Instruction at court operated as a kind of academy, as famous scholars led groups of children in Aristotelian discussion and debate. Artists and scholars mingled with noblemen, sharing thoughts and perspectives, writing poetry, songs, epigrams, and soon, the first of the early novels. “A key feature of Isabella’s court was her patronage of artists and her love of culture, and she was the driving force behind artistic policy,” writes a scholar of Renaissance art. “A number of painters made their living almost exclusively from court patronage, such as Juan de Flandes, Melchior Alemán and Michael Sittow.… Isabella’s conspicuous patronage of the arts established a fashion that was followed by the noble families in Spain.”22
In addition to crafting artworks and literature, these artists were also required to teach the royal children and their pages and attendants. Prince Juan, for one, was tutored in these early years by a Dominican who was a professor at the University of Salamanca. As the children grew, the curriculum expanded to include catechism, Latin, and Castilian grammar, religious and secular history, philosophy, heraldry, drawing, music, and singing. A German scholar described a Latin class taught by Peter Martyr, with the students clustered around him: “His students were the duke of Villahermosa, the duke of Cardona, don Juan Carrillo, don Pedro de Mendoza, and many others from noble families, whom I saw reciting Juvenal and Horace,” he wrote. “All these are awakening in Spain the taste for letters.”23
Soon to join the youngsters were two new arrivals, the sons of a Genoese explorer who called himself Cristóbal Colón, or in English, Christopher Columbus. These two boys, Diego, sixteen, and Ferdinand, six, who was named after the king, came to Isabella’s court as pages to her son Juan. They became fixtures. Diego was described by the historian Bartolomé de Las Casas as “tall, like his father, of gentle manners, well proportioned with an oval face and high forehead,” well liked but lacking his father’s intense intelligence. The younger brother, Ferdinand Columbus, was charming and popular, “of great affability and sweet conversation,” and he took to the stimulating environment with great enthusiasm.24 His father frequently traveled, and so Diego and Ferdinand Columbus were essentially raised to adulthood at Isabella’s hands, first as pages in the court of her son and then as pages to the queen herself.
The two boys took advantage of the opportunities around them. Books were a rare and precious commodity, but young Ferdinand Columbus owned 238 of them by the time he was sixteen.25 He was such an able pupil that he came to serve as an unofficial assistant and protégé of Peter Martyr, which exposed him directly to developments in Renaissance Italy. “In the Court of the Catholic Sovereigns, patrons of Italianate Renaissance culture,… Ferdinand formed the taste for books [and] for scholarship that grew into a ruling passion,” wrote scholar Benjamin Keen, in his introduction to Ferdinand’s fascinating biography, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, which he wrote in defense of his famous father’s achievement.26
In time, and as wealth came his way in adulthood, Ferdinand Columbus developed into one of the most notable scholars of the Renaissance in his own right, amassing what is believed to have been the largest private collection of books in Europe, some 15,400 volumes that he acquired in his travels on behalf of the Spanish monarchs, whom he served for more than fifty years. His carefully catalogued personal library included valuable ancient manuscripts, works from the classics, mathematical and scientific treatises, religious works, and the first books produced on printing presses. His collection of 3,200 prints included many works by the painter Albrecht Dürer.
In this environment, intellectual competition flourished, and soon many of the court’s children began attracting attention from scholars in other parts of Europe. Peter Martyr took enormous pride in what he had helped to bring about. “I was the literary foster father of almost all the princes, and of all the princesses of Spain,”27 he later said, when his charges’ accomplishments drew compliments across the continent.
Many of the scholars and artists drawn to Isabella’s court, who subsisted on her patronage, formed friendships that lasted for decades, enjoying a common bond that reached from court to court all over Europe. These ties extended to the young nobles they had tutored, who were soon in positions of becoming artistic and literary patrons themselves.
The girls received an education similar to that of the boys of the court, but they were also trained in the domestic arts, as though they were being groomed not just to be consorts to kings but to be practical and dutiful wives as well. They learned to sew, weave, embroider, and bake. Catherine famously sewed her husband’s shirts in marriage, as her mother had in hers.
The royal daughters were urged to emulate their mother, who was developing a larger-than-life persona, and to similarly see themselves as warriors for Christianity. One militant melody from a cancionero, or book of songs, for example, urged Princess Juana to “follow the shining great Queen of Castile who is the fountain of virtues” and to go forward to “carry the cross” in conquest.28
The royal children were raised with acute awareness of their future stations and duties. In addition to receiving the general education offered to all the court’s children, the prince and princesses were also instructed in court ritual and the arts of self-presentation. They were expected to make a decorous, dignified, and impressive appearance. Specific rules were attached to their clothing, to keep them in bandbox perfection.
To look his best, Prince Juan was expected to order two new pairs of shoes each month, and two new pairs of slippers or Moorish boots each week. He was allowed to wear his hats, caps, and other clothing only three times before giving them up. He was expected to wear a new belt every day. He was required to give away these garments to his household staff, for their use or resale, on a particular schedule. The queen became very angry when she learned that Prince Juan and Princess Juana hoarded their favorite items rather than passing them along to their attendants. She also required the children to distribute uneaten or excess food to the household staff so that nothing would go to waste. This could sometimes amount to a vast quantity of food because there were so many rituals surrounding mealtimes in the court.29 These gifts constituted part of the compensation received by courtiers for working in the royal household, so Isabella’s wrath reflected a profound sense of noblesse oblige, a core belief that those of superior rank had to be both generous and just.
The fact that Isabella and Ferdinand had only one son was a cause for concern. Having more boys would have given the monarchy a more solid base for the future. Juan’s delicate health made the situation seem all the more fragile. But the births of the girls also offered advantages because each of them could secure a unique diplomatic alliance with another kingdom. Each could serve as a sort of living treaty, an ambassador in another capital.
This advantage was predicted very soon after Juan’s birth secured the succession. “If your highness gives us two or three more daughters,” Hernando del Pulgar wrote to Isabella in 1478, “in 20 years time you will have the pleasure of seeing your children and grandchildren on all the thrones of Europe.”30 And indeed, Isabella and Ferdinand would seek to use their daughters’ marriages to firm up their alliances and shore up their defenses in western Europe.
The memory of the recent war with Portugal was much on their minds, and though they toyed with a number of possible marriage prospects for their oldest daughter Isabel, they ultimately negotiated an engagement and gave her in marriage to the Portuguese heir, which was suggested to them at the time of the truce with Portugal. The little Princess Isabel soon came to be known as the future queen of Portugal and was treated as a monarch-in-training. She was slated to marry the grandson of King Afonso V, the son of his son King João, a boy named Afonso. (The Portuguese royal family had the same habit as the Castilians and Aragonese in naming children after their fathers, mothers, and grandparents.)
Isabella and Ferdinand sought to encircle their French rivals by establishing a double alliance with the Hapsburg family. The future Ho
ly Roman emperor, Maximilian of Austria, who ruled Germany, had married Mary of Burgundy, and they had two children roughly the same age as two of Isabella’s children, Juan and Juana. Juana was engaged to Archduke Philip of Austria, known as Philip the Handsome, and Juan was to be married to Philip’s sister, Margaret of Austria. The double marriage would bind Castile tightly to the court of Burgundy and to the Hapsburg family.
Little Margaret of Austria, even though she was only a child, had already had a turbulent marital history. At age three she had been be-trothed to the French dauphin, the future king Charles VIII, and was raised in the French court as his consort and the future queen of France. But Charles jilted her to marry Anne of Brittany, the heiress to that kingdom and the wealthiest woman in Europe. The unfortunate Margaret lingered in France for two more years, until she could be shipped back home. This humiliating treatment made the young princess all the more eager to cast her lot with a rival of France, and she welcomed, and eagerly awaited, the proposed marriage with Prince Juan of Castile.
Isabella’s two younger daughters, María and Catherine, were considered for a number of matches. Ultimately the youngest, Catherine, was affianced to the English court in marriage to Prince Arthur, the oldest son and probable heir of King Henry VII. The English court was considerably less powerful than those of France and Castile and more fitting for a younger daughter. King Henry, eager to claim a Spanish bride for his son and heir, made the first overtures to Castile about Catherine in 1487, when she was still a two-year-old and Arthur was just an infant.31
As the children grew up, foreign diplomats described Isabella and Ferdinand’s family in glowing terms, both for their splendor and for the affectionate nature of their relationships with one another. Roger Machado, an envoy from France, attended a bullfight where the king and queen were present with their children; he noted with interest that Queen Isabella held baby Catherine on her lap during the event, lovingly interacting with her.32
Not everyone, however, received the news of the expanding family with such jubilation. In 1478, according to Pulgar, the emir of Granada, Abu al-Hasan Ali, sent ambassadors who noted the birth of Prince Juan—but they took the occasion to tell Isabella and Ferdinand that they would no longer send the customary tribute money to maintain the truce between the kingdoms, and they immediately stopped doing so. Abu al-Hasan Ali may have gone even further. He reportedly added that the kings of Granada who had given such tribute were now dead, and that he himself planned to turn the mints that made the coins into factories for forging lances to attack the Christians.
These menacing remarks came at the same time that the Castilians received word that a large Ottoman army was massing to attack the island of Rhodes in the eastern Mediterranean or perhaps, even more frightening, some other southern European objective. The young queen, a new mother with the heightened protective instincts of most women toward their vulnerable young, was troubled by these reports, which carried the most dire threats for her kingdom as well.
Her state of mind in these years, from the 1470s to the early 1480s, was captured in an unusual painting housed in the Monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos, near the mausoleum and shrine to her parents in that city. It depicts Isabel and Ferdinand, standing in prayer next to each other, with three of their children—likely Isabel, Juan, and Juana—grouped behind them. Perhaps the painting was completed before María and Catherine had been born, which would date it to the early 1480s. Isabella’s face appears sad and anxious. A cluster of nuns stand nearby, their faces likewise drawn with worry.
In the center of the painting, a giant figure of the Virgin Mary rises up into the sky, stretching her arms out to protect the family and the nuns, who are sheltered under her embroidered cloak. Mary is holding clusters of arrows in her hands. Across the top of the canvas, two demonic figures with horns and clawed feet prance across the sky, menacing the family beneath. One devil carries arrows, longer and sharper than those held by Mary, and the second is heavy-laden with books. It is unclear if he is bringing the books or taking them away.
Isabella’s home life may have been all that she could have asked for, but, in the broader world, the queen saw herself painted into a terrifying scene.
TWELVE
THE WHOLE WORLD TREMBLED
Queen Isabella’s reign was shadowed by the existence of a man she never met but who terrorized eastern and southern Europe for most of her life: the wealthy and powerful Sultan Mehmed II, known as Mehmed the Conquerer.
He was an enigmatic character—beloved and revered by Muslims as a great and powerful warrior, admired by many Jews for the benign tolerance in which he permitted them to live in his realm, but feared as a relentless aggressor who was determined to expand the Ottoman Empire by swallowing Europe. He was willing to pay a high price for this success: he was directly responsible for the deaths of an estimated 873,000 people, or some 29,000 per year.1 His conquest of Constantinople, accomplished soon after he assumed the throne, was the first of his major victories, completed in 1453 when Isabella was two years old.
Through Isabella’s childhood and early adulthood, Mehmed repeatedly said he intended to destroy Christianity. When he was twenty-one, he began styling himself as Caesar and set out to make good on his pledge to seize Rome. He planned to capture it by moving in from the east, through eastern Europe, Austria, and Greece; from the south, which could mean using Sicily as the entry point; or from the West, using North Africa as a base to invade Europe through Spain. The last idea was all the more menacing because it had proven effective in the past. Threats to either Sicily or Spain, of course, represented aggression directed specifically at Queen Isabella and her family.
Mehmed was the youngest son of Sultan Murad II, a fierce warrior who had already extended the dominions of the Ottoman Empire. Murad presided over a multiethnic and multilingual culture, in which most people were Muslim but some were Christians, some Jews, some Christians and Jews who had wholeheartedly converted to Islam, and some who had pretended to convert to Islam to get better treatment and avoid the taxes levied on nonbelievers. It was also advantageous to convert to Islam because slaves and soldiers were usually non-Muslims. The Ottoman Empire had built up a highly effective war machine that fed on invasions of foreign countries.
Mehmed’s father Murad laid the groundwork for the planned assault on western Europe by pressing deep into present-day Romania, Albania, and Greece. He attacked the ruler of Wallachia, a principality north of the Danube River, and seized his two sons as hostages. The boys were indoctrinated in Ottoman ways so they could return to their homeland and be installed as puppet governors.
Murad also conquered the Albanian principalities and took as hostage the son of an Albanian prince, John Castrioti. That boy nominally converted to Islam. He took the name Skanderbeg and initially acted as a loyal ally to Murad, even becoming something of a favorite with the sultan.
One of Murad’s signal victories was the conquest of Salonika (today’s Thessaloniki), formerly the second-largest city in the Christian Byzantine Empire and a major stopping point on the road between Rome and Constantinople. He trounced the city’s Venetian defenders in 1430, then urged his men to the slaughter with promises of what they could take from the ruined city. “I will give you whatever the city possesses,” he is recorded to have said. “Men, women, children, silver and gold—only the city itself you will leave to me.” With screams of enthusiasm, his men climbed over the city’s parapets “like wild animals.”2
The city’s defenses collapsed, and the Venetian garrison fought its way to the port to escape on waiting galleys. The Turks rampaged through the city, murdering many people and carting away some seven thousand into slavery. According to a survivor, Ioannis Anagostes:
They gathered up men, women, children, people of all ages, bound like animals, and marched them all to the camp outside the city. Nor do I speak of those who fell and were not counted in the fortress and in the alleyways and did not merit a burial. Every soldier, with the mass of ca
ptives he had taken, hurried to get them outside quickly to hand them over to his comrades, lest someone stronger seize them from him, so that any slave who as he saw from old age or some illness perhaps could not keep up with the others, he cut off the head on the spot and reckoned it a loss. Then for the first time they separated parents from their children, wives from their husbands, friends and relatives from each other.… And the city was filled with wailing and despair.3
Murad’s successes made Christians question why God was allowing this to happen. “He seized cities and regions of the West during his lifetime,” wrote Manuel Malaxos; “he subdued countless regions in Serbia and Bulgaria, since God had allowed it, on account of our sins, and because no one prevented him.”4
Mehmed, Murad’s son, was intelligent and learned but even more ruthless than his father. Born in 1432, two years after the conquest of Salonika, Mehmed was the sultan’s third son, the child of a slave girl who was one of Murad’s concubines. It was not legal to enslave Muslims, so she is believed to have been of Christian or Jewish origin. Her name is unknown, as many of the women in the harem were not identified by name. Mehmed grew up with his mother in the harem at Edirne Sarayi, southwest of Constantinople, where he developed a reputation, despite his academic interests, for “insolence, savagery and violence.”5
Isabella: The Warrior Queen Page 21
