Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  But she had had a great many disappointments in her life by this point, and as she usually did, she soon rallied and went forward. Within a year, her outreach to nobles, offering them clemency and rewards if they laid down arms, proved effective and the tide shifted in her direction. King Afonso was forced to pull troops out of Castile to defend his cities in Portugal that Isabella had placed under assault.

  The two sides finally and climactically clashed, in the major confrontation known as the Battle of Toro, on March 1, 1476. The Portuguese army, led by King Afonso, his twenty-one-year-old son Prince João, and the rebellious Archbishop Carrillo of Toledo opposed Ferdinand, the Duke of Alba, Cardinal Mendoza, and other Castilian nobles leading the Isabelline forces. Foggy and rainy, it was bloody chaos on the battlefield, where fierce hand-to-hand fighting erupted. Hundreds of people—perhaps as many as one thousand—died that day. Some of the Portuguese who died were not killed in battle but drowned in the Douro River in the darkness and confusion.

  It was difficult to re-create later exactly what had happened because the Portuguese and Castilian accounts differed. Troops led by Prince João won in their part of the battle; some troops led by King Ferdinand won in another part. But the most telling fact was that King Afonso had fled the battlefield with his troops in disarray; the Castilians seized his battle flag, the royal standard of Portugal, despite the valiant efforts of a Portuguese soldier, Duarte de Almeida, to retain it. Almeida had been holding the flag aloft in his right arm, which was slashed from his body, and so he transferred the pendant to his other arm and kept fighting. Then his other arm was cut off, and he held the flag in his teeth until he finally succumbed to death. The Portuguese, however, later managed to recover it.

  The battle ended in an inconclusive outcome, but Isabella employed a masterstroke of political theater by recasting events as a stupendous victory for Castile. Each side had won some skirmishes and lost others, but Ferdinand was presented in Castile as the winner and Afonso as a craven failure and laughingstock. In medieval terms, the possession of the flag also signified a triumph. Isabella announced it as a sign of God’s will and support for their reign. She walked barefoot in the winter cold to give thanks at the Monastery of San Pablo in Tordesillas, and she vowed to found a monastery and church in Toledo for perpetual remembrance of the triumph.

  Management of the perception of the battle rather than the event itself ended up influencing people’s opinions, and ultimately their belief about what had occurred. “Not a military victory, but a political victory, the battle of Toro is in itself, a decisive event, because it [resolved] the civil war in favour of the Catholic Monarchs,” wrote a group of Spanish historians who studied the battle and its aftermath.29

  Peace did not come quickly, however, only by fits and starts over the next four years, with continuing loss of life on both sides. The war did not officially end until 1479, when Isabella reached a peace agreement by negotiating it directly with her Portuguese aunt, Beatriz, her mother’s sister. These were high-level talks because of the family ties they represented. Beatriz was King Afonso’s cousin and Prince João’s mother-in-law and therefore was related by blood and marriage to all the disputants. She was an unusually wise woman, as her mother, Isabella’s grandmother, had been, and everyone ultimately agreed to abide by the terms she devised to settle the grievances.

  King Afonso himself had dropped out of the war after the first year. But given his military renown and stature, the drawn Battle of Toro was still a humiliating defeat for him. Unnerved, he turned to France in search of reinforcements and assistance and spent a fruitless year there begging for help, until gradually he realized that the faithless King Louis was considering handing him over to Ferdinand. When he began formulating plans to escape from France wearing a disguise, Louis shamefacedly ordered ships to send the humiliated sovereign home.30 Afonso returned to Portugal, where he shared power with his son João, who took the title King João II, until the father finally died in a monastery in 1481. He had been utterly vanquished by the young man and woman whom he had once dismissively viewed as mere willful teenagers. Young King João accepted the truce but stewed with resentment over this turn of events, continuing to view Queen Isabella with enmity. She watched him warily from Castile.

  Little Juana’s life also disintegrated. Her father, King Enrique, if he was her father, had not effectively secured her future. Her mother, the former Queen Juana, Enrique’s wife, who had gone on to give birth to two illegitimate children, died in 1475 in Madrid. She was young at her death—only thirty-six—and the cause was never determined. She had disgraced her once-proud brother, King Afonso of Portugal, whose efforts to support her daughter’s cause and uphold the family honor had led to such abject humiliation. “Some say she was poisoned by her brother… and others that she died attempting to abort another child,” writes the scholar Nancy F. Marino. “No one mourned at the time of her death.”31

  Little Juana, after her mother’s death and her husband Afonso’s abandonment of her while he wandered off to France, was left adrift. The truce arrangement between Isabella and Beatriz offered Juana the option of joining a nunnery, and she agreed, either willingly or because she believed she had no choice. Four years after the war started, Juana entered the Convent of Santa Clara in Coimbra, Portugal, later moving to the Castle of Saint George. She never gave up her belief that she was the rightful queen and signed her letters Yo, La Reina, for the rest of her life. Living quietly, however, and causing no trouble for anyone, she appears to have had a fairly normal life until her death in 1530.

  Did Isabella usurp Juana’s throne and take her place as queen? It is possible that little Juana was indeed the king’s daughter and should have been declared queen. But her mother’s sexual behavior certainly raised questions about the child’s legitimacy.

  Enrique’s own sexual behavior raised further questions. The king failed to produce any other children, either legitimate or illegitimate, during his thirty-four years of physical maturity, which included two decades of marriage, first to Blanca and then to Juana. The other rulers who were his peers produced far more offspring. King Edward IV of En-gland had ten legitimate children and possibly five more out of wedlock; Maximilian I had two legitimate children and twelve more who were illegitimate; as a cardinal, Rodrigo Borgia had between four and eight children, despite his vow of chastity; King Louis XI of France had at least eight; King Afonso had at least five. Many women would have been honored to bear a royal child. King Enrique almost certainly had a serious reproductive problem of some sort, and his physicians thought he was infertile. If he was homosexual, he probably had a low level of sexual interest in women as well.

  How much of this did Isabella know? Probably a lot. She had lived at court as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Juana, which put her into close, direct, around-the-clock contact with the young queen. She may have witnessed things that persuaded her that Juana was illegitimate.

  It is also possible that Isabella wasn’t entirely sure about Juana’s legitimacy but had come to believe that she herself was destined to rule and that her kingdom needed what she had to offer. She certainly took the kingdom’s problems enormously to heart and began, as soon as she took the throne, to confront unaddressed conditions that had deteriorated over the past decades. There is no sign that Juana, in contrast, had any sense of obligation to the citizens at large.

  Regardless of the legalities or the ultimate justice of the situation, as the Portugese threat began to fade, Queen Isabella turned her full attention to the core problems facing Castile. She convened her first administrative council, or Cortes, in April 1476. The challenges were staggering. The kingdom’s currency had been debased, its finances were in chaos, consumers were being defrauded, and criminals prowled without fear of apprehension. She began to work at setting things to rights and quickly achieved some notable successes.

  She reinvigorated an old system of armed local militias known as the Santa Hermandad, or the “Sacred Brotherhood,” law-en
forcement brigades empowered by towns and cities to capture criminals. These Hermandad units, paid for by the municipalities, soon became organized as a kind of independent royal militia, trained to maintain order and accountable to Isabella as queen of Castile. Isabella conducted many trials herself. Some critics might have questioned whether accused people were receiving due process before they faced summary judgment, up to and including execution, but most people were grateful that civil order was being restored after the rampant lawlessness of previous decades.

  Isabella also changed the composition of the royal council, which had been dominated by the aristocracy during her brother’s reign. To her new council she appointed three nobles and nine lawyers. The head of the council was a cleric; one of her early choices for this post was the converso Alfonso de Burgos. Through this means she began to administer the government more professionally, creating a bureaucracy comprised of an educated elite chosen by merit, not just by noble birth. Her frequent choice of conversos to hold key positions underscored this shift from medieval to modern management principles, and it encouraged more Jews to see advantages in converting to Christianity.

  She also applied new scrutiny to the church. She promoted scholarship, valued education for clerics, and sought to clean out corruption, which was a growing concern throughout the Christian world.

  Queen Isabella’s allies watched sympathetically as she juggled the demands of the job. She is “so young” to take on governing “so hard” a nation, wrote the converso courtier Hernando del Pulgar to the Spanish ambassador to Rome, “listening every hour to so much advice, so much information, one thing contrary to another, and… words of trickery that challenge the simple ears.”32 But crime was so widespread that she was obliged to take up those burdens, he added, noting that “the land is in threat of eternal damnation because of the lack of justice.”

  But all the while, Isabella was pondering the single most important item on her agenda: creating and financing an army to field against the Islamic emirate in Granada, which she believed could become a beachhead once again for a Muslim attack on the Iberian peninsula. Looking ahead, she feared that a confrontation was looming with Mehmet the Conqueror, ruler of the expanding Ottoman Empire, and she was worried about protecting her family, which was at last starting to grow.

  ELEVEN

  THE TRIBE OF ISABEL

  Little Isabel, the namesake of her mother and grandmother, was almost eight when at last she became a big sister.

  Her mother the queen had experienced seven long years of infertility, of waiting and hoping, as the conception and delivery of healthy infants was the single most important responsibility of royalty. Queen Isabella anxiously consulted doctors; she prayed at sanctuaries where she sought intervention by saints known to aid with childbirth; she starved herself and engaged in self-mortification. She had at least one miscarriage during those years, and the fact that the child had been a male made the disappointment all the more acute.

  Then Ferdinand came home for a few months in the fall of 1477, and matters resolved themselves. Isabella became pregnant once again, to the relief of all. The pressure had been palpable. “It is good, Your Excellency, for here is the most grave and grand matter of Spain, and nothing is more necessary or desired,” a courtier wrote to Ferdinand in March 1478.1 While awaiting the baby, Ferdinand fervently prayed for a son and pledged that he would show his appreciation to God if his wish were fulfilled. Isabella, meanwhile, had an idea in mind for how to show their thankfulness.

  This baby was born in Seville on June 30, 1478, when Isabella was twenty-seven years old. The birth followed royal custom: Isabel was attended by a midwife, and the room was packed with noblemen and city officials, who would all be able to swear the infant was indeed the child of the queen. When Isabel finally da a luz, or “gave light” and life to the infant, the entire city erupted in paroxysms of joy—a wild and boisterous celebration that lasted three days and nights.

  The child was a boy, the long-desired male heir, and the disappointment of little Isabella’s birth was quickly forgotten. They named the baby Juan, the name shared by both his maternal and his paternal grandfathers. That was also the name of Isabel’s patron saint, John the Evangelist, and of Ferdinand’s, Saint John the Baptist. But Isabel’s joy was such that when she referred to her son, she most often called him her “angel.” He even looked like a cherub, with his pale blond hair and delicate features. Spaniards all over the kingdom rejoiced, seeing the boy’s arrival as proof of God’s favor. This child would reign over both Castile and Aragon, making a lasting political union of the two kingdoms that were now linked only by marriage.

  Unlike the birth of Queen Isabella or her daughter Isabel, this child’s arrival was greeted with ostentatious ceremony. On July 9, about a week after Prince Juan was born, a stately procession wound its way through the streets of Seville from the palace to the cathedral, as throngs of onlookers and well-wishers crammed into the narrow streets to add their shouts of welcome to the baby heir to the throne. The child’s nurse, riding a mule, carried the infant swaddled in brocade cloth, under a brocade canopy, flanked by eight city officials decked in black velvet cloaks. Three young court pages followed behind, bearing gifts of gold and coins. Elegantly attired courtiers vied for spots in the line; clerics held aloft silver crosses. The archbishop of Seville, Pedro González de Mendoza, whose support had been won with the gift of the cardinal’s hat, officiated at the baptismal service.

  “All the crosses from all the churches in the city” were hauled into the open to greet the procession as it passed through the streets. “Infinite numbers of musicians playing all sorts of instruments, of trumpets,” and drums and flutes welcomed the infant prince.2

  A month later a second ceremony, even more elaborate than the first, took place. This time, Queen Isabella, having recovered from childbirth, marched in the procession, dressed in a bejeweled gown shimmering with pearls, surrounded again by Castile’s highest courtiers. She attended high mass at a service conducted at the main altar of the church.

  “The queen went to mass to present the prince to the temple, and to offer him to God according to the custom of Holy Mother Church, very triumphantly,” wrote the chronicler Andrés Bernáldez, in an obvious analogy to the New Testament stories of the presentation of the baby Jesus.3 According to the Gospel of Luke, Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem forty days after his birth, following Jewish custom. It was a popular ceremony in the Middle Ages and included prayers of thanksgiving for the mother’s survival and the baby’s continued good health.

  Indeed, Juan’s birth seemed nothing short of sacred and miraculous to loyal Spaniards. Isabella and Ferdinand were increasingly identified with the Holy Family—and Isabella, especially, as the abundant and fertile mother, the Mary figure to the Catholic way of thinking, the woman who bore the sacred male child, the queen not just of the earthly plane but also of heaven. To the conversos in the court, Catholics of Jewish descent, such as Diego de Valera, Hernando del Pulgar, and Isabel’s new confessor Hernán de Talavera, the child’s birth was the kind of event predicted in Holy Scripture. “Clearly we see ourselves given a very special gift by God, for at the end of such a long wait He has desired to give him to us,” wrote Pulgar in a letter to a colleague.

  The Queen had paid to this kingdom the debt of male succession that she was obligated to give it. As for me, I have faith that he has to be the most welcome prince in the world, because all those who are born desired are friends of God, as were Isaac, Samuel and Saint John.… And not without cause, then were they conceived and born by virtue of many prayers and sacrifices.… Because God rejected the temple of Enrique and did not choose the tribe of Alfonso; but chose the tribe of Isabel whom he preferred.4

  The happiness of the birth offset some of the bitterness of the previous years. It wasn’t surprising that Isabella had failed to become pregnant for such a long time, because Ferdinand had almost never been home in the initial years after she be
came queen. At first the war against the Portuguese provided a plausible explanation: Ferdinand’s presence was frequently needed on the front lines. But the periods of separation were often lengthy. In the early months of her reign, Isabella and her husband had been together, but for much of the rest of 1475 they had lived separately. In 1476 the couple spent only about eleven weeks together and forty-one weeks apart. In 1477, 1478, and 1479, they were together about only half of each year. It’s hard to imagine that people who were deeply in love would willingly spend that much time apart.

  One letter from Ferdinand, written in May 1475, suggests that the periods of separation were now more Isabella’s choice than his, perhaps because she was generally working so feverishly and galloping from place to place to deal with problems on the ground:

  My ladyship, now at last it is clear which of us two loves best… I can see that you can be happy while I lose my sleep, because messenger comes after messenger and brings me no letter from you. The reason why you do not write is not because there is no paper to be had, or that you do not know how to write, but because you do not love me and because you are proud. . . . Well! One day you will return to your old affection. If you do not, I shall die and the guilt will be yours.5

  Is it possible that Isabella sometimes treated Ferdinand badly? At least one observer said she treated him cavalierly, ordering him about. “The queen is king, and the king is her servant,” a foreign visitor wrote. “He immediately does whatever it is that she decides.”6