Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  Certainly they had their tiffs. In July 1475 in Tordesillas, they exchanged sharp words in other people’s presence. Ferdinand had left Tordesillas and set out against the Portuguese, who appeared, ready to do battle, just as his supplies were running low. Outnumbered, Ferdinand decided to withdraw back to the town to gather supplies and more troops. Isabella lashed out at him for what she saw as his timidity and failure, her words laced with sarcasm: “Although we women lack the intelligence to know, the courage to do, and the tongue to speak, I have discovered that we have eyes to see,” she said to him scornfully. “The truth is that I saw a great army departing from the fields at Tordesillas and it seems to me, as the woman that I am, that I could have conquered the world with it, as it included such good knights, horses and soldiers.”7 He needed to have shown more grit, she told him. “The one who begins nothing ends nothing.”

  Ferdinand, for his part, defended his action, saying that he had been outnumbered ten to one, and that to have joined the battle would likely have meant many deaths. She seemed disappointed that they had returned alive but without a victory, he said, instead of offering more appropriate “words of consolation.”8 “There has never been a man born who can satisfy you,” he told his wife bitterly. Soon thereafter the Battle of Toro was joined, and at least for practical purposes, it was won.

  The occasion at Tordesillas wasn’t their only point of disagreement. They also quarreled over women, and Ferdinand’s inability to remain faithful to the queen. Most of his known philandering occurred far from the court, when he was at home in Barcelona or traveling elsewhere in his kingdom, but sometimes he engaged in affairs closer to home as well.

  A young woman who became a particularly notorious seductress had entered court through her connections with Isabella’s closest friend and confidante, Beatriz de Bobadilla. Beatriz’s proximity to the queen was advantageous to her own extended family, who also moved into the inner circle of the court. Through this means Beatriz’s alluring niece, also known as Beatriz de Bobadilla, attracted Ferdinand’s eye. She and Ferdinand soon began a passionate affair. The young woman’s father had been the royal master of the hunt, a fact that inspired much ribald humor around court, where people tittered about amorous individuals stalking and capturing their prey. Someone drew charcoal pictures of what the Italian courtier Baldassare Castiglione termed “lascivious animals” on the door to the young woman’s home, and it happened that the queen passing by spotted the drawings. One court wit was so bold as to point them out to her, saying, “Behold, Madam, the heads of the beasts that [Señorita] Bobadilla slays every day in the hunt.”9 The jest was clever but must also have shamed and embarrassed the queen.

  The queen finally ordered the young woman to marry a nobleman visiting the court, then dispatched the newlyweds to the distant Canary Islands to subdue the rebellious native population. Beatriz was not the only young woman to be married off and sent away in this manner. There is no record of Ferdinand ever protesting this method of handling relationships that had become tedious or awkward. Perhaps he grew tired of the young women himself and didn’t mind being relieved of a potentially acrimonious ending.

  The king and queen also differed over the administration of the church. Isabella was preoccupied with reforming the church, easing out people who saw their posts as sinecures and replacing them with priests and nuns who had a real commitment to preaching and leading the flock. It must have been supremely irritating to her that Ferdinand was pursuing a church position for his illegitimate son—exactly the kind of conduct that church reformers were singling out for criticism.

  In late 1475 Ferdinand’s illegitimate brother Juan of Aragon died. Their father had arranged for Juan to be named archbishop of Zaragoza, the highest church official in the Kingdom of Aragon, who had responsibility for the souls of many parishioners and also controlled vast wealth and a large number of vassals on church-owned estates. Now, with the position open, Ferdinand asked his father if the job could be given to his own illegitimate son, Don Alonso of Aragon, who was six years old.10 This request was problematic: how could a six-year-old provide spiritual guidance to a congregation? And it was on its face corrupt because the obvious goal was to gain control of church funds that would be administered and used by the archbishop—or his father. To make matters worse, the job had already been promised to a well-qualified, mature prelate, Ausiàs de Puggio, who was well along in his preparations for taking over the post.

  In March 1476, Ferdinand asked again. The Vatican’s preferred candidate, Ausiàs, refused to step aside. Ferdinand and his father warned the man that if he persisted in seeking the spot, his family’s lands in Aragon would be seized. At this point Ausiàs prudently decided to drop his claim. Falling quickly into line, Pope Sixtus IV named Ferdinand’s child, now seven years old, as archbishop of Zaragoza.

  For Isabella, who was sincerely interested in cleansing the church of simony, or the corrupt awarding of church offices, these negotiations must have been touchy on several levels. She disapproved of just the kind of thing Ferdinand had accomplished for his illegitimate son. Unlike her husband, she always sought the strongest and best candidates for these church offices. Vatican officials generally didn’t like being pressed by kings and queens to appoint particular people of their own choosing to church posts, something they called “lay investiture,” but in Isabella’s case, the people she chose exemplified altruistic church ideals. “Isabella, however, it must be said, used her privilege in favour of really excellent men,” wrote the Vatican historian Ludwig Pastor, noting that most church appointments at the time went to the wealthy and well connected, not to those most deserving or worthy of their clerical posts.11

  But if Isabella and Ferdinand differed on some fronts, in other ways their religious convictions, dynastic ambitions, and sense of divine mission welded them together. To celebrate Ferdinand’s purported victory against the Portuguese in the Battle of Toro, Isabella initiated the construction of a new church at Toledo. She named it San Juan de los Reyes, to honor her deceased father, King Juan II of Castile, and Ferdinand’s still-living father, King Juan II of Aragon. That name also allowed her to simultaneously give homage to their two patron saints, Saint John the Evangelist and Saint John the Baptist.

  Isabella was growing very interested in architecture, and in this building she began to develop her own style and taste, elaborating on what was known as the Plateresque style and molding it into what came to be known as Isabelline. This style featured traditional Iberian elements, with simple but soaring and cavernous Gothic-inspired interiors, and rich sculptural treatments for the exteriors, all carved in golden stone. Soon churches, colleges, and hospitals built in this style were erected in Salamanca, Segovia, Valladolid, Aranda de Duero, Burgos, and Seville, all bearing her personal marks—her coats of arms and the yoke and flechas, the epigraphic symbols for her marriage to Ferdinand. Ropes signifying the Gordian knot tie these elements together. That is a reference to the riddle of the Gordian knot that Alexander the Great famously confronted, and a problem he solved by slashing the rope in two with his sword. And that, in itself, represents an idea: that the end justifies the means.

  The first Isabelline-style building, and the one that most clearly bore her personal mark, was San Juan de los Reyes. Construction was started in 1477, and within a year, the church and attached monastery were already housing a contingent of Franciscan monks. But when the queen and king came back in 1479 to inspect the work under way, she was scathing in her evaluation. “Have you built such a trifle for me here?” she was said to have asked.12

  More complex and ornate plans were quickly drawn up under the queen’s supervision by architect Juan Guas. Isabella’s tastes evolved, in keeping with the development of Renaissance styles coming into vogue, and later she would sponsor something entirely different in Rome. But for Castile, this style came to be her hallmark, a mixture of classical, Iberian, and Muslim motifs. These buildings became the enduring visual record of the places she came, s
aw, conquered.

  The structure Ferdinand and Isabella jointly undertook to build in Rome, to honor the birth of their son Juan, became the world architectural masterpiece known as the Tempietto. It is located on the site where Isabella and Ferdinand believed that Saint Peter—the apostle whom Jesus called the “rock” on which he would build his church—was crucified about A.D. 64. Peter is believed to have died during a persecution initiated by the emperor Nero, who blamed Christians in Rome for a fire that destroyed the city. The actual location of Peter’s martyrdom is unknown, but this particular site had a legendary association with the event and also with an earlier monument, the Roman Temple of Vesta, the goddess of hearth, home, and family.

  Consequently, an ancient monastery had been located on the site, known as San Pietro in Montorio, for hundreds of years. By the 1470s, the institution had become neglected and been abandoned, and in 1472 Pope Sixtus IV decided to revitalize it. He asked his personal confessor, Amadeo Menes da Silva, to undertake restoration of the site.13 And this led to the connection to Queen Isabella—for the monk Menes da Silva had been born a Portuguese nobleman and happened to be the brother of Beatriz da Silva, the saintly noblewoman who founded the Conceptionist religious order.

  Beatriz’s brother Amadeo took to this new responsibility to restore the sacred spot with particular gusto, reporting that he had experienced mystical visions at a grotto on the property, which attracted additional support for the work at hand. In 1480, when little Prince Juan was two, King Ferdinand announced that he intended to pay for the construction work at the site because of a vow he had made to build a church to Saint Peter.14 It was the family’s way of thanking God for the gift of a son.

  Amadeo Menes da Silva died in 1482, and within a few years, Ferdinand and Isabella had shifted responsibility for the work to Bernardino López de Carvajal, whom they sent as their ambassador to Rome. He assigned the task of building the special commemorative structure to a little-known, middle-aged architect from Milan who was beginning to make a name for himself by combining ancient and modern styles of construction and building ornamentation. His name was Donato Bramante, and what he built on the site is considered the first example of High Renaissance architecture in Italy. It would delight, fascinate, and amaze generations of art historians. Domed, with Doric columns, the “circular plan symbolizes divine perfection,” according to the World Atlas of Architecture. “Inspired by ancient temples, the Tempietto is both a homage to antiquity and a Christian memorial.”15

  Juan’s birth, when it came in 1478, had seemed to have eased the tensions between his parents and provided the means by which they could project themselves as an ascendant Christian monarchy with a long history and a great future. After 1479 Ferdinand and Isabella were together more than they were apart. The babies started coming like clockwork, one after the other.

  In November 1479, in Toledo, Isabella again gave birth, this time to another daughter, whom they named Juana. She too was named in memory of all the great men named John. “And they gave her the name of that glorious Juan, he whom God had chosen among men,” sang a minstrel about the child’s birth.16

  This time, however, the name had special poignancy because in January of that year, Ferdinand’s pugnacious and resolute father had finally died, at age eighty-one. Ferdinand had succeeded him and was now finally and fully ruler of Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia as well as Sicily. His new daughter was a living memorial to her grandfather Juan’s fierce determination that his bloodline would rule Iberia. She was an unusually beautiful child, more impulsive and willful than her dutiful older sister, Princess Isabel, and her agreeable and charming brother Juan.

  Then Isabella became pregnant again, growing unusually large and uncomfortable in comparison with previous pregnancies, making it difficult for her to travel. The thirty-one-year-old queen went into labor in June 1482, in Córdoba, and it soon became apparent that something was unusual with the delivery. She quickly gave birth to a baby, but the labor went on for another day and a half, and then a second child, a twin to the first, was delivered stillborn. The surviving twin, a blond-haired girl, was named María. After that dramatic birth, however, María’s childhood drew little notice. With three older siblings, she somehow got lost in the crowd and did as she was told.

  Three years later Queen Isabella delivered still another little girl and named her Catalina, or Catherine, after their ancestor, Catherine of Lancaster. This baby was ushered into an increasingly majestic world on December 16, 1485, a setting of wealth and opulence in a beautifully tapestried bedchamber in a palace in Alcalá de Henares. Strong, intelligent, and determined, she looked much like her sisters, fair-skinned with strawberry blond hair that darkened to light auburn as she left early childhood. She later received an identifying sobriquet that would tie her to her father’s hereditary kingdom in the memory of future generations: she became known as Catherine of Aragon and soon thereafter as the Princess of Wales, the future queen of England. Of all Isabella’s children, she was the one who was most like her mother.

  Queen Isabella delivered all her children with her typical stoicism and extraordinary fortitude. “I have been informed by the ladies who serve her in her chamber that, neither when in pain through illness nor during the pains of childbirth… did they ever see her complain, and that, rather, she suffered them with marvelous fortitude,” a court observer commented.17

  At thirty-three, with five children, Isabella’s family was complete. The independent queen, once easily able to jump astride a horse and travel effortlessly from town to town, now traveled with a vast entourage. The court remained itinerant, and so the queen needed to move not just her own things but the accoutrements required by a large brood of children at various stages of development.

  They traveled constantly, as the demands of administering the kingdom never slackened. Queen Isabella started the year 1481, for example, in Medina del Campo and moved to Valladolid in February, staying there until April, when she moved to Calatayud in Aragon. In June she went to La Muela and then to Zaragoza. From August to November she was in Barcelona. In the last month of the year, she and Ferdinand moved almost daily, traveling from Molins de Rey, to Tarragona, to Cambrila, to Perello, to Tortosa, to San Mateo, to Almenara, to Murviedro, to Valencia, and on the last days of the year, back to Murviedro.

  Traveling was no simple affair. In 1489 Queen Isabella employed about four hundred courtiers and household staff workers, all of whom traveled with her.18 Her highest-paid ladies-in-waiting, representing the highest-ranking noblewomen in the kingdom, included not only Bea-triz de Bobadilla, now known as the Marquesa de Moya, but also Teresa Enríquez, Inés Manrique, María de Luna, Leonor de Sotomayor, and Ana and Beatriz de Mendoza. Guards, pages, cupbearers, cooks, laundresses, musicians, and court physicians rounded out the staff. Isabella’s obligations included feeding them, housing them, and frequently clothing them as well.

  Her children had their own assigned households. Prince Juan employed eighty-two people in 1493, when he was fifteen years old. Catherine’s household staff numbered fifteen when she was thirteen.19

  These peregrinations resulted in lengthy processions. Tetzel, a pilgrim who visited Castile around that time, described watching a nobleman’s itinerant court on the move. The man would ride a mule, he said, while his servants would run alongside him on foot, sometimes foraging for food along the way, then hurry ahead in time to prepare meals and arrange lodging or campsites. He saw household servants who were so tired “they can hardly walk.” He came away impressed with their fortitude. “The Spaniards,” he said, “are a people who can endure hunger and work.”20

  Traveling by horseback or on mules, accompanied by heavy-laden carts, must have been not just exhausting but a testament to careful planning, for Isabella and Ferdinand were required to move from place to place with imperial good grace and polish. The dress and appearance of the children, for example, was not just a source of pride but also an imperative of governing, conveying the family’s
social status and importance. They dressed in jeweled gowns, in velvets and brocades. All this clothing had to be cleaned, mended, transported. Regal settings had to be composed at every location as well, which meant that paintings, illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, and rugs were hauled from place to place to accompany the royal family. Court documents, legal decrees, and correspondence were transported in great leather and metal chests.

  Isabella, acutely aware of the gaps in her own education, placed extreme importance on how the children were raised and educated. She had not been taught Latin in childhood, which meant she had to undertake the more difficult task of learning it as an adult, and she had had to hire a tutor for herself, the female scholar Beatriz Galindo. Isabella and all the ladies in her court, including her daughters, participated in these lessons.

  Humiliated when she made errors in Latin, Isabella was careful not to repeat the mistake of giving her children a second-rate education when they would be expected to operate in the most elevated intellectual levels of society. Isabella’s emphasis on girls’ education helped spawn an academic revolution for women across Europe, as her court set a new standard of expectations for females who would rule either on their own or in partnership with their husbands. Under Queen Isabella’s watchful and demanding eye, the children of the court received an extraordinary education.

  Isabella’s children were taught not only the Bible and the works of Saints Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory, but also the classics, including Seneca, Prudentius, and the Roman historians. Isabella saw humanism not as the antithesis to religion but as a complement to it. Descendants of the Greeks, she and other Spanish nobles were creatures of the classical world as well as the biblical one.

  Isabella retained as tutor to the boys the brilliant Italian humanist author and scholar Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, also known as Pedro Martír de Anglería, whose place in their household gave him a unique window into Spanish history and international affairs. And he, in return, made the children objects of marvel throughout Europe. The Dutch scholar Erasmus would later describe Catherine as “miraculously learned for a woman” and a better scholar than her eventual husband, the erudite King Henry VIII.21 Princess Juana could converse easily and casually in Latin with courtiers from other countries, and by the time she was a teenager, she was reciting and composing verse in that language.