Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  Still, on his deathbed Enrique apparently rejected much of what he had loved in his lifetime. He had endowed several fine churches in Segovia, his beloved city, but now he asked to be buried next to his mother, María of Aragon, who had also been the sister of King Juan II of Aragon. Enrique’s cruel father-in-law Juan had also been his uncle, in other words, and these family strains had contributed to the rift between Enrique and Isabella. Enrique’s choice to be buried next to his mother was another example of how twisted, convoluted, and ultimately pathetic the ties of family and power had become in the Trastámara family.

  The religious services were conducted with dispatch, and as the nobles were eager to make their way rapidly to the side of the new queen, his body was quickly interred at the shrine of Santa María de Guadalupe. Enrique had even lost Segovia to his younger half sister. His friends Beatriz de Bobadilla and Andrés de Cabrera were already in the process of transferring the treasury and its contents to Queen Isabella.

  TEN

  ISABELLA TAKES THE THRONE

  In Segovia, when Isabella got the word of Enrique’s death, she cried, describing herself as feeling “profound sadness.”1 Her emotions must have been mixed, for while Enrique had done many things to her that were cruel, she and he had also had moments of real affection. He had been the last surviving and active member of her immediate family. Her father and her brother Alfonso were both dead, and although her mother was still alive, the dowager queen’s mental health problems meant that she played no role in public life. Ferdinand was far away in Aragon, and Isabella faced Enrique’s death alone. His passing was an important turning point in her life.

  Whatever level of grief Isabella felt, however, she seems to have been prepared for the news, because she swung into action quickly. Her friends—Beatriz de Bobadilla and her husband, Andrés de Cabrera; Gonzalo Chacón, her childhood mentor, and his nephew Gutierre de Cárdenas—quickly gathered at her side. Nobody else in Segovia knew that the king had died. Isabella’s group wanted to use the element of surprise to decisively assert her right to rule, and to push young Juana out of contention by promptly confronting her with a fait accompli. Within hours Isabella and her allies set their plan in motion. Then, when the preparations were finalized, Isabella donned mourning garb and sent out letters across the kingdom informing Castilians that King Enrique was dead, calling for funeral services throughout the city.

  The day following Enrique’s death was momentous from morning until night, and residents of Segovia would remember the events for decades to come. At ten in the morning the bells of the Church of San Miguel, the main church in Segovia, about a quarter mile from the Alcázar, started ringing; soon the other churches in the city chimed their bells as well, in a cacophony that echoed through the streets. Beginning at eleven a.m., priests celebrated the funeral mass at the Church of San Miguel. Composed of psalms, readings from Scripture, and specific prayers, with responses from the congregation, the mass would have conformed to a familiar and well-established ritual known as the Office of the Dead. Conducted in Latin, it was accompanied by the sound of bells and song, and candles were lit for the repose of the soul.

  At eleven thirty, when the service was over, the officials and townsfolk filed out onto the street and gathered in the central plaza. An official called out to the crowd that King Enrique was dead, and that as he had died without a legitimate heir, his sister Isabella would assume the throne. Two people who had attended Enrique at his death publicly confirmed that the king was dead.

  Princess Isabella had attended the mass. Within hours after it ended, she took off the dark dress of mourning and reemerged wearing resplendent garb, decked in gold jewelry and precious stones. She headed back toward the same church, to have herself proclaimed queen. She had orchestrated a splendid symbolic transition in a surprisingly short time. It became obvious she had been planning it for months.

  Soon a procession entered the plaza. First came men-at-arms bearing Isabella’s coat of arms and those of the Trastámara family, whose members included both Isabella and Ferdinand. They were followed by Gutierre de Cárdenas, nephew of Isabella’s mentor, the loyal Gonzalo Chacón. Then came the glittering princess, astride a milky-white horse rather than the modest mule she had ridden at Toros de Guisando. She made her way to the Plaza Mayor, accompanied by musicians playing kettledrums, trumpets, and clarinets. At the door of the Church of San Miguel, she climbed up onto a platform covered with brocade.2

  Following close behind and flanking her were Andrés de Cabrera, Enrique’s trusted treasurer and the mayor of the city, with his wife, Beatriz de Bobadilla. The bishop of Segovia, the converso Juan Arias Dávila, and a number of other city officials and clerics, all on foot, followed the royal entourage. So did members of the Jewish community, including Rabbi Abraham Senior and his followers, visibly lending their support for the princess’s elevation to queen. Others in the crowd, according to a notary, included the papal legate, some knights and nobles, a group of Franciscan and Dominican friars, Segovia’s merchant elite, and a large group of ordinary townspeople, most of whom made their livings as employees of the wool-making firms that were the city’s major industry.

  Isabella addressed the crowd loudly and clearly. Standing on the platform, raised above the heads of the crowd, the twenty-three-year-old princess pledged to defend the church and the people of Castile and León. She placed her right hand on the Bible and swore by God that she would obey the commandments of the church. She swore to look to the common good of the people, improve their fortunes, do justice, and protect the privileges of the nobility. The crowd swore its allegiance as well, in traditional words that conveyed acceptance of her as ruler.

  The officials then knelt before her and took an oath to her as their queen, and to Ferdinand, her husband. Cabrera handed Isabella the keys to the Alcázar and the treasury, which were now her possessions, and she returned them to his safekeeping. He swore allegiance to her, promising to care for the “castles and fortresses” in the region. Isabella very quickly rewarded her closest friends, Cabrera and Chacón. Cabrera and Beatriz would soon become the Marquess and Marquessa of Moya, as Isabella had promised; Chacón would be elevated to the position of chief of staff to the queen. The point was clear: those who had shown her loyalty in the past would receive visible signs of Queen Isabella’s favor.

  Isabella’s four-year-old daughter was lifted up and presented to the crowd as the next heiress to the throne, underscoring the right of female succession in Castile, at present and in the future. No queen had ruled alone in Castile and León since Urraca, from 1109 to 1126, and Queen Berenguela in 1217. More than two centuries had passed with the crown transferred from man to man to man. Now Isabella was the monarch and her daughter was her heiress.

  Queen Isabella had made her announcement as a “proclamation” rather than through acclamation, as was traditional in Castile; in effect, she engaged in a form of self-coronation.3 Then the men-at-arms shouted: “Castilla, Castilla, Castilla, for the very high and powerful Princess, Queen and Lady, our Queen Doña Isabel, and for the very high and very powerful king, Don Fernando, as her legitimate husband!” Applause and fanfare burst from the crowd, with everyone trying to make as much noise as possible, townspeople later recalled.

  Then the queen and her procession passed back into the church, entering the arched gateway at Las Frutas, as the crowd followed behind. She fell to her knees in front of the main altar, then prostrated herself in subjugation to God. Afterward she rose and took in her hands the royal pendant and placed it on the altar like an offering. Although she was behaving as though her authority were ordained by God, she was actually engineering a coup. King Enrique had vacillated about who would succeed him, but for the last five years of his life, he had been clear that little Juana would follow him as ruler. Now Juana’s name was not mentioned.

  The question of whether Isabella or Juana was the legitimate ruler of Castile and León has perplexed historians ever since that day. Perhaps Juana was in
deed the king’s daughter, in which case Isabella usurped her throne. But probably Juana was not the king’s child. In any case, on that day in Segovia, where Enrique and his successive wives had spent many of their married years, the local population was inclined to believe that Isabella was indeed the true and rightful ruler of Castile and León.

  A procession formed around Queen Isabella again as she exited the church. This time Gutierre de Cárdenas rode in the vanguard, holding a sword aloft, point up, symbolizing the advance of justice. The crowd murmured, Palencia wrote, in a hum of shocked reaction, because this was the first time that a woman had asserted the right to be the bearer of justice and punishment. Isabella consciously adopted masculine symbolism, something she would do in ceremonial occasions thereafter. She even commissioned a tapestry that showed a queen holding a sword, entitled “Fame.”4

  It was a carefully planned display. Carrying the sword in that manner, point up, created a visual image of a “militant cross.” From her first moments in office, Queen Isabella began crafting an image for herself—serene, calm, resplendent, holy, and ordained by God through her birth.

  She passed through the city, back along the edge of the Jewish quarter to the Moorish-decorated palace that was her home. She rode surrounded by nobles on foot, with city officials following behind. She traveled majestically through the winding streets of the medieval city, heading toward her ancestral home, the fortress on the cliff, taking her place as a living queen among the statues of her ancestors.

  She had taken the throne alone. Now she stepped inside the fortress, the Alcázar, claiming it, and the riches stored within its towers, as her rightful possessions. “And that night she slept in the palace,” a Segovian scholar later noted.5

  In the next few days, Isabella began to get word of how her coronation had been received by her subjects elsewhere in the country. Archbishop Alfonso Carrillo promptly declared for her, giving her the support of the spiritual head of the kingdom’s primary see, Toledo, and he traveled to Segovia to pledge his allegiance to her. Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, after accompanying Enrique’s body to his final resting place, rushed to Queen Isabella’s side. Rodrigo Borgia’s intervention in making Mendoza a cardinal had borne fruit almost immediately upon Enrique’s death: Mendoza had thrown his support to Isabella, not to Juana.

  Reaction poured in from all over the kingdom. Isabella’s self-coronation was applauded in the northern half, particularly in Old Castile, including Ávila, Sepúlveda, Valladolid, Tordesillas, Toledo, and Murcia. Some doubts were raised in the Christian-controlled portions of Andalusia and in Extremadura, where Isabella was not so well known. Clearly she would need to go there soon to make her presence felt. Galicia seemed on the verge of rebellion,6 but its problems also went deeper than those in the other parts of the kingdom.

  More personal reactions, however, caused the first two crises in the new reign. One was a marital spat that threatened the stability of the kingdom; the other came from a jilted suitor. These problems erupted amid a general and continuing breakdown in social order and the economy in Castile, which left Isabella furiously juggling many issues simultaneously.

  The marital crisis came first. Isabella had not rushed to inform Ferdinand of Enrique’s death. He was at home in Zaragoza, the capital of his Kingdom of Aragon, about 175 miles from Segovia. “She did not appear particularly anxious that her husband should join her,” notes the historian John Edwards.7 She had sent a slow messenger to Ferdinand, telling him about Enrique’s death and advising him to do what he thought best in the circumstances, given conditions in Aragon. And she had not urged the messenger to make any particular haste. By not telling him in time for him to participate in the ceremony, she had cut him out of any chance to make a claim to the succession.

  So Ferdinand first learned of the tumultuous chain of events—that the king had died and that Isabella had assumed the throne in his place—several days after the coronation. His father’s old friend Archbishop Carrillo had sent a swift messenger, stressing that Ferdinand’s presence was required immediately in Castile. And Cardinal Mendoza had sent word when Enrique was dying, also suggesting Ferdinand should hasten to Segovia.

  Others in Queen Isabella’s entourage were also eager to tell the king what had happened. Gutierre de Cárdenas, for example, wrote to Ferdinand, telling him with innocent pride about his unique role in the ceremony, holding the sword of justice. Ferdinand received this letter on December 21, a week after the ceremony in Segovia. He flew into a rage when he learned that his wife had asserted this authority on her own.8 He promptly jumped on a horse and sped toward Segovia.

  “I never heard of a queen who usurped this male privilege,” he told the chronicler Palencia, who was traveling with him from Aragon.9 Palencia tried to calm the king, saying that she was “after all, a woman,” and would doubtless reconsider her actions once she realized she needed his manly presence for her protection. Others in Ferdinand’s entourage were more unsettled; one male chronicler suggested there was “something sinister” in what Isabella had done.10

  Ferdinand shook off his anger, persuading himself that Isabella surely had had a momentary lapse of judgment. Once he arrived in Segovia, he told himself, she would realize that she had overstepped and would defer to his authority. He had enormous faith in his sexual power to sway her opinions. “In conquering with patience,” a chronicler recalled, he “felt certain he would triumph through satisfying assiduously the demands of conjugal love, with which he could easily soften the intransigence that bad advisers had planted in his wife’s mind.”11

  By the time Ferdinand arrived, Isabella had been ruling on her own for more than two weeks, and she had had time to consider what sort of tone she wanted to set. By then Ferdinand was playing for time as well. When he drew near Segovia on December 30, he didn’t go directly to the city. Instead he waited in the nearby fortress of Turégano, while Isabella and her officials arranged the terms of his ceremonial arrival. Messages flew back and forth as preparations were made.

  On January 2 Ferdinand entered Segovia through the city’s great gates, dressed magnificently in furs and cloth-of-gold. Queen Isabella did not go out to greet him; instead, a large throng of officials and clerics, including Mendoza and Carrillo, met him and escorted him with panoply to the portico of the Church of San Miguel, the same place where Isabella had taken the throne two weeks earlier. He was formally asked whether he would reign as the husband of the queen, and he gave his assent. The councilmen of Segovia then pledged their support for him, vowing that “they would obey and receive His Highness as legitimate husband of Our Lady the Queen.”12

  Then Ferdinand traveled in procession to the Alcázar, where he found Isabella awaiting him inside the gates. Suddenly their roles were reversed. She was in control. Now he would come to her, not she to him. She was proceeding according to legal precedents established by previous queens of Castile and León, but those women had reigned hundreds of years earlier, and their memory was preserved mainly in old chronicles. Isabella’s accession had seemed something of a theoretical possibility—it was viewed as plausible that a woman would rule in her own right—but it was quite shocking as a reality, particularly for the men in court circles. Male dominance was so customary that even Isabella’s supporters were perplexed and confused about the situation. Scholars turned to the history books to establish the precedent for female sovereignty. What Isabella had done was not unprecedented, but it was highly irregular.

  Isabella, therefore, was flying in the face of tradition in Spain and, more dramatically, elsewhere on the continent. “The panorama was similar across Europe, where queens were generally able to rule in their husband’s name only when the king himself had appointed them and was in a position to impose this choice on his subjects,” wrote scholar Nuria Silleras-Fernández.13

  Queen Berenguela, however, had ruled for only a few months before turning the reins of government over to her son. Only Urraca, who ruled from 1109 to 1126, had held the th
rone for an extended period. She had taken a husband, but the marriage splintered and Urraca had ruled on her own.

  “Urraca defied the notion that a man who married a ruling queen should automatically share in the governance of his wife’s realms,” writes scholar Theresa Earenfight.14

  Ferdinand’s counselors were especially dismayed and struggled to make sense of what had happened. Palencia blamed the situation on “womanly… petulance” that had been urged upon Isabella by people who had “ceaselessly fomented” such behavior in her.15 This, however, does not seem to have been the case. For reasons of her own, Isabella had decided that she was better off taking the crown alone than risking the complications that might be raised by Ferdinand’s participation. Possibly she no longer trusted him. His long absences from Castile, his refusal to return home when Isabella needed him, and his sexual infidelities certainly made him appear unreliable. There was also the chance that he would try to maneuver her out of the line of succession.

  When at last the royal couple met in person, tempers flared, and a “disagreeable discussion” took place.16 As she had feared, Ferdinand and his relatives thought he should be the undisputed ruler, as the closest living male relative to Isabella’s father. Some of his supporters believed that women did not have the capacity to govern. Isabella and her partisans, however, maintained that Castile and León had a long history of women sovereigns who ruled in their own right, most notably Queen Urraca, who had held the throne in the 1100s. They said that Isabella was the direct descendant of King Juan II of Castile, and that whatever authority Ferdinand might hold in that kingdom would be derived through his marital association with Isabella. Both Isabella and Ferdinand, in other words, saw themselves as the legitimate ruler, and the other as consort.