt that there has lived in the world a heroine, either in ancient or in modern times, who merits comparison with this peerless woman.

  One must note, however, that much of what is popularly taught about Isabel is not true. She did not unify Spain, for when she died the nation once more divided. Fernando kept for himself the Kingdom of Aragón, but the Kingdom of Castilla went to Isabel’s daughter Juana. Fernando, treated miserably by the nobles of Castilla, sought revenge by marrying, within a few months of Isabel’s death, nineteen-year-old Germaine de Foix, niece of the French king. He did this for two reasons, to spite the Castilians and to sire an heir who would inherit his half of Spain.

  Promptly, Germaine gave him a son, and in this way Fernando, in an act of revenge, threatened to destroy all that Isabel had accomplished, but the boy died shortly after birth, whereupon Fernando and his child bride tried desperately to have another, but the old man was not equal to the task, so Germaine instructed her apothecaries to concoct a brew of blood, herbs, magic elements and bull testicles, which she fed Fernando in such quantities that she undermined his health. He died without further issue and it was due solely to this lucky accident that Spain had another chance to unite.

  Isabel’s life with Fernando had never been easy, for while living with the queen he had fathered four bastard children, each by a different mother. The two girls we have met, tucked away at Isabel’s command in the convent at Madrigal de las Altas Torres. One of the boys became a soldier, the other, at the age of six, Archbishop of Zaragoza. When Cardinal Mendoza died Fernando insisted that this youth, then only twenty-four, be made Archbishop of Toledo and thus primate of all Spain, but here Isabel put her foot down. She preferred naming an archbishop of her own choice and it was the best decision she ever made, for her candidate was Cisneros, and had he not taken charge when Fernando finally died, twelve years after Isabel, the breach between Castilla and Aragón would probably have become irreparable.

  I left Medina del Campo and drove a few miles north to another cliff on the Río Duero, where in the town of Tordesillas the tragedy of Isabel came to an end, years after her own death. I had known of Tordesillas in other contexts without realizing that it was one of the principal theaters of the Isabel story. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI, seeking to obviate colonial quarrels between Catholic countries, had established a Line of Demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese claims. It ran one hundred leagues west of the Azores but was not entirely satisfactory, so in 1494 envoys of Portugal and Spain, supervised by representatives of the Papacy, convened here in Tordesillas to sign the treaty defining a new line two hundred and seventy leagues farther west. It was as a result of this treaty that a country like Peru became Spanish, whereas Brazil was Portuguese. But for the student of Spanish internal history, events of much greater significance occurred in Tordesillas and it was these that I wished to track down.

  Shields at the University of Salamanca. Observe the busts set within the cockleshell of Santiago de Compostela.

  As the genealogical chart shows, Fernando and Isabel were blessed with numerous progeny, and one of the queen’s notable accomplishments was her manipulation of their marriages. She married her oldest daughter, Isabel, to Alfonso, heir to the throne of Portugal, but he died suddenly, so the young widow was passed along to Manoel, the next in line; but the young Isabel said she would not marry him unless he agreed to expel all Jews from Portugal the way her mother had from Spain. This curious wedding present was granted and the marriage took place to the wailing of many Jews. Then it was Isabel who died, so her mother quickly arranged for her third daughter, young María, to marry the widower Manoel (when María died in 1517, Manoel took a third wife from the family, Queen Isabel’s granddaughter Leonor!). When Isabel’s youngest child, Catalina, reached the age of four she was promised in marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales to the English throne, who was three, and when the girl was eleven the betrothal was formalized. At sixteen the marriage took place but A
rthur was sickly and soon died, whereupon shrewd Isabel, in defiance of the Church’s decree against such incestuous marriages, passed Catalina along to the dead man’s brother, the new Prince of Wales, who was to become Henry VIII. Life with him was hell, but Catalina did escape the ax which ended the reigns of two of her successors, and she did give birth to Mary, who succeeded in restoring England to Catholicism, as her grandmother would have wished, even though the restoration was reversed by her successor, the Protestant Queen Elizabeth. It was with her son Juan and second daughter Juana that Isabel had her outstanding success, because for them she arranged a double wedding with the daughter and son of Maximilian, ruler of all Germany, Holy Roman Emperor and head of the house of Habsburg.

  In Spain, Margaret of Austria, Maximilian’s daughter, married Juan, heir to the Spanish throne, while in Flanders, Archduke Philip of Austria, son of Maximilian and heir to vast estates in the Low Countries and elsewhere, known in Spain as Felipe I, married Juana. It was in this manner that Spain became involved not only with the Habsburgs, who ultimately inherited the throne, but also with the Low Countries, which were to be a permanent thorn in Spanish flesh. Young Felipe was probably the most attractive prince of the century, a lustful, vain and somewhat stupid young man who set out to humiliate his dowdy Spanish wife and who with his infidelities drove her mad. (John Langdon-Davies, in his study of Carlos the Bewitched previously cited, argues that it was the other way around and that it was Juana’s encroaching madness that almost drove Felipe out of his mind; but one must remember that the thesis of his book is that Juana was genetically insane, because of her inheritance from the demented Isabel of Portugal.) When this happened it was of no great consequence, because Juana, like her mother a generation earlier, was originally well removed from the throne. First in line was her brother Juan, who had married Felipe’s sister. Second was her own sister Isabel, now Queen of Portugal; if her brother died she stood to be queen of two countries. And third was Isabel’s son, heir to the Portuguese throne and putative heir to that of Spain as well, in which case the Iberian peninsula would again be united as it had sometimes been in the past. So for the present no one bothered much about Juana’s trouble with her handsome husband; it was no worse than what Catalina had to put up with from Henry VIII. But once again, as in the case of the famous Isabel, miracles began to happen. Juan died suddenly. Isabel did the same. And to the horror of Portugal and Spain alike, young Miguel died at the age of two. Suddenly Juana la Loca, as she was being called behind her back, found herself heiress to the throne of Spain. If she could somehow control her husband and her mind she might look forward to a reign equaling her mother’s in brilliance. With these prospects Juana and Felipe came to Spain to claim their inheritance, and we shall see them next wandering about the open countryside north of Tordesillas under conditions so gruesome as to form one of the weirdest chapters of history.