Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  But King Juan’s wife became hysterical at the news of this prospective match, which would thwart her plans for her son Ferdinand. The Aragonese chronicler Jerónimo Zurita said the queen was reported to have been “crying and cursing.”12 King Juan decided to steer Carlos toward a marriage with the Portuguese princess Catalina instead, and Carlos allowed himself to be lured back to his father’s side with what a historian subsequently called “specious assurances of paternal goodwill.”13 Instead Juan seized Carlos and held him as his prisoner. This act dismayed the Catalans, who considered Carlos the rightful heir and believed King Juan was upending the law. “Sympathy for Carlos, a seemingly penitent son harshly used by a vengeful father,” was “universal.”14

  The crisis came to a head on February 6, 1461, in Lleida, in Catalonia. Catalan emissaries insisted that King Juan release Carlos and acknowledge him as his heir. Juan refused to allow them even to present their case, saying he was too busy. He tried to leave the town but found the gates closed against him.

  Juan then faced the emissaries and coldly insisted that Ferdinand would be his heir. “Ambassadors, you shall have no prince other than my son, don Ferdinand,” he said, in a statement that was followed by a fanfare of trumpets and a listing of Ferdinand’s titles, among them Prince of Aragon. The Catalans angrily responded in shouts: “Don Carlos, by the grace of God!”15

  King Juan was eventually forced to accept Carlos as his heir, but he accepted this bitter pill with ill-concealed rage: “Publicly Juan ordered celebrations and illuminations in Zaragoza to make the accord; privately he nursed a yet deeper hatred of Carlos and the Catalans who had brought him to this humiliating pass. Age had not dimmed his fiery energy nor his thirst for revenge against those who had thwarted him.”16

  The Catalans almost certainly thought Juan, a blind and ailing sixty-three-year-old, would die soon, and that by maintaining their opposition, they could eventually outwait him. But Juan surprised them, by tenaciously hanging on to life and undergoing surgery to restore his eyesight.

  Instead it was Carlos who died, in Barcelona on September 23, 1461, after a brief illness. Many people believed he had been poisoned, possibly by his stepmother Queen Juana, who had openly lobbied for her son Ferdinand’s elevation as king. The circumstances were not entirely clear. Carlos had suffered a bout of pneumonia; the historian Alan Ryder blames Carlos’s death on “pulmonary infection aggravated by stress.”

  But the timing certainly looked bad. Even if Juan had not ordered his son’s murder, Carlos’s death certainly seemed a fortunate development for him, as it paved the way for his and his wife’s favored child, nine-year-old Ferdinand, to become his rightful heir.

  But Ferdinand’s path to the throne was still not easy. The Catalan public, convulsed with grief over Carlos’s death, was slow to embrace the new heir. Instead, amid huge public demonstrations of sorrow in Barcelona, some began calling the recently deceased Carlos a saint and venerating his remains. Contact with his coffin was said to cure tumors, heal skin diseases, and restore sight to the blind. Vast crowds gathered to witness these miraculous recoveries, and word spread widely that “the lord primogenit” continued to do great deeds through the “divine power” contained in his remains.17

  King Juan tried to dispel these stories, saying that poor people were being bribed to report miraculous cures, but it was hard for him to maintain moral authority when he simultaneously announced that Ferdinand’s mother Juana, the woman believed to be the poisoner of Carlos, would now act as regent for Ferdinand as the heir apparent because of the boy’s youth. Carlos’s death in some ways served to heighten tensions in Aragon rather than diminish them.

  The young Ferdinand could therefore travel the kingdom only when accompanied by a large entourage to ensure his safety from his own subjects. His mother traveled to Barcelona but departed abruptly, fearful of attack. After Ferdinand and his mother left, their opponents claimed that the queen had been involved in a plot to kill people who “revered blessed Saint Carlos”; the rebel groups publicly executed several officials who they claimed had participated in the queen’s scheme.

  With the population showing so little respect for the ruling family, confrontations between nobles and bands of armed peasants broke out across the countryside, leading to violence. To gain support for suppressing his rebellious subjects, Juan embarked on a serpentine set of secret treaties and arrangements that would have long-lasting and complicated consequences.

  The next person to fall victim to these intrigues was his eldest daughter Blanca, who was back home after the end of her marriage to Enrique. She had loved and supported her brother Carlos, and now, as a result of Carlos’s death, she was the heir to the Navarrese throne, although unmarried women were not allowed to govern alone in that kingdom. But that made her an obstacle in King Juan’s path. Juan conveyed his unfortunate daughter into the custody of the Countess of Foix, Blanca’s younger sister. Blanca was “carried off by force into France [and] died in captivity,” widely believed to have been killed by poison.18

  Blanca’s death was another extremely fortunate event for King Juan and his second family. But before she died, Blanca had reasserted her own claim to Navarre and bequeathed her claim to the kingdom to her former husband, King Enrique of Castile. In other words, she had preferred that her former husband, who had rejected her in such a humiliating fashion, inherit her realm rather than her duplicitous father and younger half brother.

  Sending his daughter to France was only the first step in King Juan’s new scheme. He entered into a secret treaty with King Louis XI of France to get his help in putting down his rebellious subjects. Louis was to send an army to aid Juan in defeating the rebellion in Catalonia. In exchange, Juan promised to permit French garrisons to occupy the Aragonese castles of Perpignan and Collioure. By this extraordinary action, King Juan ceded land to Aragon’s ancestral enemy, France. “With this reckless, ill-judged agreement,” Ryder writes, “which was to haunt the rest of his life, Juan had thrown away any remaining hope of a peaceful solution to the troubles of Catalonia.”19

  King Juan was determined to bring his subjects to heel at any cost. He launched a raid on Lleida and destroyed the harvest, threatening the town with starvation. Astonished and horrified by the ferocity with which their king undertook to subdue them, the Catalans became even more determined to unseat Juan and his family. Catalonian officials told Juana that they were stripping her of her position as queen and asked her to leave, taking Ferdinand with her if she chose. The queen decided to fight. She took up her position in the fortress at Girona and, with the king’s encouragement, prepared for war. The assault on the fortress began on June 6, 1463. On June 26 a large party of soldiers briefly broke through the walls, panicking the defenders. Juana reportedly ran through the streets looking for her son; when she found the twelve-year-old playing outside the cathedral, she fell into an exhausted faint. The attackers finally faded away, demoralized and out of money, by July 22, but it had been a long seven weeks for the besieged mother and son. King Juan’s hard line had succeeded.

  Hatred and contempt for King Juan grew among his subjects, however. Word of Juan’s secret treaty with France disgusted the Catalans, who considered the French their longtime mortal enemy, and they viewed Juan as a traitor for opening the doors of the kingdom to them. As one historian writes, “The triumphant royalist cause was now identified with foreign oppression and atrocity.”20

  To fight Juan, the Catalans needed a powerful ally, and much as Juan had turned to the French, the Catalan nobles now turned to Castile and its king Enrique, who had been a friend to Carlos. They stripped the right to succession from Ferdinand and offered it instead to Enrique, whose first impulse was not to seize the opportunity but to hesitate. Before he accepted their offer, he said, he needed to seek advice from his council, which caused a delay of some weeks; but in the meantime, he took under his control a few scattered towns in King Juan’s kingdoms. This development, of course, infuriated King Juan. Instead
of King Juan seizing Castile from a weak ruler, that weak ruler was now claiming soil that Juan considered his own. Juan now faced the prospect of war not just within his own kingdom but also against the Castilians.

  Just as risk of hostilities between Castile and Aragon was opening, the French king Louis cunningly offered to arbitrate between the two nations. He took a bribe from King Juan for handling the task, and he gave a bribe to Juan Pacheco for enabling it to happen. King Enrique arrived at the meeting place to discuss the judgment. Typically awkward and insecure, Enrique showed up in splendid array, surrounded by a three-hundred-member Moorish bodyguard, but King Louis induced him to cross the River Bidassoa to reach the parley location. Compelling Enrique to ford the river in his party clothes put him on the defensive, making him appear both bedraggled and overdressed. Then Louis, ostentatiously underdressed, delivered the coup de grâce: he announced that Enrique should yield Catalonia to Juan and also disgorge territories that the Castilians had seized in Navarre, Valencia, and Aragon. Catalonia was told it had to submit to this judgment, though the Catalans had not been party to the deliberations.

  The Castilians and Catalans were aghast. King Enrique, humbled once again, slunk away, with the dawning realization that he had been played for a fool by his best friend, Juan Pacheco, and by his former father-in-law, King Juan of Aragon. This was another reason King Enrique opposed Isabella’s marriage to Ferdinand.

  The Catalans, meanwhile, saw in this still another reason to despise their sovereign, King Juan of Aragon, who had betrayed their interests once again. In June 1463 the Catalan council made it a crime punishable by death to utter even a good word about him.

  But King Juan’s ambitions for himself and his son remained undimmed. Ferdinand was named heir to the throne of Aragon and Sicily on September 21, 1464. Even his opponents recognized that he was strong, sturdy, and competent, and youth always stirs optimism, so there was a prospect that his ascension would improve conditions in Aragon.

  By July 1465, when Princess Isabella was fourteen and Ferdinand was thirteen, King Juan was back to his old trick of trying to destabilize Castile, even as he struggled to maintain his own rickety footing on the throne of Aragon. This time he lent his support to the nobles led by Carrillo who were rebelling against Enrique, playing a role in forcing Enrique to name his younger brother Alfonso his heir, rubbing salt in the wound for the Castilian king once again. King Juan remained, according to the historian Henry John Chaytor, “more anxious to stir up intrigues in Castile with the hope of interfering in her politics to his own advantage than to secure the peace and prosperity of his own dominions.”21

  But Prince Alfonso’s untimely death meant that political conditions in Castile had changed once again, and King Juan began pressing anew for a marriage between Isabella and his son Ferdinand. He reached out to his old friend Alfonso Carrillo, the archbishop of Toledo, and together Car-rillo and King Juan again worked the levers of power to marry the young Castilian princess, Isabella, and the young Aragonese prince, Ferdinand.

  It was this Ferdinand, the product of this process and the son of this father, who now stood beside Isabella on her wedding day. Isabella had just married King Juan’s favorite child. Behind his smiling eyes and easy laughter, young Ferdinand was his father’s son.

  SEVEN

  THE NEWLYWEDS

  Their family histories were tangled, but one aspect of the young couple’s early life together was simple and self-evident: their sexual chemistry. They had seen each other for the first time on October 14, 1469, and married within the week; Isabella was pregnant within three months. King Enrique’s infertility had been a source of shame and worry for the nation, but Isabella had proven her own fruitfulness in a remarkably short time. Observers who had helped to bring about the alliance noted with satisfaction that the relationship appeared to be warm and passionate.

  Both were strong and physically fit, energetic and decisive. Isabella was the more intellectual of the two, enjoying the company of scholars and people of a romantic temperament; Ferdinand was a man of action with great personal charm. Isabella was eager to have a child, and Ferdinand was happy to do his part to make it happen.

  In addition to their physical bond, the two teenagers had much else in common. They were both Spaniards, inculcated from birth with the same beliefs about their nation’s history, destiny, and challenges. When Ferdinand first stepped into the Great Hall in the Alcázar of Segovia and gazed upward at the frieze of statues showing the long line of Spanish Christian monarchs, he was looking at his own ancestors as well as Isabella’s.

  As they established themselves as a couple, Isabella and Ferdinand observed the symbolic practices that were customary in the late Middle Ages. For example, royal couples adopted a symbol or drawing of some kind to represent their union and make the nuptials common knowledge at a time when many people were illiterate. Isabella’s symbol was the flecha, or arrow, for the F of Ferdinand; Ferdinand’s symbol was the yugo, or yoke, for the Y of Ysabel, the common spelling of her name in Castile at the time. These two symbols were artistically interwoven and bound with a chain to link them together, a pictorial manifestation of their marriage. This device would eventually appear on government buildings and churches all across Spain.

  This same reverence for ritual was reflected in the couple’s religious observances, although Isabella was the more devout of the two. Both were Catholics who had grown up surrounded by clerics. Both now employed confessors and regularly consulted with priests to examine the state of their souls.

  Ferdinand was easily popular with many people. He was a gifted horseman and a good jouster and falconer, and he excelled at ball games like pelota. He liked playing chess and cards and gambling. He was not much of a reader. Isabella had interests in embroidery and sewing that allowed them to pursue their interests in parallel, both enjoying themselves while chatting and laughing, often surrounded by courtiers eager to curry their favor. Entertaining and witty banter in the court added to the amusement by day; at night they enjoyed music and dancing.

  Ferdinand and Isabella had psychological and emotional similarities as well. They had both been raised in the shadow of older siblings who were expected to rule. Both had grown up surrounded by the war and civil unrest that follows a leadership vacuum, making them feel exposed and vulnerable to danger, even as children. Both were determined to bring to the job of governing the kind of determination that had previously been lacking.

  And they both were the product of unconventional childhoods. Isabella had never known her father and tried to launch married life out of her imagination as she thought it should be. Trained by nuns to spin, weave, and embroider, she made all of Ferdinand’s shirts by hand.1 They worried about money almost constantly, but at least their sense of shared sacrifice provided some excitement. Ferdinand “had gone to Castile without any money, and the Princess didn’t have any either,” an Aragonese chronicler noted.2 Ferdinand frequently begged his father for funds but often came away empty-handed because the king of Aragon, enmeshed in civil war, had so little left for his son.

  It was an exciting and optimistic time for the young couple: if their child were to be a boy, Isabella’s claim to the succession would be considerably bolstered, as the mother of the next male heir. Their child would reign over both Castile and Aragon, joining the crowns in a reunited Spain, a vision held for Spain ever since Pelayo climbed down from the cave to begin recovering the peninsula.

  And finally, through her marriage, Isabella had established an indisputable royal identity for herself. Ferdinand was king of Sicily, and Isabella was his queen. The princess who had struggled to find a legitimate role for herself was now consort of a head of state. She adopted his titles with pride, intensely proud of their shared noble lineage. And so she became not only his lover but his fierce defender, eager to preserve their splendid isolation, even against blood relatives, the cousins who were the male heirs to Ferdinand’s grandfather, the admiral of Castile. “One day the Admira
l spoke quite sharply to him during a game of cards,” an observer recalled, “and when a courtier observed that [the Admiral] was, after all, the King’s cousin, Isabella replied instantly that Ferdinand had no relatives, only vassals.”3

  But the marriage exacerbated problems in her own family. Isabella was worried about the rift with her brother King Enrique and hoped to mend fences quickly. After the wedding, she and Ferdinand sent three separate envoys to him, asking him to accept what they had done and promising in return their respect and loyalty. They pleaded for the king’s forgiveness, calling themselves “obedient children” who hoped “to help him and bring harmony and peace to his realms.”4

  Enrique’s response was slow in coming and chilly when it arrived. He said he would comment after consulting with his advisers, but no further missive arrived. He was clearly furious over the match and was not interested in forgiving Isabella. He no doubt felt that his old enemy King Juan II of Aragon, his former father-in-law, had bested him once again, and that Juan’s son Ferdinand would eventually reign in place of little Juana.

  Isabella and Ferdinand wrote to Enrique again in March 1470. They again begged the king to forgive them and asked whether an ecclesiastical court could help resolve their differences. This time Enrique declined to respond at all.

  The people around Enrique encouraged this rift between brother and sister. Each had his or her own reasons. Queen Juana of Castile wanted to protect the rights of her daughter to the throne. Juan Pacheco, whose proudest possession was his title as Marquess of Villena, was worried about the new marriage because his title had previously belonged to King Juan II of Aragon, back before the Battle of Olmedo, when Álvaro de Luna had defeated Juan; he suspected the family might want back what they believed rightfully belonged to them. Others in the king’s entourage were no doubt eager to point out that his younger sister had publicly defied her brother by marrying Ferdinand, an affront that most kings of that era took very seriously. In that day and age, it was almost unthinkable for a young woman to arrange a marriage on her own without deferring to the authority of the head of the family.