Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  The exiled Jews found a mixed reception in Christian lands. Many went to Portugal, where they were given admission for a limited time, as long as they paid a hefty entry tax. In Genoa, they were greeted by priests carrying bread in one hand and crucifixes in the other; conversion was the price to be paid for the relief of their hunger.56 The notorious Pope Alexander VI, reviled by so many other people, was kinder and granted them asylum and protection in the Papal States.

  The Spanish Inquisition was vicious and tragic. But from Isabella’s perspective, it unified Spain and allowed it to quell internal religious dissension and look outward. It was one of the largest and, from Isabella’s point of view, one of the most successful forced conversions in Spanish history. Eliminating outsiders has had its advantages; religious tolerance is not a universal concept. Spain was now on the verge, ready and sufficiently ruthless, of becoming the greatest world power ever known.

  FIFTEEN

  LANDING IN PARADISE

  It was almost inevitable that Queen Isabella, once she had secured the boundaries of her kingdom and dealt with tensions within it, would begin to turn her attention outward—even beyond the confines of Europe. A new age of global exploration was dawning. Spain and Portugal had been rivals within the narrow confines of the Iberian peninsula, but they were now also becoming rivals on a world stage as well, engaging in a fierce competition to secure overseas lands and trade routes. Discovery of new territories was becoming the great new entrepreneurial enterprise, and only a few countries, most notably Portugal and Castile, had recognized the magnitude of what was coming. Those that seized these opportunities would reap the profits and gain the glory. Those that didn’t would be left behind.

  The Portuguese had pioneered this activity under Henrique, or Henry the Navigator, the prince most responsible for Portugal’s outward expansion southward and around the perimeter of Africa. What has been called the Illustrious Generation of Portugal’s royal family had introduced a whole new way of looking at the world—seeing the potential for acquiring distant lands by finding them, charting them, settling them, and taking possession of them. Portugal, consequently, was swelling with arrogance and newfound wealth.

  The drive toward mercantile adventuring was a family interest for Queen Isabella. Her beloved grandmother, the Portuguese noblewoman Isabel of Barcelos, had been cousin and sister-in-law to Prince Henry the Navigator; Prince Henry was therefore Isabella’s great-uncle. In Isabella’s youth, between 1462 and 1487, while Castile had been engaged in debilitating civil wars, Portugal had commissioned eight separate maritime expeditions into the Atlantic Ocean, claiming more and more territory and outstripping Castile year by year.1

  Isabella had come to the throne very conscious of these new developments at sea, for they had been at play in the peace negotiations with the Portuguese following the war of 1475 to 1479. The Treaty of Alcáçovas in 1479 had given her control of the Canary Islands but had forced her to concede to the Portuguese exclusive rights to any newly discovered lands on Africa’s West Coast, as well as the Cape Verde Islands. King João of Portugal had immediately set about increasing and consolidating power in those areas, strengthening the Portuguese trade routes and mercantile empire. He was intensely competitive with Castile and kept his explorers’ discoveries state secrets, but they were pushing further and further toward the Orient: first they went south by sea, discovering the Congo River in 1484 and rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; then they made forays into the interiors of India and Ethiopia by land.

  Isabella, meanwhile, had asserted and consolidated Castilian control in the Canary Islands, making the island of Grand Canary a colony in 1480. These subtropical islands, located off the west coast of Africa, were inhabited by a native tribe known as the Guanches. Western Europeans had made their way there in ancient times, but regular visits by Spanish and Portuguese explorers started only in the early 1400s. Castile and Portugal had fought for possession of them, but after the Treaty of Alcáçovas, Castile was able to begin a more systematic settlement process. The Gaunches resisted Castilian domination but were subdued, partially due to the brutal and remorseless efforts of Beatriz de Bobadilla’s sultry exiled niece and her new husband, and the islands were incorporated into the Kingdom of Castile. The islands became prosperous colonies and provided a base for further exploration.

  So when a charismatic and opportunistic seafarer from Portugal with an intriguing exploration proposal showed up at Isabella’s court in the mid-1480s, claiming he had links to her Portuguese grandparents, the queen was disposed to listen. This mariner, an Italian who had been living in Lisbon, was named Christopher Columbus. He had been married to Felipa Moniz, whose father had served in the household of Isabella’s grandfather, the Infante Don Juan of Portugal.2 The family of Felipa Moniz had also been associated with Prince Henry the Navigator and had participated in some of the early Portuguese explorations. When Columbus married into this family, his mother-in-law gave him some navigational instruments and maps that her husband had owned, which Columbus reportedly received with joy.3 Columbus’s wife Felipa had since died, and now the widowed explorer had formulated a plan for an audacious sea exploration that he avidly wished to pursue. Columbus, a single father with his young son Diego in tow, moved to Castile and began to propose his idea to the queen.

  Christopher Columbus, or, as he was known in Spain, Cristóbal Colón, believed it was possible to sail westward around the globe to arrive at the Indies, bypassing the Turkish monopoly on silks and spices from the East. It was common knowledge then that the world was round, but nobody had yet been able to circumnavigate it because of the great distance across the open ocean with no stopping points along the way. Efforts to make such trips had been rumored, but none had been substantiated. Columbus believed he had the grit and sailing skills for the test. The expedition, he told the queen with passionate conviction, would allow the sovereigns to replenish their dwindling treasury, depleted by the war with Granada, and could perhaps even fund a new crusade to reconquer Jerusalem from the Muslims. This, of course, was music to the queen’s ears.

  Columbus’s pitch to the monarchs was more romantic than pragmatic. From the beginning he wooed them with a siren’s song, addressing them in letters as “King and Queen of the Islands of the Ocean.”4 Given Isabella’s background and knowledge, she was inclined to listen. Nevertheless, she was preoccupied with the war against Granada, she was raising five children, and much of the court regarded Columbus’s proposal with skepticism. It took some seven years of persistent persuasion before he was able to set off from Castile with his small squadron of three ships. Twice Isabella had referred the proposal to commissions for further study, a time-tested administrative technique for delaying a difficult decision, and twice the learned scholars had reported back that the trip was too risky, too unlikely to succeed.

  Isabella nevertheless decided at some point that she would commission the trip and that Columbus would be a good choice to lead it. He seemed more than competent for the undertaking, for he had a kind of genius as a seafarer and navigator, and he had demonstrated his skills more prosaically to a land-bound court through the production of careful and detailed maps. But he was a bit vague, even oddly secretive, about the journey’s exact route. From his perspective, he was trying to preserve his good idea and keep others from poaching it, but some observers thought his ideas lacked specificity. Moreover, in an era when classical learning was viewed as the source of all wisdom, heated debates over the merits of his concept revolved around what the ancients had said about the topic thousands of years earlier.

  Columbus had first made his proposition to the Portuguese King João during the civil war following King Enrique’s death. Columbus had tried to persuade the Portuguese to fund his trip and fruitlessly negotiated with João over the terms. Columbus had entertained outlandishly inflated expectations for the rewards he should receive if the trip were successful. Bartolomé de Las Casas, the author of Historia de las Indias, recounted that Columb
us had asked to be knighted, to be given the title “Don,” and to receive one-tenth of the king’s income from gold and other salable items found in the areas he discovered. King João, who by this time was experienced at managing these kinds of expeditions, laughed him off as an overreaching “fantasticist” whose claims would prove unfounded.5

  Unwilling to make the financial pledges Columbus asked, the crafty king nonetheless used the information Columbus had provided him to dispatch an expedition in the direction described. But the sailors sent to sea failed to find land and came back complaining bitterly that Columbus was a mistaken fool. Columbus was enraged over this betrayal, suspecting that the Portuguese king had stolen his confidential material. In high dudgeon, he left Portugal and went to Castile to plead the same case. He sent his loyal brother, Bartholomew, on a similar mission to England, but according to fellow explorer and historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, King Henry VII “made fun of what Columbus said, and took his words to be in vain.”6

  Columbus presented his idea personally in Castile, weaving a tale that mixed astronomy and navigation with mythological history and essays by the ancients. He had not come from a wealthy family, however; he was self-taught, and his incomplete and faulty grasp of classical learning quickly became apparent to the scholars at court. Two panels of experts, asked to analyze his proposal, rejected his premise, saying—correctly—that the globe was much larger than Columbus claimed and concluding that his trip was likely to be a costly and embarrassing failure that would lead to nothing but loss of life for the sailors.

  But the intense and mystical foreigner mesmerized many others, including the queen, who decided to back the enterprise. They embarked on a kind of minuet. Columbus danced attendance at court for years, trying to show his enthusiasm for Castile’s interests, even volunteering as a soldier in the war against Granada. He had personal conferences with the queen, sometimes with both the king and queen, at least four times over these years, including meetings in the audience chamber at the Alcázar in Córdoba, at the sovereigns’ battlefield encampments at Baza and Málaga, and at Santa Fe, where they were conducting the siege of Granada. Some of these meetings became the stuff of legend—several times Columbus stalked away from court, only to be drawn back by someone who took his parting message to the queen, and she would call him back to tell her more. When he wasn’t at court, he was living at the monastery of La Rabida in Huelva, in the south, so a royal command meant that he appeared to be leaving monastic life to return to the world to discuss the business venture at hand. Of course, this was just the kind of approach tailored to attract the queen’s attention and respect. It does not mean, however, that Columbus was practicing priestly celibacy, for within a few years he acquired a second son, whom he named Ferdinand, through an extended out-of-wedlock love affair with a woman from Seville. He now had two children who depended on him for their sustenance.

  Isabella strung Columbus along, giving him encouragement and just enough money, small though it was, to make him hope that she would endorse his project. She essentially had him on call for whenever she would be ready to send him off. Columbus was paid 3,000 maravedis from the Castilian treasury on May 5, 1487; the same amount again on July 3; 4,000 on August 27, when he was asked to go to the royal encampment in Málaga; the same amount on October 15; and then another 3,000 on June 16, 1488. In other words, he was given a retainer of about 12,000 maravedis a year, the approximate wage of “an able seaman” of the day, according to the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison.7

  The amount was too meager for him to support himself at the peripatetic court, so he appears to have depended on charity at different times as well. He became increasingly threadbare in appearance, which would have undermined his credibility among the haughty and ostentatious Spanish courtiers.

  The next year Isabella pushed off his expenses onto her other subjects, requiring tavern owners and innkeepers to help with his upkeep. On May 12, 1489, the sovereigns furnished him with an open letter to all municipal and local officials, ordering them to give food and lodging to “Cristóbal Colomo,” “who has come to our court.”8

  Columbus’s hopes rose and fell with each new development. The queen was keeping him dangling, even as he received offers of funding from other sources. Two well-connected Spanish officials, the Duke of Medinaceli and the Aragonese financier Luis de Santángel, both said later that they had been willing to finance Columbus’s expedition. The Duke of Medinaceli said he had supported and housed Columbus for two years while the mariner was waiting for the Castilian commission, and that he had had three or four ships at the ready at his own facilities and could have sent Columbus on his voyage without delay. But he had informed the queen of his intention, and the queen had opted to keep the mission and its possible gains exclusive to Castile, something that irritated the duke, who later believed he had been one of the first to recognize the trip’s potential but had been waved off.

  “But since I felt that this was a job for the Queen, our Lady, I wrote to her Highness about it from Rota, and she answered that I should send Columbus to her,” the duke later wrote to Cardinal Mendoza.

  So I sent him to her, and besought her Highness, since I did not care to try it and was getting things set up for her [behalf], that she let me be given a piece of it, and that the ships be loaded, and [on their return] unloaded, at the Port. Her Highness received him and turned him over to Alonso de Quintanilla, who wrote to me on her behalf that she did not hold this business likely to come off; but that if it firmed up, she would graciously grant me a piece of it. But, after she had quizzed him, she decided to send him to the Indies [herself].9

  From fairly early on, observers saw that Isabella and Columbus had a certain affinity; their conversations were such that people referred to them as “chatting.” They were almost the same age—they even resembled each other, with their reddish hair and pale skin, standing out in a realm where most residents were dark-haired and dark-eyed—and they shared a romantic fascination with exotic places, animals, plants, and people. They were curious about the world around them. A little less apparent, but clear to the intuition, both possessed a messianic sense of destiny, intermingled with intense religiosity. Both wanted to spread the Christian faith, and both thought earthly rewards would come their way for doing so. Without question, their motives were simultaneously material and spiritual. They sought worldly riches but did not want to be perceived as doing so.

  Columbus possessed the same tangled view of world history as Isabella, mingling classical learning and mythology with recorded events in the recent past. He based his proposed trip on Ptolemy’s Geography, a book written in the second century that had been rediscovered in the 1400s. He anticipated finding certain people and places when he reached the Orient, based on the accounts of the Venetian Marco Polo, who had gone to Asia in the thirteenth century. Like the queen, he believed in the legend of Prester John, the mythical Christian king marooned among the Muslims or Mongols somewhere in East Asia. He promised to deliver to Isabella the kind of world that she had already commissioned Diego de Valera to write about in his Crónica.

  But Columbus also had a streak of madness, which is perhaps why he was willing to undertake a trip that almost everyone thought would lead to his death. He had a wild imagination. He signed his name with a secret signature he had devised himself, an indecipherable combination of letters and images. Some people believe that it was his coded way of sharing his Jewish ancestry with his children. But writing in some kind of cipher was a popular fad at the time among intellectuals—a fellow Italian, Leo-nardo da Vinci, who was roughly the same age as Columbus, famously wrote in script that was readable only in a mirror. Columbus, like Leo-nardo, spent many hours developing his theories, writing feverishly in notebooks, journals, and in the margins of books he owned. In his copy of Plutarch’s Lives, he made special notations on ninety-nine pages where “auguries, portents and… forms of divination… [including] the conjuration of demons” were mentio
ned. He was particularly fascinated by accounts in which individuals, such as Marcus Caecius, heard “voices in the air.”10

  Later he would claim that he heard such “voices in the air” himself. But this medieval preoccupation with angels and demons, and fears of them, haunted Isabella as well.

  Columbus was a fascinating, contradictory, and inscrutable character. He was evasive about his origins, though Italians were confident that he was born in Genoa. He may have had Jewish blood. Some thought he was a spy for Portugal. He was probably born poor. He was undoubtedly motivated by a need for money and by a desire to transform himself, and his descendants, into members of the titled nobility. That may have been why he was vague about his considerably more humble lineage, and perhaps why he never married the mother of his son Ferdinand, who most likely also came from a lower social class.

  At the same time, however, he was most certainly a devout Christian. His son Ferdinand later said his father was “so strict in matters of religion that for fasting and saying prayers he might have been taken for a member of a religious order.”11 Columbus seemed that way to others as well: when his pilot and sometime rival, Juan de la Cosa, depicted Columbus in an illustration, he depicted him as Saint Christopher, delivering Christianity to the masses in the New World.

  Unraveling fact from fiction has been a challenge for Columbus’s biographers ever since, because he created so many fables about himself. After his fortunes faltered, for example, he began to view himself as a martyr, describing himself as having been alone and friendless in the Castilian court. In fact, however, as a result of his great personal charm and intriguing ideas, from a fairly early point he drew many and varied supporters to his side. He came to be admired by Cardinal Mendoza, whose counsels were greatly respected by Queen Isabella. The Castilian treasurer Alonso de Quintanilla backed Columbus financially, as did a group of Genoese merchants, and so did the two would-be patrons of the endeavor, the Duke of Medinaceli and the Aragonese financier Luis de Santángel. Several priests, including one of Isabella’s confessors and one of Prince Juan’s tutors, endorsed his effort. And Beatriz de Bobadilla, Isabella’s best friend, is known to have considered the expedition a risk worth taking.