Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  The second bachelor candidate was Charles of Valois, Duke of Berry, the younger brother of the French king, Louis XI. The historic animosity between Spain and France made that match less than likely. Isabella made discreet inquiries about him just the same: she sent a chaplain secretly to France to get a look at the duke. He reported back to her that Charles was “soft and effeminate, with spindly legs and weepy half-blind eyes.”24 It was an assessment unlikely to win a young woman’s heart.

  Pushing for that candidate nonetheless, Louis’s envoys visited Isabella in Madrigal de las Altas Torres, where she was staying with her mother. Isabella was careful not to show her hand. “She merely indicated she would obey the laws of the realm, and do what was best for the honor, esteem and glory of Castile and the Castilian crown”: that ambiguous answer allowed her to maintain her countenance while still appearing compliant with the men’s negotiations over her future.25 Soon Charles too was put on the sidelines.

  That left two plausible prospects for Isabella’s life partner, both men from the Iberian peninsula, and both closely related to her. The first was King Afonso V of Portugal, her mother’s thirty-seven-year-old cousin. He was the candidate favored by the powerful Mendoza clan, by Juan Pacheco, and by the king, even though he was not a particularly attractive choice for a seventeen-year-old woman.

  Even the way Afonso publicly presented himself would likely have made him unappealing to a teenage girl. Tapestries from the period commissioned by the Portuguese king depict him wearing overly elaborate and out-of-fashion, old-school armor rather than the newer styles preferred by younger warriors and their ladies.

  Afonso was the marriage partner whom Enrique preferred for personal reasons. Enrique continued to be tormented by mixed feelings about little Juana. Her parentage was tarnished, but he clung to the idea that she was his daughter and that he should protect her prospects if only he could find a way to do so. Under this plan, Isabella would marry King Afonso, and Juana would marry his son, the heir to the Portuguese throne, Prince João. That would mean that Juana’s children would most likely reign over both countries, and Isabella would be consigned to the sidelines of history, married fruitlessly to a man she considered “odious.”26

  But the cards were stacked in King Afonso’s favor, as King Enrique sought to take revenge on his young sister by forcing her into a marriage she dreaded. Afonso, for his part, was most favorably impressed by the pretty princess he believed favored his suit, and in his mind, his amorous and dynastic ambitions merged. He began seeing the marriage as a transaction completed. On April 30, 1469, Enrique and Afonso reached a final agreement on the terms of the marriage. The nuptials were to take place two months after Afonso’s arrival in Castile, and if Isabella did not agree to it, she and her supporters were to be declared outlaws. This agreement expressly gave Afonso the right to wage war on Castile if the marriage did not occur. The terms of the agreement allowed Afonso to begin calling himself Prince of Asturias, giving him the title traditionally borne by the heir to the Castilian throne. There was also a backup plan: if the marriage did not take place, Afonso would have the right to marry young Juana and, in alliance with Enrique, to wage war upon Isabella and her allies.27

  But Isabella had another marital possibility as well, and this was the choice closest to her heart, the young man she had believed was her intended in her childhood. He was Ferdinand, an attractive sixteen-year-old, a second cousin who was destined to rule in neighboring Aragon and Catalonia. The death of his older brother Carlos had made Ferdinand an even more attractive match than he had been as a child. Moreover, he was already a crowned head of state: his father had recently named him king of Sicily, and marrying him would at once make Isabella a queen. Ferdinand was also the preferred choice of Alfonso Carrillo, archbishop of Toledo, who for years had been working stealthily and steadily to advance his cause, in tandem with Ferdinand’s father, King Juan of Aragon.

  King Enrique flatly forbade Isabella to marry Ferdinand.

  Despite her brother’s adamant opposition, the princess, who was soon to turn eighteen, believed that Ferdinand would make the best husband for her. Unbeknown to her brother, she was already secretly negotiating a marriage contract with Ferdinand.

  “It has to be he and no other,” Isabella privately told her allies.28

  FIVE

  MARRIAGE

  Isabella had privately decided that the young and athletic Ferdinand of Aragon was her choice. Ferdinand felt the same way. But as in any good romance, their union would face formidable obstacles. Thus began a story that Spaniards, ever the romantics, would weave into legend.

  The marriage negotiations between Isabella and Ferdinand had to be conducted clandestinely, through secret messages and undercover communications. Enrique might have broken many of his promises to Isa-bella, but she still had committed herself not to marry without his permission. So the young couple corresponded at first by letter. One early exchange already conveys the discreet flirtatiousness and clever manipulation of male psychology that would be Isabella’s hallmark. Having received a letter from Ferdinand, she wrote back, in a letter that any seventeen-year-old boy would have found pleasing in its feminine submissiveness and its promise of sexual pleasure ahead: “Now you should inform me what you wish to be done, for that I must do.… From the hand that will do as you may order, La Princesa.”1

  A marriage compact between the pair was finalized on March 5, 1469. Ferdinand promised to respect the rights of the Castilian cities and acknowledged that Isabella would be the true monarch of that land. He also pledged to reside permanently in Castile.2

  The couple had a religious hurdle to surmount as well. The Catholic Council of Agde, a conference of bishops held in A.D. 506 to integrate Roman and Germanic laws as the Roman Empire collapsed, had prohibited marriages of first or second cousins, unless the church gave special permission. Ferdinand and Isabella were second cousins, sharing the same great-grandfather, King Juan I of Castile, so they needed a permit from the pope, known as a papal dispensation, for their marriage to be legal. Such paperwork could be costly and difficult to obtain, because the pope had to be convinced to approve the union. King Juan of Aragon solved the problem by obtaining the dispensation from the bishop of Segovia, Juan Arias, who based his decision on a marriage dispensation that King Juan told him he had gotten from the pope in the past.

  Isabella’s allies, including Archbishop Carrillo and Gonzalo Chacón, arranged for a relatively safe proxy wedding ceremony between her and Ferdinand, which soon occurred. She was supposed to receive a wedding gift of 40,000 gold florins.3 The promised cash did not arrive in full, but part of it did, as well as a gift of jewels, which Isabella soon began to flaunt.

  Then the teenagers decided to stage an in-person marriage. This would be far more difficult to arrange, as there were several obstacles. The powerful king of Portugal, who was self-confidently building a global empire for the maritime nation he had inherited, believed he was Isabella’s destined bridegroom. King Enrique, sensing that something was in the wind, threatened Isabella with imprisonment in Madrid if she tried to leave the city. King Juan feared for his son’s life if he were captured in Castile. Consequently, the initial rendezvous between Ferdinand, seventeen, and Isabella, now eighteen, was cloaked in secrecy and high drama. The teenagers and their allies concocted an elaborate subterfuge and bided their time.

  First they waited until King Enrique left Ocaña, in central Castile, to deal with some pressing administrative problems in Andalusia. The king made the princess promise specifically not to marry while he was gone. But he was scarcely out of town when Princess Isabella announced her plan to visit her brother’s tomb in Arévalo, which was also her mother’s home and her own childhood residence. This was a logical excuse—her beloved brother had been dead for only a year and his memorial rites were overdue. She left Ocaña at night, on horseback, accompanied by two attendants.

  The trip did not begin well. King Enrique had given Arévalo to his ally, the
Count of Plasencia, and the count, fearing that Isabella intended to reclaim the city for her mother, stopped her at the gate and blocked her from entering. Isabella had to be content with honoring Alfonso’s body in the Franciscan convent where he was buried. She then traveled to see her mother, who had been moved to Madrigal de las Altas Torres.

  In these few weeks, Isabella was more alone than she had ever been. She was putting herself directly and openly at odds with her brother the king, and with the Portuguese king as well, who was threatening to bring war on her head if necessary to stop her from marrying another man. Her mother was no help; her mental health problems made her dependent on Isabella rather than a source of strength. Isabella’s beloved grandmother had died by this time, and now faint-hearted friends dropped away as well. Even some of Isabella’s closest friends turned against her. Juan Pacheco had convinced Beatriz de Bobadilla and Mencía de la Torre, Isabella’s ladies-in-waiting, that a marriage to Ferdinand would be a bad idea and to block it. The women participated in a plan to track Isabella and watch her whereabouts.

  In Madrigal, Isabella learned how closely she was being watched. King Enrique knew where she was staying, and at his suggestion the French envoys went there to present their proposed betrothal of Isabella with the French king’s brother, the Duke of Berry. When they arrived, she temporized with them coolly, despite the fact that she was already secretly married by proxy to Ferdinand at the time. She handled it so glibly that the arrogant French diplomats left thinking they had successfully wooed the princess and that she would soon become the duke’s bride. They rushed off to France with the good tidings.

  But King Enrique, aware that Isabella had disobeyed him by leaving Ocaña, grew suspicious and warned officials in Madrigal that they would be punished if she succeeded in marrying Ferdinand. The princess fled with a few companions to a nearby town, then to a convent, and then to Ávila, where frantic watchmen waved her party away from the city’s high medieval walls—it had been struck once again with plague. After a journey that lasted almost a full day, the princess finally staggered into the city of Valladolid, where town officials promised to give her haven. The archbishop of Toledo’s niece, María, wife of a nobleman named Juan de Vivero, welcomed the princess to her home near the city’s central square. Isabella arrived on the night of August 30, 1469.

  Meanwhile, Ferdinand was facing a harrowing journey as well. Two envoys from Isabella—Gonzalo Chacón’s nephew, Gutierre de Cárdenas, and the courtier Alonso de Palencia—were sent to Aragon to escort him to Castile. They learned that they would face almost universal opposition on the return journey and that the castles along the frontier were on the watch for the young lovers. Cárdenas thought Ferdinand would not come; Palencia thought he would because when he had gone to collect the jewels that were the wedding gift, Ferdinand had been eager to ride to Isabella’s rescue and free her from her overbearing older brother.4

  Palencia and Cárdenas arrived in Zaragoza and met the young prince amid great secrecy in a cell of a Franciscan monastery.5 They found him eager to rush to Isabella’s side.

  But Ferdinand had to find a way to sneak across the heavily guarded border from Aragon into Castile without attracting attention. The trip was more than 225 miles, over a steep mountain range. Ferdinand decided to travel by night, incognito, with only five close friends as his guard. This was a brave move: conditions in both Castile and Aragon were so perilous that most people traveled in large groups for self-defense.

  The young prince, attractive, slim, and strong, donned ragged clothes and disguised himself as a mule driver, even acting as servant to his companions at an inn, to keep his identity a secret. They moved smoothly and surreptitiously, usually traveling by night to avoid Enrique’s spies. They took refuge on one occasion in a fortress near El Burgo de Osma, at about the halfway point. They arrived earlier than expected and startled a night sentry who was not expecting them. The sentinel raised an alarm, shouting, and threw a large rock down at the strangers attempting to enter the castle’s gates, narrowly missing the prince. But Ferdinand was eventually recognized and welcomed by nobles in the castle who supported his cause, and he traveled the rest of the way to Valladolid, where Isabella was waiting, with a two-hundred-man military escort.

  Princess Isabella wrote her brother on October 12, 1469, telling him of her plans and asking him to accept her decision. She had informed him but not gained his consent. Now the die was cast.

  Finally, on the evening of October 14, Isabella and Ferdinand met at midnight at the home of Juan de Vivero, the Castilian nobleman who was related to the archbishop of Toledo, who was helping orchestrate the match. Ferdinand and his entourage arrived by horseback at the fortified palace, located in the heart of Valladolid, and was brought inside by the back entrance. As he entered the room, Gutierre de Cárdenas excitedly shouted, “Ese es, ese es,” exuberantly pointing him out to Isabella.

  But they had spotted each other right away. When they saw each other for the first time, they both gazed in admiration. Some nobles had insisted Isabella require Ferdinand to kiss her hand as a sign of obeisance; she said it was not necessary, that they were equals, and that he was perhaps even her superior as a reigning king.

  Isabella saw before her a well-made young man, slightly shorter than she, with his hair cut in the fashionable long and underturned style that was very much the rage in Europe. His travel clothes had been set aside, and he arrived “richly dressed,” for Ferdinand always made an elegant appearance.6 While not exactly handsome, he was fit and athletic, darker-complexioned than Isabella and swarthy in a rakish way. He appeared to her as a fine specimen of manhood.

  Young Ferdinand “was a man of middle height, well proportioned in his limbs, his features well-composed, his eyes merry, his hair dark and straight, and of good complexion,” wrote the chronicler Hernando del Pulgar.7 “He rode very well; he jousted with ease.… He was a keen sportsman and a man of good endeavor and much activity at war.… He had a singular grace, to wit, that all who spoke to him at once loved him and wished to serve him, for he had a friendly intercourse.”

  The youth had a passionate nature, something that no doubt quickly communicated itself to the pretty young princess. They liked each other so well and so instantaneously that they might have begun to embrace almost immediately, Palencia recalled, noting that the “amorous impulses” of the two were evident, restrained only by the presence of the fifty-nine-year-old archbishop of Toledo, who chaperoned the meeting, which lasted two hours.

  They exchanged formal promises to marry, which were recorded as a legal matter by a notary. The archbishop read aloud the marriage agreement as well as the papal dispensation because of close blood kinship of the bride and groom. With the legal formalities out of the way, Archbishop Carrillo thought it best that they marry as soon as possible in case Enrique unexpectedly returned from Andalusia.

  Five days later, on October 19, 1469, Isabella and Ferdinand were formally wed, in the great hall, or sala rica, of the Vivero home. The marriage ceremony was followed by a nuptial mass. The couple were so poor that they were compelled to borrow to meet the wedding expenses.8 The official witnesses were the Admiral and María de Acuña, Ferdinand’s grandfather and aunt; a large crowd of local dignitaries were present as well.

  The marriage was consummated that night, to the satisfaction of all parties. Witnesses entered the bridal chamber playing trumpets, flutes, and kettledrums, and the bloodstained bedsheet was displayed to the expectant crowd outside.9 Seven days of great celebrations followed in Valladolid; the townspeople cheered the couple’s passage through the streets.

  This first meeting and their nuptials became the stuff of legend. Isabella had fallen deeply in love with the gallant young prince; he proved an ardent suitor. Her brother’s opposition provided ample reason for concern, but surely he would soon see the appropriateness of the match and bless their union.

  Even one possible cause of trouble might also have been, properly considered, a blessing
in disguise. Ferdinand was intelligent, charming, and passionate, yes, but even at his young age he came into her world encumbered with two illegitimate children. They would need to be provided for in some way. Given the fertility problems in Isabel’s family, however, Ferdinand’s proven virility probably seemed an asset.

  Only one truly disquieting note hung in the air. It would probably have escaped the attention of an enamored young woman, but it was no doubt on the minds of many of the wedding guests. Ferdinand was a prestigious marriage partner because he was the heir to a rich and important set of kingdoms. He was already king of Sicily and would one day inherit Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia, with its crown jewel being the splendid city of Barcelona. But he had become the heir only as a result of the sudden, unexpected deaths of his older brother and sister. Just what, exactly, had happened to Carlos and Blanca?

  SIX

  FERDINAND AND HIS FAMILY

  From nearby Aragon, King Juan, Ferdinand’s seventy-one-year-old father, watched avidly as events unfolded in Valladolid. This successful marriage represented the culmination of his lifelong plan to gain control of neighboring Castile, which he had enviously coveted ever since his boyhood years.

  King Juan was sending his beloved son Ferdinand off to gamble his life—for the family’s enemies would willingly have killed the young man—for the goal his father had sought for decades, mastery of Castile. So Juan kept a close eye on news from Valladolid, using a network of correspondents and spies to watch and report back everything that happened.