She said that … if on occasions she referred to things that your holiness did, to be sure that it was not out of bad will, but with great love, but that she was obliged to speak out by some of the things she had heard about your holiness, which cause her, on your holiness’s behalf, great displeasure and disgust … and she specified to me the parties that were held for the engagement of doña Lucrezia and the creation of cardinals, naming the Cardinal of Valencia [Cesare] … and she asked that I write on her behalf, begging your holiness not to show such warmth towards the duke [of Gandía] and his brothers.
The nuncio had replied to Isabella by revealing to her some of the more scandalous behaviour of the recently deceased popes Innocent VIII and Sixtus IV. ‘I told her not to be so disgusted by your holiness’s things, that she should not think they were the kind of things that provoke unfortunate consequences, and that it seemed her majesty hadn’t been so interested in discovering the lifestyle of the other popes who came before your holiness,’ he said. The scabrous details he revealed – probably including Innocent’s nepotism towards his own bastard children or the half-dozen Sixtus nephews who became cardinals, as well as the latter’s allegedly uncontrollable passion for beautiful young men, ‘proved how much more dignified your holiness’s behaviour was than theirs’.8
Political advantage was, however, more important to Isabella than the behaviour of the Borgias. The ambitious Rodrigo Borgia saw himself as a pontifex imperator,9 a pope-emperor, and was determined to strengthen the papal states. He played the neighbouring Italian kingdoms off against one another and trod a fine line between support for the conflicting ambitions of the young French king, Charles VIII, and of the powerful new monarchs in Spain, all of whom had their eyes set on the large southern kingdom of Naples, which was ruled by a bastard line of the Aragonese royal family.
Borgia read Isabella and Ferdinand well. He realised that the Spanish sovereigns were far more concerned about dividing up the New World, reforming the church at home and containing France than they were about his own family’s infamous behaviour. He had been quick to issue bulls giving them rights over the New World shortly after Columbus’s first voyage. He also conceded on church reform, giving them a large degree of control over a process that was of utmost importance to Isabella. They, in turn, accepted Cesare as archbishop and arranged a match between one of Ferdinand’s cousins, María Enríquez, and his other son Juan. Realpolitik was evidently more important to Isabella than the moral stench emanating from Rome.10
Since gaining the upper hand in the Hundred Years War against England some sixty years earlier, France had become the dominant nation in Europe. The newly potent Spain was now a challenger for that role, but Isabella and her husband first needed to recover from the expense and effort of the Granada campaign. In January 1493 they had signed a non-aggression pact with Charles VIII, pledging not to oppose his attempts to take control of Naples in exchange for the return to the Aragonese crown of the borderlands of Roussillon and Cerdagne.11 Their agreement fell apart a year later after King Ferrante of Naples died, ending forty-six years of rule, and the French announced plans to invade Italy. By September 1494, the twenty-four-year-old Charles had an army of 50,000 men in the north of Italy and four months later Borgia was forced to open the gates of Rome to him.12
This was a step too far for Isabella and, especially, for her husband. Ferdinand now also formally made a claim to the throne of Naples – which needed his help if it was to survive the French onslaught. Isabella and her husband sent a modest army of 2,000 men and 300 light horses. They were led by a distinguished veteranfrom the Granada War, Gonzalo de Córdoba, soon to become one ofthe major military figures in Europe and dubbed ‘the Great Captain’. The following month Charles reached Naples and expected the pope to proclaim him king. But by March 1495 a wider Spanish-led, anti-French league that was backed by Borgia had been formed.13 This was Isabella and Ferdinand’s first major military venture outside Iberia, and a sign that a newly self-confident Spain felt it could use its muscle well beyond its own borders (though Sicily and Sardinia had long been, and remained, Aragonese possessions).14 An anonymous note was pinned to the doors of the pope’s Sant’Angelo castle in Rome warning the Spaniards that ‘the day would come when they would all die by the knife’.15 Charles VIII reportedly vowed to ‘cut the chain [of the league], even if it was stronger than diamonds’. A contest for domination of Italy and, by extension, for the role of Europe’s greatest power had started.
36
All the Thrones of Europe
Almazán, July 1496
In Almazán, the fortified town on the River Duero near the Aragonese frontier where Isabella was setting up a separate, independent household for her heir Prince Juan, the queen sat down with a special code sheet that transformed words into groups of Latin numerals and laboriously wrote out a secret message to her ambassador in England, the converso Rodrigo de Puebla. He was to insist that Henry VII join an alliance against France that already included the pope, Spain and the German lands ruled over by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. ‘The King of France assembles as great an army as he can,’ she wrote on 10 July 1496. ‘Considering the weakness of Italy, there is no doubt that he will conquer it very soon if the King of England, and the King and Queen of Spain, do not henceforth assist it effectually … you must request him, in all our names, to send succour without delay, and not permit the Church to be trampled on. You must speak not only to the King, but to all Britons,’ she added. In return she offered not just to finalise the wedding between her daughter Catherine and Arthur, Prince of Wales, but also to help the Tudor king see off the threat posed by Perkin Warbeck – the pretend Duke of York whom Isabella called ‘the boy in Scotland’. ‘We are strong enough to assist him,’ she said.1
Isabella had received a letter from Warbeck in September 1493, in which he claimed to be one of the two missing sons of Edward IV, the so-called Princes in the Tower. His elder brother – who would have become King Edward V – had been murdered, he claimed, but the man who had been ordered to kill him discreetly had found it impossible and had, instead, kept him hidden. After a wandering childhood he had received pledges of support in France, Denmark and Scotland as well as from the Emperor Maximilian. ‘Many of the chief personages in England, whose indignation has been roused by the iniquitous conduct of the usurper, Henry Richmond [Henry VII], have done the same in secret,’ he had told Isabella. ‘I hope Queen Isabella, who is not only my relative, but also the most just and pious of Princesses, will have pity on me, and intercede on my behalf.’2
Isabella did not swallow his story, but still worried about just how resilient the new Tudor dynasty that her daughter was marrying into would prove. Her stock of four marriageable daughters was, once more, proving a precious resource that promised, as Pulgar had already put it, to see her ‘children and grandchildren on all the thrones of Europe’. Catherine of Aragon had long been engaged to Henry VII’s eldest son Arthur (giving rise, some claim, to an English nursery song about how ‘the King of Spain’s daughter came to visit me, and all for the sake of my little nut tree’), but the match still had to be finalised and it now became one of the building blocks of the wider alliance against France.3 In July 1496 Isabella heard that Henry’s ambassadors in Rome had agreed that he should join the anti-French league.4 ‘If it be so, and he really has joined [the league], you must strongly urge the affair of the matrimonial alliance … to uphold and aid one another in matters affecting our states against all persons whatsoever,’ she wrote in late August. She moved quickly to bind the English king closer, and Catherine’s future was formally settled in an agreement signed in London on 1 October 1496.5 She would marry when Arthur, who had just celebrated his tenth birthday, turned fourteen.
A second daughter, Juana, also served to buttress the alliance. She was already engaged to Philip of Burgundy, lord of an extensive and important stretch of land on the North Sea and, as Maximilian’s son, heir to his Habsburg father’s German lands.
Juana was due to leave in the summer of 1496 and Isabella found herself busy preparing the great fleet that would accompany her sixteen-year-old daughter, and a trousseau that needed ninety-six mules to carry it, north to Flanders.6
Isabella’s belief that the alliance needed England urgently was, it turned out, misplaced. The Great Captain was already close to inflicting defeat on the French army in the kingdom of Naples. The lessons learned in Granada, including the use of artillery to overcome castles, had been refined and improved on with Italian help and the discovery that lightly armed but mobile troops could defeat the heavily armoured, cumbersome French cavalry. Spain’s control of the sea and its diplomatic activity in Italy and elsewhere helped to isolate Charles VIII. This was the first great Spanish victory at the start of more than a century of warring as France’s domination of continental Europe weakened and Spain’s increased. By the end of the year, Borgia would show his appreciation, awarding Isabella and Ferdinand the title of ‘Catholic Monarchs’ in acknowledgement of their conquest of Granada, the expulsion of the Jews, their promise to fight the Turks and, crucially, their opposition to France’s Italian ambitions.7 It was a recognition of power, not piety.
With both Juana and Catherine already engaged, Isabella turned her attention to her other daughters. Her children proved to be as intense and obstinate about their spouses as their own, famously jealous, mother. The short marriage of her eldest daughter Isabella to Prince Afonso, heir to Portugal’s throne, had set the pattern. Although this was a political union, they fell passionately in love, lust or both. She was twenty, he was just fifteen, and their marriage ended dramatically after just eight months with Afonso’s sudden death in July 1491. Like the tragic heroines of the first Spanish sentimental novels that the new printing presses in Burgos and other cities were beginning to produce – including the popular Treatise on the Loves of Arnalte and Lucenda, which was dedicated to the queen’s ladies, who must have been the novels’ most avid readers – the young Isabella reacted dramatically.8 She cut off her magnificent reddish-blonde hair and dressed in the habit of a Poor Clare nun. ‘She does not want to know another man,’ reported Peter Martyr d’Anghiera.9 Food became a challenge and, like her sister Catherine, she appears have suffered some kind of eating disorder – suggesting a perfectionist nature and, perhaps, a demanding mother. Fasting and vigils had left her ‘thinner than a dried-out tree’ and she had vowed to mourn for the rest of her life, becoming obstinate and panicky whenever the subjects of marriage or childbirth were raised.10 But Isabella refused her request to enter a convent. Their daughters were a crucial part of her foreign policy and she and Ferdinand needed the younger Isabella to continue their dynastic alliances. ‘Her parents try to persuade her, they plead and beg that she procreates and gives them grandchildren,’ said Anghiera.11 ‘But she has been surprisingly firm in refusing a second marriage. Such is her modesty and chasteness that she has not eaten at table again since her husband’s death … She flushes and gets nervous whenever the conversation turns to marriage.’ Isabella herself admitted that they were having trouble with their eldest daughter. ‘We have to tell you that the princess, our daughter, is very determined not to marry,’ she wrote to her ambassador in London on 18 August 1496.12
One Italian visitor was surprised to see the queen’s daughter ‘wearing a widow’s habit’, though it seems there was nothing extraordinary about a Spanish widow parading her sorrow in such an exaggerated fashion. ‘Sometimes, when a Spaniard dies, on the day of the funeral, his widow or her closest relative … cries and wails throughout the funeral, pulling at her hair and shouting: “Dear God! Why have you taken from me this man, who was the greatest in the world?” ’ reported one surprised visitor from northern Europe. ‘And she continues with a thousand more words, all lost or mad; and if they do not do it themselves, they hire other women to do it for them, who show exactly the same emotions. It seems their pain is greater in appearance than in their hearts.’13 The infanta Isabella, like her sisters, was also aware that a major part of their task was to produce children who could be heirs to their fathers and grandchildren to both Isabella and Ferdinand, so helping cement alliances with Spain. Her openly expressed fear of childbirth, a frequent cause of death among young women, might also have driven her desire to seek the safety of a convent.14
Her single-minded devotion to her deceased Portuguese husband eventually backfired. The Portuguese were so impressed that their new king Manuel, who had inherited the crown the previous year on the death of his cousin João II (and had been supported by Isabella, who moved to the frontier with troops in case he faced an armed challenge), now wanted her as his wife. Isabella offered him María, her third daughter, but Manuel insisted that only the younger Isabella would do, and she eventually found it impossible to resist her parents’ insistence that she remarry. Among other things, she was told that a place at Manuel’s side would allow her to exercise her religious zeal and promote the kind of reforms that her mother was already carrying out in Castile. What neither parent expected, however, was that she would make personal demands to Manuel before consenting. The younger Isabella had inherited her mother’s prejudices and during her previous spell in Portugal she had, it seemed, felt deep shame at the sight of so many Inquisition suspects flooding freely into Portugal. She had also inherited her mother’s obstinacy and insisted, in a letter to Manuel, that ‘all those condemned over here [in Castile] who are presently in his realms and lordships’15 be expelled before she set foot in Portugal again. Isabella and Ferdinand were forced to excuse and explain their daughter’s behaviour. ‘We were very upset with her for sending it [the letter] without telling us first, but she said that she sent it without informing us because she was worried that we would stop her,’ they explained to Manuel.16
Isabella’s excuses for her daughter’s behaviour remain unconvincing. She herself was given to accusing Manuel of deliberately harbouring conversos and would write to him again in 1504 complaining about that. It is probable that her daughter was merely repeating her mother’s complaints. The impact of all this on Portugal’s religious minorities was devastating, as Manuel readily bowed to his fiancée’s wishes. In November 1496 he expelled the Castilian conversos, though some families obtained papal absolution and were allowed to stay. The following month he ordered the expulsion or conversion of the Jews and, going even further than Isabella’s Castile, added the expulsion of Muslims as well.17 It was as though he was competing with Isabella to see who could be toughest. This was a double blow to those she had already forced out of Castile. ‘A wind of terror swept the Hebrews and particularly those Jews who had come from Castile who lamented: “We have fled from the lion only to fall into the jaws of the bear,” ’ wrote one Jewish chronicler.18 Given the choice between conversion and exile, most Jews again chose the latter. But Manuel was piqued by the suggestion that he might be less devout than his future mother-in-law and tried to outdo her. He ordered the confiscation of all Jewish books, many of which were burned.19 ‘They already took one Jew who loved his books and beat him severely with straps,’ wrote Saba, the fugitive scholar from Zamora.20 ‘As I listened, I stood trembling, walking on with trepidation and fright, and I dug into the middle of a large olive tree which had extensive roots in the ground, and there I hid these books which I had written.’21
Manuel’s real aim was forced conversion, rather than deportation, and just before Easter 1497 he increased the pressure by decreeing that Jewish children under the age of fourteen be taken from their families and forcibly baptised. When the child-snatching failed to break enough wills,22 further force was used. ‘I witnessed with my own eyes how Jews were dragged by the hair to the baptismal fonts; how a father, his head covered [with a prayer shawl] as a sign of his intense grief and with a broken heart, went to the baptismal font accompanied by his son, protesting,’ reported the bishop of Lamego, a royal council member who was hardly a pro-Jewish witness.23 Those who resisted conversion and insisted on leaving were pushed into
an encampment near the Estaus palace in Lisbon24 and forcibly baptised. Some chose martyrdom, smashing Christian statues in the full knowledge that they would be put to death. Of the thousands there, only Saba and some forty men and women avoided baptism. ‘They stripped me, and took away my sons and daughters,’ he said. ‘I was left with nothing. And I and the [forty] others were imprisoned and chained, and after six months the king ordered we be given one broken ship to take us to Arzilla.’25
There is no record of Isabella’s reaction to all this, but she was unlikely to be upset about neighbouring Portugal replicating her own actions in Castile. If anything, it served to justify what she herself had already done. She and Ferdinand, perhaps worried that their new Muslim subjects in Granada would blame them for Portugal’s expulsion order, were surprisingly sympathetic to Portugal’s Moors. In April 1497 they acceded to a request for them to move to Spain. ‘We order that you, your wives, children, men, servants and goods be permitted to come into our kingdoms and to be there as long as you wish,’ they said. The result was a sudden boost in the mudéjar population of Castilian border towns.26
37
Though We Are Clerics … We Are Still Flesh and Blood1
Seville, 1496
Santiago Guerra was just one of the many churchmen to be found in the small, windswept meseta town of Boadilla de Rioseco, forty miles from Valladolid. A long-established and wealthy Cistercian monastery, the Royal Monastery of Benavides, held sway here and those who wore religious habits enjoyed the privileges, status and security that came with them. Those privileges obviously did not include the right to attack and rape local women, but when Guerra did exactly that to a girl from the town’s Cano family, the victim found it impossible to obtain justice from the bishopric of León.2 Instead of being placed on trial, Guerra wandered around Boadilla de Rioseco armed and threatening to kill the girl’s father, Pedro Cano. It was only after the family had appealed directly to the royal authority of Isabella and Ferdinand that a judicial investigation was finally opened.
Isabella of Castile Page 40
