Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  When Juan married María Enríquez in September 1493, he became a cousin to King Ferdinand and a relation by marriage to the most elite families in Spain. But the young man behaved badly from the moment of his arrival. He drank prodigiously, gambled heavily, spent many hours in brothels, and entertained himself by such reprehensible pastimes as shooting dogs and cats for sport. His father even heard a disturbing report—which soon proved untrue—that his son had failed to consummate the marriage. In fact, his wife became pregnant twice in short order, giving him a son and a daughter.

  Juan did not earn high marks among the Spaniards. “A very mean young man, full of false ideas of grandeur and bad thoughts, haughty, cruel and unreasonable,” one observer remarked.20 His conduct did not endear him to Ferdinand and Isabella either, and they did not protest when he was called home to Rome for a visit of undetermined duration. His wife, María Enríquez, stayed behind, raising the children on her own.

  Meanwhile, the pope’s administration of the Vatican was making people angry. Alexander VI was facing outright rebellion from the College of Cardinals. In an effort to bolster his control over the group, he proposed an unprecedented thirteen new candidates for membership. Three were his secretaries, a fourth was Alessandro Farnese, brother of the beguiling Giulia, and a fifth was his own son Cesare. The existing cardinals objected strenuously, but the pope said he intended to make the change whether they liked it or not, and so he did. At a meeting of the consistory on September 20, eleven cardinals appeared; seven voted for the pope’s plan and four abstained. Ten other cardinals, however, boycotted the meeting.21

  Thus it was with limited support that Cesare Borgia was invested as cardinal in a ceremony on September 23, 1493. It was obvious to everyone that he had no religious vocation whatsoever, and very soon he began to make it clear he wanted to be released from his clerical vows.

  The Borgia controversies at the Vatican came at a time when tensions were bubbling over on the Italian peninsula. The region had never established any sort of central administration, leaving civil governance dangerously unstable because of the ferocious competition and constant bickering among its largest city-states, which included Venice, Milan, Rome, Florence, and Naples. Milan, Naples, and Rome were at odds over the throne of Naples. Venice was facing a losing war against the Turks over its Balkan possessions. And there was a power vacuum in Florence. The statesman Lorenzo de’ Medici had died in 1492, leaving his maladroit son Piero in his stead.

  Milanese humanist Peter Martyr believed Italy was on the verge of war. “The Italian princes I think are turning the times to their own ruin,” he wrote in September 1492, describing the hatred and jealousy brewing in Milan and Naples, which seemed likely to provoke a violent intervention by France: “… Thus Italy forges by degrees the sword by which to kill herself.”22

  Indeed, the French were preparing their invasion. To make sure that the Spanish would not intervene when they marched south, King Charles reached out to King Ferdinand to offer to return the territories of Roussillon and Perpignan—the lands mortgaged away by Ferdinand’s father, Juan, when he was putting down the civil uprising in Aragon. Spain and France began negotiations. Observers noted that Spain would in effect be stepping away from any oversight role in Italy as a result of the treaty, and it seemed like one more piece of proof that a war between the Italians and the French was on its way.

  For it was becoming increasingly clear that Pope Alexander VI did not have the moral authority to act as a stabilizing force in the land where the Catholic Church made its home. At a church consistory on June 12, 1493, Spanish envoy López de Haro denounced the pope’s foreign policy, saying it was keeping Italy “in a constant state of war,” and he also criticized “the venality of his curia, the scandalous auction of benefices.”23

  But these differences were muted—at least for now—by the shared religiosity of Pope Alexander VI and his patrons in Spain. Unquestionably, they were all deeply committed to their practice of Catholicism, if not to its underlying values, and they sought to communicate their faith in ways that would increase the church’s prestige.

  This was the period when Ferdinand, Isabella, and Pope Alexander VI pushed ahead with architect Donato Bramante to design and construct the commemorative tomb called the Tempietto on Vatican Hill. A masterpiece of High Renaissance art with precise echoes of the classical world, the building was commissioned by Isabella and Ferdinand, and decorated with the scallop-shell motif that represents Santiago de Compostela and pilgrimage in Spain. Its foundation stone, planted in the wall in 1502, bore the names of Ferdinand and Isabella, written in faux medieval script. Isabella and Cardinal Bernardino López de Carvajal collaborated to collect more than five dozen holy relics for the site, including pieces of the True Cross and fragments from the crib of the infant Jesus. The building struck observers in Rome as something completely new and innovative; it was also a visual representation of the ways in which the joint reign of Isabella and Ferdinand marked the transition between the Middle Ages and the modern era.

  Another shared Spanish endeavor was the splendid redecoration of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, the largest church in Rome, dedicated to Christ’s mother. The pope paid for construction of the building’s magnificent gilded ceiling; the actual gold used was said to be among the first of the precious metal to be brought back from the New World, and was a gift to the church from Isabella.24

  The queen and the pope shared a belief in the importance of the discoveries in the New World and a sense that the church was destined to make great progress there. In his private apartments at the Vatican, Alexander VI commissioned a monumental painting by Pinturicchio, done sometime between 1492 and 1494, that showed the pope kneeling in prayer before the Risen Christ. This work, called The Resurrection, contains in the background, just above Christ’s empty tomb, a depiction of native Americans. They are shown as naked, strong, and muscular, wearing feathered headdresses. It is the first known representation of Indians in European art, and the decision to include them in this masterpiece underscores the pope’s early interest and awareness of the pivotal significance of bringing Christianity to a new land.

  The pope’s quick appreciation of the issue paved the way for Isabella to impose her own religious values, in ways both good and bad, on an entire new hemisphere. She brought in Castilian-style education, health care, political systems, and spiritual values to millions of people. She also introduced the Inquisition to the New World, soon after it had taken root in Spain. It meant that the uniquely Spanish combination of in-tellectual inclinations—broad-mindedness in secular matters combined with intolerance of religious differences—made the leap across the ocean, where it would affect cultural and political life in Latin America for more than five hundred years.

  But the pope’s most valuable gift to Isabella and to Spain’s future was the fact that he had carved the world in half and given such an important part to Isabella. All in all, it was an extraordinary transaction—first that an individual would have the audacity to divide up the planet, and second that the Catholic Church was so powerful that many people in generations to come never even considered questioning the ruling.

  The gift was immediately questioned by native Americans in the New World, however, when they were later informed that the pope had taken land occupied by millions of them and ceded it to the Europeans with a wave of a pen and a dollop of sealing wax. They struggled to grasp the concept that one man—the pope—would be believed to have that much power over heaven and earth.

  When it was described to two Indian Cenu chiefs in Colombia in 1512, they shook their heads in wonder. “The Pope must have been drunk,” one said to the other.25

  SEVENTEEN

  LANDS OF VANITY AND ILLUSION

  In the centuries since 1492, generations of scholars have heatedly debated who actually were the first non-Americans to step on the shores of the New World. Some say the credit should go to Norsemen, or Welsh, or Africans, or Polynesians, or, most recently
, Chinese. Some or all of these people may in fact have gotten a glimpse or more of the Americas before Columbus did. They looked, they left. But one thing is certain: only one person in history immediately recognized the importance of the discovery, claimed it for herself, and turned the venture promptly into a keenly pursued enterprise that resulted in one of the most dramatic population shifts in history. And that person was Queen Isabella.

  She alone of all the rulers of those various lands appreciated from the start the significance of what had been found and took effective steps to institutionalize future expeditions and colonize the Americas. The En-glish and French lagged behind by a century, finally claiming the leftover lands in North America that the Spaniards had found unappealing. The Portuguese at first focused their efforts on mercantile exchange, creating only a network of trading posts that supported their trade routes. The Spanish, however, resettled themselves in great numbers almost immediately, intermingling the blood of Castilians and native Americans to forge a new people.

  Soon after Columbus’s return in 1493, Queen Isabella came to the conclusion that what he had found was too momentous for any one man, even her friend, to have sole right to exploit. As soon as she secured the pope’s blessing, she began to throw resources and effort into forming new expeditions, with proper financial controls, that would primarily benefit her subjects, the Castilians. Within months she sent Columbus back with more men and ships, but she sponsored other explorers as well. Soon ship after ship, with different Castilian captains and crews, was heading west from Seville on her mission.

  Columbus was dispatched on three further voyages with varying degrees of success. But in the next decade she sent out at least six other expedition parties as well. Alonso de Hojeda led a group accompanied by the pilot from the first trip: Juan de la Cosa went with Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine who wheedled his way on board, and after whom the Americas were accidently (and unaccountably) named. Other expeditions were led by Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, the youngest of the three Pinzón brothers; Diego de Lepe, a capable seaman who was a cousin to the Pinzón family; Pedro Alonso Niño, from the Niño maritime family; and Rodrigo de Bastidas, a wealthy merchant from Seville, who was joined by a young man named Vasco Núñez de Balboa.

  With her express permission, within the next ten years these expeditions reached and charted thousands of miles of coastline in the Americas. Columbus visited most of the major islands of the Caribbean as well as the coast of Central America. Alonso de Hojeda reached what are now Colombia and Venezuela. Juan de la Cosa explored a cluster of islands off the coasts of Colombia and Panama. Vicente Yáñez Pinzón visited Brazil and was the first European to see the Amazon River. Bastidas, accompanied by Balboa, was the discoverer of mainland Panama. The expedition to Panama was particularly significant because the narrowness of the isthmus at the point soon made it possible to traverse from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Balboa was the first European to spot the Pacific Ocean from American shores.

  Each expedition spawned others, in a cascading effect that continued for decades. Hernán Cortés, who arrived in the Caribbean in 1504, became the conqueror of Mexico and later explored Baja California. Juan Ponce de León, who first went to the New World in 1493, charted the coasts of Florida, in what would become the future United States of America. Francisco Pizarro traveled to the Americas with Alonso de Hojeda in 1509 and conquered Peru in 1533. And the explorations were multigenerational. Pedro de Vera Mendoza helped conquer the island of Gran Canaria in the 1480s; his grandson Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca set out for the coast of Florida, got marooned and enslaved there, and ended up walking for nine years across the south of Texas and the American Southwest before making his way to safety in Mexico.1

  Isabella’s decision to allow others to go exploring was painful to Columbus, who believed he had negotiated the exclusive right to exploration and mercantile exchange in the lands he had discovered. But his original supposition that he had landed in India was soon proved inaccurate, and although Columbus showed himself to be an excellent mariner, he was also exposed as a terrible administrator and a man of poor judgment, something that would soon become obvious to almost everyone.

  At first, however, Isabella placed complete confidence in the Italian seafarer. Within a month of Columbus’s arrival in Barcelona, she had prepared sixteen royal orders making preparations for his next departure. Using the customary royal boilerplate heading that joined her name with Ferdinand’s, Isabella gave him specific instructions for the trip. The first and most important point—and the one that she most fully elaborated—called for the religious instruction of the Indians, whom she said Columbus should “by all ways and means… strive and endeavor to win over,” to convert them to “our Holy Catholic faith,” teaching them Spanish so that they would understand the religious instruction they would receive. To that end, she sent a contingent of twelve priests to begin the missionary work.

  Queen Isabella was explicit about how Columbus and his men should interact with the native Americans. She ordered them to “treat the said Indians very well and lovingly and abstain from doing them any injury, arranging that both peoples should hold much conversation and intimacy, each serving the other to the best of their ability.” The queen said that if any person were to “maltreat” the Indians “in any manner,” Columbus should “punish them severely,” under the authority she had granted him as admiral, viceroy, and governor.

  She wanted to make sure that the expedition’s finances were solidly managed, both as to its initial expenses and as to the income she expected to eventually derive. For better oversight, she put the acquisition of the ships and supplies under the joint control of Columbus and Don Juan de Fonseca, a bureaucrat from an aristocratic family based in Coca, not far from Isabella’s family headquarters in Segovia, and whose family had long been faithful servants to the crown. Fonseca was not a mariner, but he was an expert logistician whom Isabella had employed on other complicated tasks. He shared responsibility with Columbus for hiring and expenditures.

  New rules and regulations were imposed that determined how the lands would be colonized. Everyone who went on the new explorations was required to register and take an oath of loyalty to the crown of Castile. A customshouse was established in Seville so that the kingdom could track the arrival of shipments from the New World. The right to barter for goods was restricted to the Castilian crown.

  On September 25, 1493, just six months after his triumphant return from the Indies, Columbus set sail on his second voyage. This time he led a much larger enterprise. His effusive description of the wonders of the lands he had found—a paradise where gold was available to be plucked from the ground like the luscious fruits hanging in the trees, free for the taking—had inspired a groundswell of enthusiasm, and people clamored to join the voyagers. This time seventeen ships set out, with some fifteen hundred men participating. There is no complete list of the voyagers, but a number of well-connected courtiers took part this time, including many who would go on to play important roles in future trips of exploration, such as Juan Ponce de León and Alonso de Hojeda, both of whom had already made names for themselves by serving bravely during the war with Granada. A few Aragonese noblemen also joined up, including a man named Mosén Pedro Margarit, who had close and long-standing ties to King Ferdinand.

  There was a larger contingent directly linked to the queen and her household, including Diego Álvarez Chanca, the queen’s physician; Antonio de Torres, the brother of the crown prince’s governess; Melchior Maldonado, a former envoy to the Vatican; and Francisco de Penalos, a courtier of the queen, and his brother, Bartolomé de Las Casas. These last two men told their stories firsthand to Bartolomé’s son, who shared his father’s name and became one of the first historians of the Indies. Columbus was permitted to take along a few Italian friends, including his brother Diego and a Genoese named Michele de Cuneo.

  We have many more sources of information for this second expedition than for the first one. Columbus kept
a journal on this trip, and although his account has not survived, it was accessible to the first generation of historians of the New World. At least three other participants—the younger Bartolomé de Las Casas, Diego Álvarez Chanca, and Michele de Cuneo—all wrote letters or books about the second voyage based on what they saw or heard on good authority. In addition, contemporary accounts were circulated by historians Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés and Peter Martyr, who also had inside knowledge of the events.

  Columbus had been given everything he asked. He was granted the fine title of “Viceroy and Admiral of the Ocean Sea and the Indies,” which would be inherited by his children. He had been instructed by the sovereigns to “treat the Indians well and lovingly” but was also given the specific right to judge civil and criminal cases and punish wrongdoers. He was authorized to claim new lands for Castile.

  Not surprisingly, tension arose between Columbus and Fonseca very early in the preparations. Columbus saw himself as the unquestioned commander of the expedition, but Don Juan de Fonseca saw his role as ensuring that the sovereigns’ interests were protected and advanced. The conflict erupted over a number of small matters: the size of the guard that would defend Columbus, and the quality of the horses chosen for the trip. Fonseca was not a sailor or a discoverer, which irritated Columbus, but he was nevertheless a master of planning and managing elaborate enterprises. His function was essentially to serve as the crown’s “chief minister for colonial affairs,”2 and his role would grow increasingly powerful over the next few years.