Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  A successful poisoning can mimic natural ailments, making it hard to detect. Arsenic, for example, causes severe gastrointestinal distress and low blood pressure, symptoms that might also accompany acute food poisoning. Poisonous mushrooms, sliced into a salad or sautéed with meat, can cause violet spots to appear on the victim’s skin, making it a popular method of murder at the time, because some kinds of infectious pestilence caused similar discoloration.2 Indeed, Queen María, King Juan’s first wife, and Leonor, Juan’s sister-in-law, queen of Portugal—the Aragonese sisters who died within days of each other—were reported to have been covered with just such spots. If just one of them had died, it would have looked like plague, but because two relatives suddenly perished in cities distant from each other, with notably similar symptoms, it was widely believed that they had fallen victim to foul play.

  Crafty methods of application are the key to success for the poisoner. The Persian queen Parisatys applied poison to one side of a knife and sliced a portion of meat with it, giving the poisoned side to her daughter-in-law while eating the other portion herself without apparent consequence. Antimony, another poison, is soluble in water, and its taste is easily masked with other flavors, making it a favorite with cooks eager to accelerate someone’s journey to the afterlife.

  Poison attained a new level of popularity as the late Middle Ages faded and the Renaissance began, about the same time that Isabella was growing to adulthood. Schools of poison began operating in Venice and Rome. One murder academy was so bold as to distribute a price list, with costs that varied depending on the status of the customer and the identity of the target. Indeed, poisoning became so common on the Italian peninsula that a new word was coined—Italianated—to refer to murder by poison. One prominent Spanish family from Valencia, the Borjas—or Borgias as they were known in Italy—became noted experts in the field after they moved to Rome.

  But others observed that Alfonso’s symptoms didn’t fit neatly into any known category of poisons. Wasn’t it possible that Alfonso had died of plague after all? Certainly it was an omnipresent threat at the time. Virulent and contagious diseases were sweeping through Europe with regularity. The Black Death of the 1350s, brought to Europe via the Silk Road from China, was estimated to have killed one-quarter of the continent’s population. The city of Ávila had reportedly been struck by such an epidemic that very summer.

  But poisoning remained a definite possibility, and almost immediately rumors began circulating that Alfonso had indeed been murdered. King Enrique had ample reason to hate his younger half brother. Seizing his beloved city of Segovia and killing his menagerie of pets certainly would have been enough to turn Enrique into Alfonso’s mortal enemy, even if his younger half brother was not also trying to unseat him from the throne. But who might have actually carried out the deed?

  One possibility, of course, was an anonymous professional answering directly to Enrique. Or the murder could have been performed by Juan Pacheco, Enrique’s paramour and nemesis. He had a long history of double-dealing, of feigning friendship and shifting to treachery. Perhaps he believed that Alfonso’s prospects were dimming, and he decided to throw his support back to Enrique. Removing Alfonso from the situation would make this shift easier to explain. And indeed it soon became evident that Pacheco was communicating and collaborating not just with the rebels opposed to Enrique but also with Enrique himself.

  Other motives may have been at work as well. Alfonso’s support for the conversos of Toledo had suggested that the boy prince would be less malleable than his supporters had hoped; that might have persuaded them to cut their losses. The Spanish historian María Dolores Carmen Morales Muñiz, a biographer of Alfonso who spent years sifting through the evidence, concludes that he was killed.3

  But if someone murdered Alfonso, how had he accomplished it? The episode of the trout pastry at Cardenosa rose to people’s minds almost immediately. Alfonso alone of the party had eaten it; no one else had gotten ill. But scraps of the meal had been fed to the village dogs, and none of them had been visibly sickened. Still, dogs often have a stronger stomach for spoiled food than humans do, and perhaps they ate a poisoned pastry but did not suffer from it.

  Grappling with this new disaster, and far from friends and family members, the grief-stricken young princess turned these questions over in her mind because she had to decide how to tell the kingdom what had happened. And as she reflected on it, she was forced to make a decision about her own future as well. With Alfonso dead, Isabella was now next in line to the throne. And if Alfonso had been viewed as a mortal threat by someone and had been put to death, then Isabella too was in danger. Making an accusation that her brother had been murdered would make her even more of a target. If she made such an accusation, the killer or killers would almost certainly strike again. She declared Alfonso’s death to have been caused by plague. It was at least a way to buy time. She sent out letters informing officials that Alfonso had “died at three o’clock of the pestilence.”4

  Alfonso’s supporters, meanwhile, suddenly became less than protective of Isabella. They moved her quickly to Ávila, where they argued intensely about what to do with her. This was an odd decision: if Alfonso had not been poisoned, then he had died of plague. Now Isabella was being sent to the city that was the epicenter of a new outbreak. The deliberations underscored their chilling lack of concern for her well-being.

  Two men wanted Isabella to declare herself queen. Juan Pacheco wanted to remove her from Ávila, presumably to a place of his own choosing—something that would certainly have rung alarm bells for the young princess. Carrillo wanted to keep her there, despite the epidemic, but where he controlled the garrison. Pacheco said he wanted her to marry King Afonso of Portugal. Carrillo said he wanted her to marry Ferdinand of Aragon.5 Each man intended to make her a puppet who would dance to his will. Isabella found herself a bystander as the men battled it out.

  She had good reason to try to claim the throne for herself. She had joined the rebellion, allying herself with the group who believed Enrique had to be deposed, so it would be consistent for her to take the crown in her own name now. This might also be the safest course. A king, once crossed, cannot be relied upon to be forgiving. Her claim also seemed to have political support: the city of Seville, one of the kingdom’s largest commercial hubs, had quickly proclaimed her queen in Alfonso’s place.6 She was waiting to hear from other cities as well. Officials in Murcia, for example, had been informed of Alfonso’s death and promised to respond promptly.7

  At this point, Isabella made one of the first of many life decisions that demonstrated her steely self-discipline. Throughout history, those who have tasted power, as Alfonso and Isabella had done, have shown enormous reluctance to surrender it. Pretenders to a throne persist in their efforts, often unto their deaths. The nobles urged her to take the throne. Isabella came under intense pressure from them to continue the rebellion, because that would delay their own day of reckoning with the king, and of course, she might possibly win.

  Retreating to the Convent of Santa Ana in Ávila, praying and living among the nuns, Isabella pondered what to do next. Her decision to join Alfonso had turned out to be terribly wrong. She weighed her loyalty to her brother Enrique against her own political ambitions. This time she charted a safer course. Sensibly recognizing that her claim to the throne was weaker than Alfonso’s because she was a woman, and also realizing that the nation had been undecided even about Alfonso’s right to rule, Isabella made her announcement. “Return the kingdom to Don Enrique my brother, and thus you will restore peace to Castile,” she wrote in a letter sent across the kingdom. “But if you hold me daughter of the King Don Juan, my lord and father, and worthy of the name, have the King my brother, and the nobles and prelates, after his life—and may that be long—declare me to be the successor to the realm.… This I will take as the greatest service you can render me.”8

  Enrique was the true king, she told her countrymen, and she should not be seen as the monarch
at this time, but she would be his successor. She underscored her support for his reign, but added a note suggesting she hoped he would govern more wisely. “Now that it has pleased God to take from this life Alfonso my brother,” she wrote to Juan Pacheco and Archbishop Carrillo, “so long as King Enrique may live I shall not take over the government, nor call myself Queen, but will make every effort to the end that King Enrique while he lives, may govern this realm better than he has done.”9

  Enrique responded gratefully and positively, glad to have an opening to put the unpleasant episode behind him. After a flurry of negotiations in Ávila and elsewhere in August 1468, Isabel and her brother reached agreement on many things. She was recognized as his heir, and she was given as her own property the city of Ávila; prosperous Medina del Campo, home of the fairs that drew tradesmen and shoppers from across the continent; and the towns of Huete, Molina, Escalona, and Ubeda, which gave her possessions scattered around the kingdom. She was also assured she would never have to marry against her wishes—but in return, she promised not to marry without Enrique’s consent. Enrique promised to divorce his wife, who had caused him such embarrassment, and send her home.10

  Soon a preliminary deal was struck. Within two weeks, she signed a letter to her old tutor Gonzalo Chacón: “Isabel, by Grace of God Princess and legitimate hereditary successor to these kingdoms of Castile and León.”11

  This was one of the first examples of what observers would come to call the “extraordinary prudence” with which she governed her life.12 A number of cities soon turned tail and swore obedience to the king. The officials in Murcia never responded to Isabella’s letter about Alfonso’s death. If she had allowed her head to be turned by the importuning nobles, she would have ended up without substantial support and in direct personal confrontation with the king, who was soon working to solidify his position.

  Instead, her demonstration of fidelity to the king gave Enrique the priceless gift of saving face, and the two sides formalized the terms of their reconciliation. The king based himself in Cadalso, and Isabella moved to nearby Cebreros, both towns in central Spain, while they hammered out the details. Envoys sped from one camp to the other. Finally, on September 18, 1468, about two months after Alfonso’s death, the two siblings met in person about fifty miles from Ávila, on the fields of Toros de Guisando, a place freighted with ancient significance. The site was known for its life-size, weather-beaten statues of bulls placed at the foot of a mountain pass in some long-ago time, their specific purpose lost to memory. It was a spooky place, from another age of the world, suggestive of Greek mythology’s reverence for bulls and for the sport and festivals related to their life and death.

  Isabella and Enrique were publicly reconciled in this windswept open field. Isabella arrived on a mule with Archbishop Carrillo walking beside her, symbolically representing herself as both royal and humble. In the ceremony that followed, she was officially named the king’s successor, and she, in turn, pledged to marry only with Enrique’s approval. The king granted her all the towns he had promised, and even more symbolically, he also gave her the principality of Asturias, the hereditary title of the heir to the throne.13 The papal nuncio endorsed the arrangement, which gave the event a spiritual veneer.

  The ever-treacherous Juan Pacheco, for his part, emerged at the meeting—this time at the king’s side. He had switched allegiances once more and was almost seamlessly back in the king’s good graces, again his closest councilor and confidant. King Enrique appeared to have forgiven Pacheco all that he had done. The person who stood by Isabella at that perilous moment, both figuratively and literally, was Carrillo, the archbishop of Toledo, making himself the likely target of the mercurial king’s wrath.

  In the coming weeks, the king recognized Isabella publicly as his heir, even to the humiliating point of admitting that the child Juana was not his own. “I married and procreated in such a manner in these kingdoms that I do not have a legitimate successor to my lineage,” he told town officials throughout the kingdom in a letter.14

  Queen Juana, for her part, was further disgraced, having borne another child while living separately from Enrique during the civil war. While Alfonso and Enrique had been off on campaign against each other, Juana had been lodged for safekeeping with Bishop Fonseca and had become, embarrassingly enough, pregnant by the prelate’s nephew. Even so, when she learned about the negotiations between the king and Isabella, she was furious. She had not given up hope that her daughter would become queen. In advanced pregnancy, she sought to depart from Bishop Fonseca’s home by night: she arranged for her servants to help her out of an open window and into a basket to be lowered to the ground. The ropes broke, however, and the queen tumbled to the ground, suffering bruises and scrapes. A widely circulated story had it that the disheveled queen had then rushed to the house of her onetime suitor Beltrán de la Cueva seeking sanctuary—and found him disporting himself with a band of male friends. He was reported to have rudely sent her on her way, returning to tell his snickering friends that he had never much cared for her “skinny legs.” Queen Juana was forced to travel on in search of friends and allies, finally reaching the home of the powerful Mendoza family. The Mendozas were traditionalists who supported royal prerogatives, and they sheltered the queen.

  The king and Isabella, meanwhile, had departed from Toros de Guisando and rode off together to Cadalso, where Enrique had been staying, to dine together and mend fences. Isabella reunited with Enrique wholeheartedly, presenting to him a “very happy face” and full “obedience,” a chronicler reported, and soon afterward, when Enrique left for the town of Ocaña, Isabella traveled with him.15

  Isabella spent the next nine months in Ocaña, a municipality controlled by Pacheco located some distance from the cities she knew best—Segovia and Madrigal—and a place where she was a stranger. But this new location had its advantages: She was able to stay in the home of Gutierre de Cárdenas, the nephew of Gonzalo Chacón, her childhood mentor from Arévalo. This put her among friends. Both Cárdenas and Chacón had supported Alfonso, so her living arrangement also showed that Enrique trusted her once again and was allowing her to select her own entourage. Isabella’s financial situation improved as well, as Enrique finally turned over to her the jurisdiction and revenues from Medina del Campo. Isabella began to prepare herself for her future role as queen, writing to nobles and presiding over events. She was now princess of Asturias.16

  But within weeks, once the rebel army disbanded, Enrique’s promises again proved fleeting and unreliable. It became clear that he did not intend to do all the things he had said he would. He didn’t transfer the other properties he had pledged to Isabella, and at Juan Pacheco’s urging, he began to undercut her position in many small ways. Archbishop Carrillo became worried enough for her that he established himself in a fortress seven miles from Ocaña, where he could keep an eye on the comings and goings of her court, and he bribed servants there to keep him apprised of developments.17

  There were soon many reasons for concern. As time went on, Queen Juana’s adamant insistence that little Juana was the king’s own daughter convinced more people, and the king became ashamed that he had disinherited the child, whom he truly loved, and ashamed also of reports about his impotence and his “weakness of heart.” Soon he came to blame Isabella for everything that had hurt him and damaged the realm. “And the king… not only lost the love he had borne for the princess, but also came to view her with hatred,” an eyewitness recalled later.18

  Then, contrary to the promises Enrique had made, he began pressing once again for a foreign marriage that would dispose of Isabella by sending her abroad. Her new strategic importance and position guaranteed that many potential husbands now came courting. Her good looks and social graces added to her allure as marriage material. She had reached full physical maturity by this point and many people found her lovely. A chronicler described her as being “of middle height, well made in her person and in the proportion of her limbs, very white and fair;
her eyes between gray and blue, her glance graceful and modest, the features of her face well set, her face very beautiful and gay.”19

  Four suitors, at least, would receive serious consideration from Enri-que in the year ahead.

  One was another intriguing English candidate, a man about the same age as Isabella. He was Richard, the soon-to-be-famous younger brother of King Edward IV.20 He was described as being of middle height, darker in hair and skin tone than his fair-haired and taller Plantagenet brothers, and he had the misfortune to have been born with one shoulder higher than the other. But he had a number of good qualities. He had won acclaim by leading part of the army in defense of Edward and had become the second most powerful man in England, after the king. At this point he was considered a suitable match for the princess. But Richard did not remain long in the marriage contention. He was the first candidate rejected, because Castile was already moving toward a break in diplomatic relations with England that would happen in July 1469, for an ephemeral combination of political, economic, and military reasons.21

  That was a lucky turn of events for Isabella, for although Richard eventually became king of England as Richard III, he lost power and was killed in the brutal civil war that brought the usurping Tudor family to power in the person of King Henry VII. “Entirely loyal himself, he was unable to recognize treachery in others or to deal with it with sufficient ruthlessness when it became obvious,” writes the historian V. B. Lamb. “His leniency towards traitors was both remarkable and fatal; it cost him his crown, his life, and his reputation.”22

  Richard’s reputation was later to be sullied by none other than William Shakespeare, who curried favor with the Tudor dynasty by painting a grotesque portrait of Richard III as a dark and hunchbacked villain who had murdered his brother’s two young sons. “It was quite remarkable how the views of men of letters changed almost overnight after Henry’s usurpation,” one historian said acidly.23 Isabella had thus avoided association with that dismal page of history.