Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  But the city was fatally weakened when it was sacked in 1204, by its fellow Christians of the Fourth Crusade, as the result of a pay dispute. Thereafter it entered a long decline. Its territory shrank each year until it finally encompassed little more than the city itself. Pleas for aid from western Europe went unheeded by western Europeans who were too busy fighting each other to consider the plight of a distant city, and who were still angry at the great schism between Western and Eastern Christianity, which made them unsympathetic to the Orthodox Christians in Constantinople. When the Turkish sultan Mehmed II made his final move in 1453, Constantinople could marshal only 7,000 defenders, including 700 Genoese, to oppose an attacking force of 80,000. The city fell on May 29 after a seven-week siege. The fate of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, is not known for certain. Most accounts say that he personally waded into the fighting and was killed; his body was later identified only by the purple shoes he wore. Fighting alongside him as he went to his death was a nobleman from Spain who was one of the very few western Europeans who had come to help defend the city.

  The final assault and destruction of Constantinople was a horrifying spectacle. Eyewitnesses such as the Genoese archbishop of Mytilene, Leonard of Chios, and Niccolò Barbaro of Venice describe the sack in violent terms, of mass slaughter, rape, and enslavement. Churches were burned down, precious relics discarded, and approximately 120,000 books and manuscripts, some from earliest antiquity, were lost, burned, or destroyed: “From only three days of plunder and careless destruction of books, which held little value for the foot soldiers who sacked the city, the Turks became known by Western scholars as one of the worst threats to high culture and learning Europe had ever faced.”50

  Alarmed observers throughout western Europe thought that all civilization could be at risk. To Isabella, the fall of Constantinople was an omen of the possibility of many bad things that could come to pass. When her court chronicler Alonso de Palencia, a man she paid to tell her story, wrote his account of the times, Isabella’s birth was given about one page. But the account of the fall of Constantinople went on for three pages, with Palencia describing it as a “catastrophe” and a “disaster” that could mean “the extermination of Christianity.”51

  In the following years, survivors wandered around Europe, dazed and bereft. Many had been personally devastated by the conquest of the city. The Muslims disposed of women and children in the same way they had in 711 in Spain. George Sphrantzes, a diplomat employed by the Byzantine emperor Constantine, wrote that his wife and children were taken after the fall of the city and ended up in the possession of the sultan’s mir ahor, master of the horse, “who amassed a great fortune by selling many other beautiful noble ladies.”52

  Western Europeans, particularly those in Spain, were terrified about where the Muslims would strike next. Mehmed swore his horse would eat its oats from the great altar at St. Peter’s in Rome. And, Spain, of course, was considerably closer to Muslim population centers than Rome, just eight miles from North Africa. “Islam twice posed a universal military challenge to Christianity,” writes the historian John McManners. “First during the rapid conquests of the mid-seventh to mid-eighth centuries when, for a time, all Christendom seemed in danger of invasion and defeat. And second, in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, when the Ottomans made their bid for world supremacy.”53

  It was at that second point in time that Princess Isabella was born. And though little is known of those earliest years of her life, neither her birthdate or her baptism, one item seemed notable enough that it was memorialized. It marked the first official action Isabella took, of her own accord, when she was a young girl. It was a donation of money—some 200 maravedis—to be used to help pay the costs of reconquering Granada, the remaining bastion of Muslim control on the Iberian peninsula.

  TWO

  A CHILDHOOD IN THE SHADOWS

  Isabella’s mother never really regained her mental health, and so the child’s older half brother, King Enrique IV, a man who has been called “possibly the single most controversial personality in the history of Medieval Spain,”1 became the dominating figure of Isabella’s childhood, a man whose mercurial whims and moods influenced every aspect of her life. Exactly how and when Isabella first came into close contact with Enrique isn’t clear because so many of the details of her childhood have been lost to time.

  In her earliest years, they saw each other only sporadically. Isabella’s father died when she was three years old and her brother Alfonso was an infant. Sometime after the king’s death in 1454, Queen Isabel took the two children and retreated to a remote rural town, Arévalo, some fifteen miles from Isabella’s birthplace of Madrigal de las Altas Torres, and far from the glitter of court life. Arévalo was another heavily fortified town, located at the confluence of the Adaja and Arevalillo Rivers and site of a powerful fortress that had once housed the imprisoned wife of a former king. Isabella’s new home was a castle with thick stone walls with tiny windows high off the ground and blank exterior walls, a residence never modified for comfort, light, or airiness, surrounded by a dry moat. It was far off the beaten track: Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, a noted scholar associated with the court, called it forlorn, “esta desierta villa de Arévalo.”2 Enrique had wanted the queen to remain at court with the children, and when she refused, the king sent two hundred men to act as guards over them, which protected them from marauding gangs of robbers and kidnappers but also kept them closely sequestered.3 Even the physical environment was fierce and brutal, alternating between bitter cold in the winter and blistering heat in the summer. The snow-capped Guadarrama Mountains were visible in the distance, many miles away, across the flat, dry countryside.

  The instability of Isabella’s family life mirrored conditions in the kingdom as a whole. The vacuum of leadership under the feckless King Enrique had permitted the kingdom to descend into chaos. The kingdom’s nobles, who could have helped rule in their regions, instead became brutal and bickering warlords, terrorizing the peasantry, cornering the resources of an increasingly impoverished land. Rape, theft, and murder were rampant.

  This social breakdown occurred because the Iberian peninsula of Isabella’s youth was splintered into feuding fiefdoms: the combined kingdoms of Isabella’s homeland, known as Castile and León, encompassed the north and central parts of what would become Spain; the Portuguese held the lands along the western edge, facing directly onto the Atlantic Ocean. The Kingdoms of Valencia, Aragon, and Catalonia, in eastern Iberia, were joined together in an uneasy and unstable confederation, yoked through marriage to Navarre, a separate kingdom on the peninsula’s far north perimeter; they were oriented toward the east, to the Mediterranean Sea. The Moorish Kingdom of Granada, which stretched across the southern part of Spain from the Rock of Gibraltar to the port of Almería, the area known as Andalusia, controlled the Mediterranean coastline across from Africa.

  With no central authority on the peninsula, chaos reigned, and most of the residents of Spain lived, as Isabella did, near or inside heavily armed compounds. The landscape was so dotted with these stone or wood fortifications, many planted atop steep precipices, that the central kingdom was named Castile, or Land of Castles. The Spanish people lived indoors, crouched behind thick walls made of stone, peering out through tiny windows that served as arrow slits, scanning the horizon for signs of danger, existing in a state of perpetual readiness for conflict. Isabella grew up in a land that was almost perpetually at war.

  Despite all these problems, Isabella had a particular advantage. During her childhood, a coterie of competent adults stepped in to fill the parental void in the lives of Isabella and Alfonso, during the years in which they learned to walk and talk. Only one of their grandparents was still alive, Queen Isabel’s mother, Isabel of Barcelos, a Portuguese widow in her fifties who came from the wealthy and powerful Braganza clan. Grandmother Isabel came to live with her daughter’s family in Arévalo when the young Princess Isabella was still a toddler. She kept a watchfu
l eye over the household. Isabel of Barcelos was an intelligent and competent woman, with life experience that allowed her to help shape Isabella’s worldview and prepare her for governance. “A notable woman of great counsel,” she was also a “great help and consolation to her daughter,” said chronicler Diego de Valera.4

  Grandmother Isabel was part of what the Portuguese call “the Illustrious Generation,” the children of King João I of Portugal, who lived from 1358 to 1433. His oldest son, Duarte, was known as a philosopher; the next son, Pedro, was a patron of the arts; another son was Henrique, the famous Henry the Navigator; the youngest son, Fernando, martyred in Morocco during a failed invasion attempt, was named a saint. Isabel’s own husband had been João, the son best known for his sage advice and wisdom, who had held the influential position of constable of Portugal. Grandmother Isabel also had royal blood, as she was herself a granddaughter of King João I. The Portuguese ruling family believed the key to the future was maritime seafaring and international trade, and they aggressively pursued it. Such overseas expansions were enriching Portugal and giving it an outsize role in world affairs. These were lessons taught to Princess Isabella and that she took to heart.

  A husband-and-wife team attached to the family would also play a significant continuing role in Isabella’s life. The wife was Clara Alvarnáez, Isabella’s governess, who had come to Castile from Portugal with Isabella’s mother and grandmother. Clara’s husband, Gonzalo Chacón, had been a courtier to Isabella’s father, King Juan II, and he was one of the people to whom the king had entrusted the education of his children. Chacón was also administrator of Queen Isabel’s household—a role he had also played for Álvaro de Luna, which meant that he, like Isabella’s mother and grandmother, had previously participated in the governing of the kingdom. They were out of the limelight now, but they had all lived in the bright, hot center where politics, family, and governance intersected. Moreover, they were ambitious to return to the focal point of power.

  The governor of the castle in Arévalo was a man named Mosén Pedro de Bobadilla, married with three children who became Isabella’s playmates.5 The two families grew close. The Bobadilla family had a long history of service to the crown, with an ancestor who had served as chief of the treasury to Alfonso XI, and who had been sent as an ambassador to the pope at Avignon. Pedro’s daughter Beatriz, who was about a decade older than Isabella, assumed a sisterly role with the princess. Comely, persuasive, and piercingly intelligent, she became Isabella’s most loyal friend and confidante. From these unlikely beginnings, the two women rose together to dominate Spain. Beatriz was more than a friend. She was a brilliant ally and strategist, with a magic touch for bringing new allies to their side.

  During these years, there was hardly any mention of Isabella’s existence in court documents or chronicles. A scrap or two of a phrase would suggest the princess had been moved from place to place or had been taken to visit a historic site—once she visited the historic Visigothic capital city of Toledo—but nobody was paying much attention to her. She grew up to be pretty, demure, and devout, third in line for the throne but valued mainly for her potential value as a pawn in a political marriage at some future point. Her birth had gone almost unnoticed in Spain and foreign capitals, and her childhood passed unremarked as well. Why would she, in any case, have attracted much attention? Girl children at the time were viewed as scarcely worth mentioning, not just in Christian culture but also in the Hebrew and Arab worlds as well. It was almost inconceivable that a woman would exert any real power, much less change the world.

  In Arévalo the princess was taught her letters and became an avid reader. She was curious about the world, intrigued by accounts of odd and strange animals and plants found in distant lands. She favored stories about King Arthur’s court, and heroic accounts—mythological, biblical, and legendary—of people behaving nobly in the face of adversity. A Hispanicized book about Joan of Arc’s life, called La Poncella de Francia, was presented as a model for Isabella’s life, and Joan’s militant religiosity was explicitly described as a “better example” for Isabella to follow than the lives of “any of the other ladies.”6 Isabella also liked Aesop’s fables, collections of stories about animal characters that teach moral lessons.

  Her formal education was solid but perfunctory. She was taught protocol and domestic skills and was introduced to grammar, philosophy, and history. She was multilingual, reading French and Italian and speaking not just Castilian Spanish but also Portuguese, the language of her mother and grandmother. She was musically gifted, as was her mother, and she played several instruments well and also sang sweetly. She was a good dancer.

  She was not, however, given the education that a man would have received, particularly to a man being prepared to govern. For example, she received no childhood instruction in Latin, the language of international diplomacy. This clear and embarrassing deficiency in her education was one of which she soon became acutely aware.

  Instead she was trained in needlepoint and embroidery, then essential ingredients in the rearing of female children, and was tutored in the other skills expected of the wife of a ruler. She also developed the requisite social skills. She was strong and active, physically fearless, a good horsewoman at home in the saddle. She loved to hunt; she enjoyed parties, games, art, and architecture. Her behavior was viewed as appropriate for her age and station, attracting little additional comment.

  Most important for her future, during these years she developed an iron-willed self-control, which allowed her to conceal her emotions while she pondered how to respond to the situations that presented themselves to her. This came to be an important part of her character because she learned to keep her own counsel. Soon she would realize that this skill was the key to her survival.

  She became devoutly religious. Christianity was the bedrock of life in medieval Europe, and religious instruction formed a large part of Isabella’s education. There was an active Franciscan monastery in Arévalo, so religious scholars were always present, and Isabella became particularly fond of that religious order, and of Saint Francis, its founder, who had dedicated himself to a life of poverty and simplicity. She considered her own patron saints to be Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist, the only one of the twelve apostles who was not martyred in the early days of Christianity, and who had cared for Jesus’s mother in Ephesus in her old age. It was this second patron saint, John the Evangelist, who had written the Gospel according to John, one of the four canonical accounts of the life of Christ.

  Many of her mother’s friends were also deeply religious. Beatriz de Silva, the Portuguese noblewoman who had attracted the king’s eye and been locked in a closet before embracing a religious vocation as a nun, participated in Isabella’s education, as did an attendant of her mother’s named Teresa Enríquez. Beatriz founded a new female religious order, Concepcionistas, which celebrated the special spiritual role played by Jesus’s mother. Enríquez was given the sobriquet loca de sacramento because of her zeal for taking communion. These one-on-one lessons in faith were supplemented in her teenage years by what was viewed as appropriate reading material, such as Friar Martín de Córdoba’s Garden of Noblewomen, which was a guidebook for character development in women, written specifically with Isabella in mind. It stressed extreme piety, even providing a specific list of acceptable activities, which included attending mass each day, reciting prayers, hearing sermons, and conversing with church elders about religious teachings. Female purity was also essential, according to Martín: “Even if a woman’s virtues might have mounted to the heavens, without chastity they are nothing but dross and ashes in the wind; because the woman who is not chaste, even if she is lovely, makes herself foul, and the more beautiful she is, the greater the filth and corruption.”7

  Isabella’s childhood was not altogether austere, however. Although Arévalo and Madrigal were comparative backwaters, one nearby town became a favorite destination for the princess. Medina del Campo, twenty miles from A
révalo, a long day’s ride by horse or mule, was one of Europe’s preeminent shopping destinations. It was a market town that drew merchants from all over the known world who bought and sold rich fabrics, jewelry, foodstuffs, leather goods, tools, toys, cosmetics, medicines, rare spices, and exotic fruits. It was a beautiful town, with forty church and convent spires rising in the sky, and streets lined with splendid homes inhabited by wealthy merchants, financiers, and noblemen.8 Its international ambiance made it one of Castile’s most cosmopolitan cities. “There was no other luxury market in all Europe, not even in the courts of the Italian princes, that could compare with the one of Castile,” writes the historian Jaime Vicens Vives.9