The agreement was a victory for the Castilians over those who wanted Isabella to remain in the background while Ferdinand governed. But that does not mean Ferdinand was dissatisfied. He had not sought the full unity of their two dynasties’ kingdoms but hoped, among other things, to gain advantage for his family’s crown of Aragon and, crucially, for his own offspring. One of his most immediate aims had been to raise a Castilian army that could ride to the rescue of his father – and his own future kingdom – in Roussillon. Within three days the Castilians had pledged to send 2,000 lancers. He also, according to Pulgar, had full confidence in Isabella’s ability to govern without him.13
The young monarchs could feel satisfied with their achievements in this first month. Isabella’s old supporters had mostly stayed loyal. The Mendozas had joined them, along with other nobles who declared their loyalty in the weeks after Isabella’s rapid proclamation.14 But the Pacheco family and many other senior nobles had not offered support. More importantly, Juana la Beltraneja had a rightful claim to the throne. She was too young to act for herself, but it was only a question of time before someone took up her cause.
12
Clouds of War
Segovia, March 1475
The archbishop of Toledo was furious. He may have taken the best rooms in Segovia and played an important part in drawing up the agreement between Isabella and Ferdinand on how they would rule, but the new situation jarred. Isabella was not being nearly nice enough to him. In fact, he thought, she was being downright rude. He had spent years working for the cause of Aragon and had played a crucial role in bringing Ferdinand to Isabella’s side. The princess and her husband had sworn to obey him and not to appoint anyone without consulting him first. Even though his loyalty had wavered towards the end of Enrique IV’s reign, he thought that he had every right to expect to be the new royal privado – heir to the likes of Juan Pacheco and Álvaro de Luna, who had run Castile for most of the previous half-century. But Isabella did not want a privado. Nor did Ferdinand. Instead, Isabella’s dislike of the archbishop and his madcap court of sorcerers and frauds grew daily. ‘All one heard were his frequent complaints about the ingratitude the queen showed by giving preference to absolute enemies over certain friends,’ wrote Palencia.1
Isabella was pleased with herself. Her husband had signed a contract that kept Castilians happy. Her strategy, already evident at her wedding to Ferdinand, of acting boldly and forcing others to deal with a fait accompli appeared to be paying off. A sufficient number of nobles had come round to her cause to make her usurper’s coup an established fact – at least for the moment. Dislodging Isabella would now require a considerable amount of force and money. A new era was dawning, she felt, where the dubious royal authority of her brother would give way to something far more potent – an authoritarian, semi-absolutist monarchy in which the new queen and her husband could rule with minimum interference from the nobles, the church or anybody else. The Grandees and other oligarchs were needed to help govern her kingdoms and maintain the existing social order and its hierarchies, but they must know their position. Ferdinand was her greatest ally in this strategy, though this was far from being the tradition of Aragon, with its complex power-sharing between the crown and its various kingdoms and cities. He had already shown his frustration with that arrangement, angering the burghers of both Zaragoza and Valencia with summary executions carried out without consulting local authorities. In Castile he, too, agreed that a stronger, more authoritarian monarchy that concentrated power in the royal court was best. Among the cheerleaders for Isabella’s firm hand and new style of government was Friar Torquemada, the influential prior whose Santa Cruz monastery sat just outside Segovia’s walls. In a memorandum to her outlining Castile’s ills, he would call on her to correct the numerous errors of government in a kingdom which was being run by ‘inefficient’ and ‘avaricious’ officials, where the church was often up for sale and where Jews and Moors were not kept in their place. But many of the great feudal magnates differed utterly in their view, seeing themselves as rightful co-participants in the government of the kingdom. If Isabella thought they would accept the change without a fight, then she was wrong. The grandiose, proud and warlike archbishop of Toledo harboured extravagant fantasies of eternal life and limitless wealth. He could hardly be expected to accept diminished status as a secondary player in Castilian politics.2
Archbishop Carrillo fumed, none too quietly. He demanded seven of the most important posts at court for himself and his family. He developed a growing hatred of Isabella and kept trying to tell Ferdinand how marvellous and clever his sorcerer Alarcón was. ‘He was supposed to be devoted to the king and a firm backer of his cause,’ said Palencia. ‘But he gave space in his heart to the virulent hatred inspired by perfidious Alarcón.’ The archbishop’s support for Isabella stretched back to those first days after her brother Alfonso’s death and it was he who had led her mule to the historic meeting with Enrique at the Guisando bulls. Perhaps she knew him too well and had tired of his moods, eccentricities and misogyny. Perhaps she mistrusted him after their recent falling-outs. Either way, this was not a moment for pushing away one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. Isabella’s early triumph was built on fragile foundations. It badly needed consolidation.3
Isabella and Ferdinand, fuelled by impetuous audacity, spent the first weeks of her reign celebrating their early success with youthful exuberance. The latter wrote upbeat letters to Aragon, making out that the whole kingdom was behind them and that it was just a matter of time before the Castilian army appeared on the horizon and scared off the French. Isabella seemed remarkably unaware of exactly how big a threat they posed to a number of important people. These included the kings of Portugal and France, now faced with an alliance between the two halves of Spain that boosted their might on the frontiers of both countries. Those who had gained most from Enrique’s weak kingship also felt threatened – especially the Pacheco family. Last, but not least, was a twelve-year-old girl who had been sworn in as heiress by the country’s nobility and was already in the Pacheco family’s power.4
Ferdinand’s recent triumph in Perpignan suggested that the combined might of Castile and Aragon had created a new, powerful player in Europe. Threatening letters were written to the Portuguese king warning him that he would feel the wrath of both crowns if he declared his support for the cause of his niece, Juana la Beltraneja. But reality bit quickly and devastatingly into the young couple’s fantasy of a newly potent Castilian–Aragonese alliance that would make other European monarchs tremble. In February the Catalans informed them that, unless ‘the power of Castile was awakened’, Perpignan would soon have to be handed back to the French. Early in March Ferdinand was forced to tell them that the royal exchequer was empty and Castile itself too impoverished to help. On 10 March 1475, Perpignan fell.5 Catalonia was convinced that it was only a matter of time before it, too, ended up under the French yoke. It was an enormous blow to Isabella and her husband, just three months after she had claimed the crown.
Only a combination of naivety and hubris can explain why Isabella and her counsellors failed to spot the speed with which a potentially devastating alliance was being built by her enemies and some whom she thought of as friends. Just two weeks after Isabella had proclaimed herself queen, and before Ferdinand had even made it to Segovia, the king of Portugal had begun urging others to recognise the ‘clear right’ of the woman Enrique had declared to be his legal heir, Juana la Beltraneja. ‘We consider that his daughter, our niece doña Juana, is queen and that her honour and condition is now, more than ever, in our hands and that we are obliged to help her as much as is possible, seeing how she was sworn in and approved as the true and legitimate successor to those kingdoms,’ he wrote to Rodrigo Ponce de León, Marquess of Cadiz. The marquess was one of two nobles (the other was the Duke of Medina Sidonia) who fought for personal control of wealthy Seville and its surroundings, an area where royal authority had effectively lapsed long before. ‘We
are sure of the loyalty that all her subjects are now obliged to show her and that they should recognise and obey her, and nobody else, as queen, especially and above all because at the time of his passing away, in the presence of several of the Grandees of his kingdom who were there, the king her father pronounced her to be the true heir and successor to his kingdom and, as his legitimate and natural daughter, telling them to obey her,’6 the Portuguese king now claimed.
A far different dynamic to that imagined by Isabella and her husband was beginning to reshape Europe. The ambitious Louis XI, also known as ‘the universal spider’ because of the way he spun his web across the continent, had found himself confronted by a series of alliances between his neighbours in Aragon, England, Burgundy and Brittany. Castile’s new alliance with Aragon could have been expected to corner him further, but his reconquest of Perpignan proved that this so-called Great Western Alliance was built on sand, and soon all the other members had signed peace deals with him. Isabella looked increasingly isolated and Afonso V now decided that Castile was, in the right circumstances, Portugal’s for the taking. The excuse was already there, as Isabella’s claim to the throne was, at best, tenuous. Afonso’s insistence that Enrique had pronounced Juana la Beltraneja heiress on his death-bed was almost certainly false, and could not be reinforced with documentary proof, but it was hardly the most substantial part of a very clear claim.7 All he needed was sufficient support both abroad and within Castile itself.
That support was already taking shape. Afonso V, by now nicknamed ‘the African’ after expanding Portugal’s lands in modern-day Morocco to Tangiers and Asilah, had started sounding out both Castilian nobles and the French king almost as soon Isabella declared herself queen. The most powerful noble in the land, López Pacheco, had not travelled to Segovia to kiss the hands of the new monarchs. He also had possession of the rightful heiress. He soon began plotting with Afonso but, cleverly, also lobbied Isabella and Ferdinand for control of the Santiago military order, making it look as though he might still be won over. While the second most powerful noble, the archbishop of Toledo, remained by the new queen’s side, López Pacheco’s scheming with King Afonso remained insufficient. Archbishop Carrillo knew this and, his pride hurt, decided to prove it by storming off. Juan the Great sent an envoy with instructions to win him back. ‘This gentleman told him about the numerous times that the king had exhorted and charged his son to remember how only the archbishop of Toledo, with his authority, courage, great prudence and power, has maintained him and the queen his wife in Castile,’ Zurita reported. But the archbishop now claimed to have intercepted a letter showing that people at Isabella’s court were plotting to murder him. The young monarchs, especially Isabella, did not treat him or his people with the respect they were due, he insisted. An alarmed Juan the Great tried to arrange a personal meeting with Toledo,8 not knowing that the archbishop had been in secret negotiations with Afonso for a while. López Pacheco was the match-maker.
A third senior grandee, Álvaro de Stúñiga, added further weight to the alliance against Isabella. The young queen might have won him over, but he wanted to hold on to the dukedom of Arévalo9 which had been gifted to him by Enrique after Isabella’s mother was ejected from the town where she had spent the sweetest days of her childhood. That was an open sore for Isabella. Stúñiga was, quite simply, her enemy. She was happy for it to stay that way. One day, she hoped, revenge would be hers.
Loyal Castilians lobbied the Portuguese king, warning him against his fickle allies. The Pachecos, Toledo and Stúñiga ‘were the [same] people who had broadcast throughout Spain and abroad that she [la Beltraneja] had no right to inherit Enrique’s kingdoms nor could be his real daughter because of the impotency he suffered from’, Fernando del Pulgar pointed out in a letter. He also reminded Afonso that, before Enrique’s death, the Portuguese king had pursued a marriage with Isabella while turning down several opportunities to marry La Beltraneja precisely because he doubted her legitimacy. But Juana la Beltraneja had already been moved to Trujillo, in the frontier region of Cáceres. On 1 May, at a ceremony in which Afonso sent Baron Biltri to represent him, they became formally engaged – allowing the Portuguese king, according to an outraged Palencia, to start calling her ‘my wife’ and himself ‘King of Castile and León’.10 Soon Portuguese soldiers were massing at the frontier. It would be war.
13
Under Attack
Valladolid, 3 April 1475
Isabella appeared on a big hackney pony in elaborate trappings, its rump covered with a colourful skirt and the mane, breast strap, bridle and overcheck decorated with small silver plates and flowers shaped out of gold. She wore a crown and a dazzling brocade dress and was accompanied by fourteen ladies, all wearing tabards that were half of grey-brown velvet and half of green brocade. The women of Valladolid hung from windows, determined to catch a glimpse of their magnificently turned-out new monarch and her retinue as they prepared for a celebratory week of jousting and partying in the city. ‘The queen and all her ladies came, she so richly dressed and hatted and her ladies with such diverse, gallant and rich clothes of the kind that women of this kingdom have never been seen wearing to fiestas,’ said one chronicler.1 Isabella had claimed the throne just fourteen weeks earlier and had, among other reasons, come to Valladolid to marshal support against her rival, Juana la Beltraneja, and the king of Portugal. One of the best ways to assert her splendour and authority was by showing off her wardrobe and jewels. The more dazzling, magnificent and regal she seemed, the better for her reputation as it spread by word of mouth across the country. This was a lesson, like so many, that Isabella had learned from the failings of her half-brother Enrique IV. Where he was scorned as sloppy, humble and unregal, she would be magnificent, admired and feared. ‘She was sometimes accused of the vice of showing too much pomp,’ one of her own chroniclers admits. ‘But we should understand that there are no other ceremonies in this world quite as extreme as those required by the royal condition … which, as it is uniquely superior, must make an effort to show itself above all others, given that it enjoys divine authority on earth.’
The woman who rode through the famously muddy streets of Valladolid was twenty-three years old, and in the early stages of a fresh pregnancy from those first nights when she had been reunited with Ferdinand in Segovia. ‘This queen was of medium height, well put together in her person and the proportion of her limbs, very pale and blonde,’ reported Fernando del Pulgar, the new chronicler who arrived at court with the Mendozas. ‘The eyes were between green and blue, her look is honest and graceful, her features well arranged and her face beautiful and full of joy. She was very measured in her bodily movements; she didn’t drink wine; she was a very good woman who liked to be surrounded by good, elderly women of fine lineage.’ A portrait believed to be of her as a young queen, painted by an anonymous Flemish-style artist in the first decade of her reign, highlights those green-blue eyes and the light auburn hair. It also shows her wearing the heavy jewellery that she liked to don on her public outings. A large gold chain is decorated with green emeralds and fat pearls, while the jeweller has reproduced her sheaf-of-arrows motif several times in different sizes, using elaborately worked fingers of gold with pearls at their tips.2 More emeralds, pearls and large, plum-coloured balass rubies decorate the large brooches used to pin strips of white silk to her cloth-of-gold dress. A thick Moorish-style axorca gold bracelet is encrusted with even more precious stones. Isabella still has a young girl’s unlined face, and the narrow plucked eyebrows of the time, though a slight hardening of the jawline – which would become pronounced later on in life – can just be detected.
Isabella was already her own woman, confident in her beliefs and decision-making. ‘She enjoyed talking to religious people who lived honestly, from whom she frequently sought advice, and she would listen to them and to the other lawyers around her, but mostly she made up her mind by following her own ideas,’ said Pulgar. ‘She wanted her instructions and orders to be carri
ed out to the letter … She was firm in her intentions, changing her mind only with great difficulty.’3 She was not, in other words, a woman who liked to be crossed. Nor was she used to obeying, though it was probably in Valladolid where she now became close to Friar Hernando de Talavera.
As queen, Isabella made sure that others knew their place was below her – not just figuratively but also literally by sitting or standing on platforms that raised her above them in public. That explains her surprise when she suddenly found herself forced to kneel, accepting a position of inferiority. It was Friar Talavera, her new confessor, who insisted that she drop to her knees. Previous confessors, whom she had the power to appoint and replace, had never dared order such a thing. ‘We should both be on our knees,’ the queen protested. ‘No, my lady, I must be seated while your Highness kneels, because this is God’s tribunal and I am his representative,’ Talavera replied. Isabella was impressed. ‘This is the confessor that I have been looking for,’ she said afterwards. This story was first recounted in a history of the Jeronymites, Isabella’s favourite monastic order along with the observant Franciscans, and is possibly apocryphal, but it reflects the truth of her relationship with the devout, honest priests whom she chose as confessors and, later, as bishops, archbishops and administrators. These were men who might lecture her about God and morals, including her own, but they did not actively seek political power or personal wealth. They respected her regal power in ways that, say, the grumpy and scheming Archbishop Carrillo of Toledo had never done, while also demanding absolute respect for their role as men of God. It was the sort of clean, clear division that Isabella liked. It was also a world in which each man, and woman, knew their place. And Talavera had clear, unbending and traditional ideas on exactly what each person’s place was.
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