Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

Gonzalo remained with the court during the early months of Isabella’s marriage but left around the time her first child was born. He went to a monastery near his hometown of Córdoba, seeking admission to the order. The prior turned him away, saying that God had other plans in mind for him;26 Gonzalo then began staying at the chapter house of the Knights of Calatrava, the religious military order, when he visited Córdoba. There he lived under Benedictine rule, bound to a life of chastity, keeping the required silence in the dormitory, eating meat only three times per week, and fasting regularly. Even so, he kept his sword girded at night, to be always ready for action, in defense of the faith or the weak.27

  His chivalrous behavior toward women made him the subject of local legend. A story was told of a wealthy bachelor, an “audacious libertine,” who had become enamored of a beautiful and impoverished orphan girl. She rebuffed his advances, so he decided to kidnap her and forcibly take her to his home. Gonzalo was walking nearby when he heard gasping cries from the young woman as three armed men dragged her down the street. Gonzalo dashed to the scene, his sword drawn, wounded the nobleman, and killed one of his henchmen. He then escorted the young woman safely home, winning the affection and respect of the neighborhood.28

  Gonzalo eventually returned to court and stayed in attendance on Princess Isabella until Ferdinand finally came home from the French campaign, at the end of 1473. At that point, Gonzalo left once more, in an abrupt manner that attracted some comment. He briefly married, but his wife died soon thereafter in childbirth. Gonzalo was not in a hurry to remarry, remaining a bachelor for more than a decade. His continued attentiveness to Isabella’s needs made some people suspect he loved the princess or that she loved him. There was never any record of misconduct between the two, however, except for a single cryptic remark later made by Ferdinand “when Isabella taxed him with infidelity,…  implying that she too had a favorite, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba,” writes his biographer Mary Purcell. “There is no foundation for this conjecture.… It is possible that Ferdinand, jealous of a young man who was his equal in bravery and sporting prowess, his superior in appearance and address, had him sent away. More likely Isabella, who to an exceedingly sensitive conscience joined a determination to be her subjects’ exemplar in all things, discharged Gonzalo from the court rather than have her name coupled with his, in however innocent a connection.”29

  Isabella, indeed, was extremely careful to protect her reputation for virtue. Having seen Queen Juana’s life unravel as a result of her sexual escapades, she took extreme measures to ensure that no one would ever question the paternity of her children. Her caution doubled whenever her husband was away. Then her ladies-in-waiting all slept in her room, witnesses to one another’s conduct. At a party in Alcalá, when the king was away and the queen wanted to dance, she pointedly offered her arm to one of her ladies-in-waiting rather than dance publicly with a man who was not her husband.

  Most important of all, Isabella was a profoundly devoted Catholic, to whom marriage was a lifetime commitment and to whom divorce was unthinkable. She had joined her life to Ferdinand’s, and the two were a couple. But at some point, Isabella realized Ferdinand’s political interests were different from hers, and that she would need to manage her own life and chart her own course. If she were to get back into King Enrique’s good graces, win the support of the Castilian nobility, and be restored as heir to the crown, she would need to find a way to do it herself.

  EIGHT

  THE BORGIA CONNECTION

  In these years of Isabella’s isolation and abandonment, when her future was anything but assured, an ally and counselor appeared from the east who had, one might say, celestial credentials.

  Powerful in body, overtly sensual, elegant, and magnetically attractive to women, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia was a Spaniard by birth. He was the nephew of Pope Calixtus III, whose papacy had resembled the founding years of a dynasty more than a spiritual mission. Calixtus had elevated Rodrigo to a cardinalship when he was only twenty-five years old, even before he had become a priest, and soon thereafter conferred a great many other ecclesiastical honors on him as well. After his uncle’s death, Rodrigo had adroitly managed to retain these elevated posts, which required particular cunning. The Italian cardinals who dominated the halls of the Vatican tended to hate and scorn foreigners, particularly those who threatened their stranglehold on power in Christendom, and they could call out Roman gangsters to attack people identified as outsiders. These gangs would have been glad to dispatch Rodrigo to accompany his uncle into the next life.

  In the face of this formidable opposition, Rodrigo had managed to maintain his position as one of the highest churchmen in Roman Catholicism. In the summer of 1471, when Isabella was a twenty-year-old newlywed in a precarious spot, Rodrigo was a man with considerable power. This was important to Isabella, because Pope Paul II refused to give the couple the marriage dispensation that would legitimize their baby’s birth. In July 1471 they learned that Pope Paul had died, and that a new pope, the Italian Francesco della Rovere, had been elected to replace him, taking the name Sixtus IV. Rodrigo was in a position to be helpful in obtaining the correct paperwork, for it was Rodrigo who had placed the crown on the pope’s head at the ceremony at the Vatican.

  Then, in 1472, when Isabella’s little girl was still a toddler, Rodrigo announced he was coming home to Spain for a visit. Pope Sixtus had decided he too would raise an army to help beat back the Muslim advance, and he sent out envoys to the courts of Europe to solicit support for the cause. Borgia was sent to smooth tensions in Castile and win King Enrique’s backing for the new campaign. Ferdinand and Isabella quickly realized that Borgia’s visit presented them with a unique opportunity to make an ally who could help them in many and profound ways.

  Rodrigo had now lived in Italy for more than two decades, but his loyalty and affection for Spain remained paramount to him. He still spoke Catalan as his first language. “For Rodrigo,” writes the historian Marion Johnson, “the return to Spain was also something of a sentimental journey, a chance to refresh himself at the family source and to remind himself that his roots lay in the province of Valencia.”1

  Ferdinand and Isabella saw that Borgia’s affinity for his native land gave them an entrée to him. They realized that he needed allies as well. He was an ambitious man, and he must have already realized that the papacy was within his reach, if he managed his career properly and reached out for support as needed. Immigrants like the Borgias were on particularly shaky ground in Rome because of the prejudice against non-Italians. Rodrigo knew he needed firm backing from his native Spain.

  Rodrigo de Borja had been born in 1431 in Xativa, a craggy hilltop town with a medieval castle crowning its highest point, located near Valencia. Borja retained a great sense of affiliation with the crown of Aragon, as he believed himself a descendant of an old and venerable line that had fought valiantly in the reconquest of the land from the Muslims. The Borjas were a numerous clan—proud, fearless, and, as it turned out, unscrupulous—and young Rodrigo early took his mother’s last name to more closely align himself with his uncle, his mother’s brother. They were not a wealthy family, and the Borjas were good at making the best of any advantage that came their way.

  The Borja clan first moved into high-level church politics through their connections with a Spanish cardinal named Pedro de Luna, the uncle of Álvaro de Luna. Spaniards were rare among the elite order of cardinals at the Vatican. When Pope Gregory XI died in 1378, Pedro de Luna was the only Spaniard among them, all the rest being French or Italian. To be effective in these councils, Pedro de Luna had needed Spanish allies at home, as was soon made abundantly clear. Within days of the pope’s death—Gregory XI had been born in France—a fiercely ethnocentric confrontation erupted. The cardinals, including Pedro de Luna, gathered in conclave with great ceremony to choose the next pope, following custom and tradition. This time, however, the building was surrounded by a seething Roman mob who demanded that the new pope should be an Italia
n from Rome. The terrified cardinals, fearing they would be torn limb from limb, looked about the room and spotted an elderly cleric who they thought had been born in the city. Despite his energetic protests, they draped him in the papal mantle, pressed the mitre on his head, and shoved him up to the altar, thus naming the next Vicar of Christ. Then they quickly fled the building.

  Once seated, this unlikely candidate, Pope Urban VI, decided to take his selection seriously. He set out to reform the church, condemning luxuries and vices. This attitude was as alarming to the cardinals as the street mob had been, so they once more fled Rome. Soon they named a replacement pope, another Frenchman, Clement VII. But Urban vociferously refused to step down, and Christianity found itself with two rival pontiffs, one based in Rome and the other in Avignon. Italy and northern Europe sided with the Roman pope, Urban VI; France and Spain aligned themselves with the Avignon alternative, Clement VII. Church hierarchies everywhere had to choose sides, forcing kings, bishops, monasteries, charitable institutions, and universities to align themselves with one or another of the camps. Even after Urban and Clement both died and replacements moved into their posts, the schism continued until 1418. The moral authority of the church diminished as the faithful witnessed leading prelates behaving like grasping and squabbling children. Spaniards such as Pedro de Luna found themselves navigating these uncharted waters in relative isolation.

  Meanwhile back in Aragon, amid this dispiriting scene, a pious young man from Xativa named Alonso de Borja (Borgia in Italian) was growing to maturity. Devout, determined, and diligent, he soon came to the attention of church elders, including a wandering Valencian preacher named Vincent Ferrer who was drawing crowds from all over southern Europe with his fire-and-brimstone sermons. Ferrer was having great success convincing Jews to convert to Christianity, either out of fear for their lives or because of his powers of persuasion. His converts soon filled top government posts in Spain. Spotting Alonso de Borja’s face in the crowd at one of his sermons, Vincent Ferrer prophesied that Alonso would one day be pope. This kind of recommendation was helpful to Alonso and also inspirational, and he began to believe that he might have a special role to play in healing the divide within the church.

  Alonso de Borja eventually became a religious adviser to King Alfonso of Aragon. When King Alfonso moved to Naples and never came home, his conscientious and hardworking adviser, Alonso de Borja, went with him, soon adopting the name Alonso Borgia, as the Italians spelled it. Borgia proved his mettle by helping bridge the schism, just as he had hoped, and with a reputation as a peacemaker, he began climbing the pontifical ladder. As a reward for his faithful service to the king and to the pope, Alonso was named a cardinal in 1444. He, in turn, relied on the support of another helpful Spanish ally, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada. Soon the Spaniards formed a tight little fraternity at the Vatican.

  By 1451, when Princess Isabella was born, Pope Nicholas V, an Italian, was reigning in the Vatican. The Renaissance was dawning, and Nicholas V became a patron of literature and the arts and amassed a great personal collection of books and manuscripts, which would become the core of the Vatican Library. He arranged for the translation of many ancient Roman and Greek texts into Latin, and rebuilt a great many classical monuments, as well as palaces, bridges, and roads. All these cultural enterprises and public works projects meant his friends in the Vatican had multiple ways to prosper.

  By this time Cardinal Alonso Borgia’s high rank and improved financial standing allowed him to help his own relatives, including his able and ambitious young nephew Rodrigo, who was growing up within the crown of Aragon. Alonso secured for his promising nephew his first ecclesiastical post in Valencia when he was only fourteen years old. A few years later Alonso brought Rodrigo to Rome, where the young man soon made himself useful at the Vatican.

  When Pope Nicholas V died in 1455, the College of Cardinals selected Alonso as the next pope, and he took the name Calixtus III. Some observers said he had been chosen in spite of his Spanish heritage because he was crippled with gout and looked old. The other cardinals thought he would die soon, giving them more time to prepare their own candidacies. But Calixtus turned out to be stronger than he looked. And in Spain, his ascension was a subject of intense nationalistic pride, viewed as a fitting recognition of the peninsula’s role as a bulwark of Christianity. Through Isabella’s early years, this Spanish pope was Christ’s vicar on earth and the leader of Christendom, the final arbiter of all things spiritual, and congregants prayed for him and for his continued good health.

  To bolster his position, Calixtus quickly elevated friends and relatives from Spain. One of his first official acts was to name the deceased Vincent Ferrer a saint. Ferrer, of course, had had the great good luck to have foretold the coming—and unlikely—greatness of Alonso Borgia.

  Three weeks after Calixtus’s investiture, Rodrigo, at twenty-four, was named apostolic notary and given a number of lucrative benefices in Valencia, which ensured him a rich income. At twenty-five, though he was not yet a priest, his doting uncle made him a cardinal, and the next year, he was promoted to the most prestigious post in the Vatican after the pope, that of vice-chancellor of the church, as administrator of the “government of Christendom,” a position that provided an annual income of 20,000 ducats.2 Next he was made bishop of Valencia, which added another 20,000 ducats and made him caretaker of the souls of the second-largest kingdom within Aragon.

  Pope Calixtus placed other relatives in positions of power throughout the Vatican. “They kept on appearing—relations, and relations of relations—and for every one of them there was a corner in the sun,” writes the papal historian Clemente Fusero, “for each applicant one of those countless sinecures or odd positions which the hypertrophied development of the Papal bureaucracy had created over the centuries.”3 The Italians disdainfully called them “the Catalans.”

  As a native of Spain, Pope Calixtus carried with him the ancestral Iberian obsession with the Muslim threat, something that had been part of the peninsula’s culture since 711. He had been deeply disturbed by the fall of Constantinople in 1453, two years before his election, and he avidly listened to reports of subsequent events in eastern Europe. “He ascended the Papal throne,” Fusero writes, “with one great and all-devouring project in mind—to free Christian Europe from the Turkish scimitar which, more especially since the occupation of Constantinople, had been pointed at her throat. All his efforts, all his thoughts, all his political activities converged on this one end.”4

  Very few European Christian rulers shared his intense concern. Preoccupied with their own territorial rivalries, the Europeans had done little to prevent the conquest of Constantinople, and their subsequent efforts against the Muslims were halfhearted and ineffectual. This state of affairs made the cities of Europe seem easy pickings to the Turks; their wealth and women seemed available to anyone with the pluck and determination to take them. In the 1450s, in the wake of his victory, Mehmed II began calling himself Caesar and styling himself the emperor of Rome, leading an army three hundred thousand strong and preparing once more for attack. Pope Calixtus issued a clarion call for funds and troops to fight the Turks, but the response was tepid. The threat seemed too distant, too ephemeral, particularly for northern Europeans and for the warring northern Italian city-states.

  Pope Calixtus resolved to defend Christianity on his own. To raise money, he introduced an austerity program at the Vatican, a reversal of course after the free-spending ways of Pope Nicholas. Calixtus ordered gold and silver plate from the papal treasury to be melted to raise money for armaments. When a marble tomb was unearthed and found to contain two mummified corpses dressed in robes of gold-woven silk, he delightedly ordered these items to be brought to the Vatican, not to preserve or study them, but to sell them for the value of the gold they contained.

  Calixtus also drummed up support by encouraging public admiration for religious warriors. He was the prelate who had pressed for the reexamination of Joan of Arc’s life, whi
ch recast her as a God-fearing soldier of liberation against an invading force. Her legend grew as that taint of heresy dropped away. As a result of this review of her case, which happened when Isabella was six, Joan of Arc was declared innocent, rehabilitated, and placed on the path toward sainthood. “Only on the battlefield does the palm of glory grow,” Pope Calixtus once said.5

  His preoccupation with Christian self-defense intensified as reports from eastern Europe grew more alarming. Turkish troops were headed for Hungary and up the Danube River. In 1456 Turkish troops engulfed Athens; recognizing that no assistance was at hand, its residents opted to surrender. Having shown no resistance, the Athenians survived and were allowed to follow their own religious traditions. But the people who had coined the term democracy were labeled rayah or slaves by the Ottomans. The Parthenon was converted into a mosque; the Erechtheum, with its statues of the female caryatid statues, was used as a harem. Strong young boys were sent away to be trained as Ottoman soldiers; good-looking girls were shipped off to serve as concubines to wealthy Muslim men. According to the historian T. C. F. Hopkins, “The fall of Athens in 1456 to the Ottomans was a shocking blow for Europeans and Christians, for it had been assumed that Athens would hold out against any and all attacks as a bastion of Western thought and moral superiority.… Many Europeans feared that the Ottoman conquest was coming and they would be helpless against it.”6

  During Calixtus’s pontificate, and using the funds he had stockpiled, the pope engaged in the strongest counterattack organized by the Christian world to that time. He outfitted and sent out a fleet to oppose the Turks, and they had some initial success. The Turks were defeated in a sea battle in the Greek Isles. Elsewhere the city of Belgrade, besieged by the Ottomans, succeeded in holding them off.

  But Calixtus was eighty years old, and he had been selected for the papacy because of his declining health. In the summer of 1458, when Isabella was seven, he grew ill and was reported to be dying. Churches throughout the Christian world were placed on alert; vigils were held; fervent prayers were raised for his recovery. Rodrigo was vacationing in Tivoli when he got word of his uncle’s illness. He rushed home to Rome, but by the time he arrived, the news had spread everywhere. Disorderly throngs of Italians were converging to attack the Spaniards who had profited and prospered during the reign of the Aragonese pope. Rodrigo’s servants disappeared, and his home was looted. Most Spaniards fled the city. Rodrigo stayed to tend his uncle, who died on August 6. Only one steadfast friend, the Venetian cardinal Pietro Barbo, remained behind with Borgia at this frightening time, and his loyalty earned Borgia’s lasting gratitude.