Whether ultimately positive or negative, Isabella’s influence on the New World cannot be underestimated. The discoveries and the colonization would make Spain the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world for the next two centuries, though at great cost to many. About half the colonists and explorers who went to the New World died young; the death toll for the indigenous population, mostly as a result of exposure to new diseases, was far higher. The entire native American population was decimated in the original islands Columbus discovered. The microbes that killed them cannot be blamed on European malice, nor can the microbes that migrated from the Americas to Europe, but millions of people were inevitably affected.
Most of the indigenous survivors in the New World were those who intermarried with the Spaniards and formed a new race. Under Queen Isabella, this new race was an Hispanic people. She established Spanish as the official language; its grammatical rules were regularized by a grammar published by a professor at the University of Salamanca and widely disseminated. Isabella had exported Castilian culture across the globe.
She also established Christianity as the formal religion. Human sacrifice and cannibalism would be prohibited, and by 1542, so too would slavery. The strengths of Catholicism would spread across the continent—with its support for family, respect for education, access to charity through church-affiliated organizations, and a tradition of self-reflection that can lead people of conscience, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, to work in defense of the weak and powerless.
But if she imported the strengths of Castile to the New World, Isabella also imported its weaknesses, including the institution of the Inquisition. Wrong thinking would not be tolerated in the New World, either. Moreover, political and economic mistakes made in Castile would be replicated in Latin America as well.
All this happened because of the joint enterprise between a brave and bold explorer, Christopher Columbus, and his far-sighted sponsor, Queen Isabella. Because of her willingness to explore, because she recognized the possibility that the world was a bigger place than people had believed at her birth, she has been called the single most important person in Spanish history.
And no single person was more responsible for Spain’s expanded dominions than Columbus. “He planted the Christian faith in places so foreign and far,” Oviedo wrote, and because of him, “so many treasures of gold, and silver, and pearls and other riches and trade goods went to Spain. No other Spaniard ever brought such wealth to the kingdom.”34
EIGHTEEN
FAITH AND FAMILY
Isabella’s life was changing as her children moved into their teenage years. There were five of them—Juan, her heir, and his four sisters—and she had much to do in monitoring their educations and training them to rule. She was orchestrating their marriages with royal houses throughout Europe, and each negotiation was separate and complex, requiring consummate political and diplomatic skills. Meanwhile each child needed to be tutored and prepared to step into his or her future role as king or queen.
Queen Isabella was an affectionate but demanding mother. Stern, doggedly determined, and devoutly religious, she expected the same qualities in her family. No one was allowed to shirk responsibility or question obligations. The children’s behavior was expected to be impeccable, not only when they were on display at state events but also privately as they interacted with people inside the court circle. Isabella had a strong view of right and wrong. Her world was almost entirely black-and-white. Self-control was required, not optional.
Her standards for proper dress and demeanor were correspondingly high. She was torn between her need to operate successfully in the public sphere, which called for opulent external display as a demonstration of the kingdom’s wealth and power, and an internal tug in the direction of the traditional Christian values of simplicity and humility in garb and appearance. Ostentatious apparel was an essential tool for mesmerizing the public, intimidating rivals, and impressing foreign envoys. Such magnificence paid dividends—ambassadors went home speaking in awed tones about the continent’s new emerging superpower. The conquest of Granada, moreover, had made Ferdinand and Isabella into celebrities, imposing on them, even more than before, the obligation that appearances be maintained.
Consequently, in public, Isabella dressed herself and her family with splendor that became the talk of Europe, but she also made sure her children were warned about the moral hazards and superficiality that this kind of dress represented. Her choice of clothing was politically and socially savvy, but she also knew that it represented, at its core, false values.
But if court clothes were just vanity, they were vanity on an extraordinary scale. A soldier accompanying the English envoy on a trip to negotiate the marriage between Princess Catherine and Prince Arthur was astonished by the clothing and jewelry displayed by the Spanish royal family. Ferdinand “wore cloth of gold lined with fine sables,” while Isabella wore a black velvet cape lined with gold and set with precious gems.1 The next day Ferdinand appeared in crimson velvet, and Isabella wore cloth of gold. The oldest children, Juan and Isabel, joined the adults briefly; Juan made his appearance in crimson velvet, like his father, and Isabel dressed in cloth of gold, like her mother, with a great train of green velvet and a cap of “net in gold and black, garnished with pearls and precious stones.”2 Day after day, the family entertained the envoys with banquets, balls, bullfights, and jousting tournaments. And at each event, the members of the family appeared in new, different, and dazzling ensembles.
But all the time, Isabella’s confessor, Hernán de Talavera, was exhorting the faithful not to succumb to the snares of conspicuous consumption and to avoid “sumptuous dress.” He wrote a treatise on the ways good Christians should dress themselves and eat so that they would not fall into bad habits that led to sin and gluttony. Excessively revealing clothing, for example, was against the laws of nature because people were intended to cover their bodies to protect them from cold or the burning rays of the sun. Nudity was absolutely forbidden, he added, and had been ever since Adam and Eve. He also recommended that women cover their hair to promote modesty. And he urged people to dress and eat in “necessary and reasonable,” not “costly or extravagant,” ways.3 Each was to dress appropriately for his or her station in life.
Not surprisingly, Isabella’s choice of garb for herself and her family raised some eyebrows in church circles. Talavera several times questioned her about her apparel and behavior, and she squirmed with discomfort. Once he told her that her vanity would “offend God.”4 She replied that she had to dress as she did on state occasions and to help shape the image of Spain as rich and influential. But these kinds of issues caused her many hours of anxious reflection about whether she was living up to her own spiritual ideals.
Her inner conflicts were revealed in a set of small but exquisite paintings she commissioned. These were a set of depictions of scenes from the life of Christ, mostly following biblical text, designed for Isabella’s personal devotional use. They were probably intended as components of an altarpiece. Of the forty-seven oil paintings produced for the series, about two dozen are known to have survived. In their totality, they provide a remarkable window into Isabella’s thinking and religious philosophy and the ideas that she communicated to her children. They reveal her life as what the art historian Chiyo Ishikawa calls a “pointedly conservative enterprise” and show her deep desire for a court designed with “simplicity and austere understatement.”5
Believed to have been executed by two court painters whom Queen Isabella maintained on her staff, Juan de Flandes and Michael Sittow, both trained in Flanders, the paintings depict characters from the stories of the New Testament. The figures are dressed in the garb that was current at the time they were produced, making the images more directly relevant to the observer than scenes that more accurately portray the distant past. Many of the accessories shown—a convex mirror, a cuckoo clock, a classical entablature, a Gothic arch, a small hunting dog known as a whippet—were trendy obje
cts that would have been found in the homes of the wealthy in the 1480s. It is believed that Archbishop Talavera helped in the conception of the project.
Isabella and her children became integral parts of this series. Members of her family were painted as spectators and participants in scenes from Christ’s life. Placing family members in a painting was not particularly unusual at the time; many noble families commissioned pictures of themselves dressed in splendid robes, kneeling in prayer before an idealized Holy Family. But Isabella’s artworks did not portray herself and her family in the glorious foreground. Instead, they appear as bit-part actors, dressed as ordinary citizens, in the unfolding dramas. In one painting that depicts Christ’s miraculous feeding of the multitude with just a few loaves and fishes, Isabella appears as a humble and pious onlooker dressed in a simple robe and cloak, sitting as part of the crowd.6
Her son Juan and his bride-to-be may have been similarly worked into the scene as the wedding couple at the Marriage at Cana. Juan, blond-haired with delicate features, gestures with his hand as he speaks to a blond young woman, her hands held in prayer. Christ, dark-haired and pensive, sits next to his mother at the table, near the young couple. A convex mirror, a popular home accessory at the time, hangs from the wall. The table is set with a white cloth, looking something like an altar, with bread and wine visible, suggesting Holy Communion. In this picture, a wedding is turned into a religious service, a kind of mass.7
In other paintings, stylish and revealing garments are equated with sin. In one scene a blindfolded man, who is probably Jesus, is mocked. His tormentors appear as affected and haughty young Castilian courtiers dressed in high fashion. The men’s tights reveal the slender, shapely, and wiry muscles of their lower limbs; one sneering fellow wearing bright-red leggings has a particularly bulging codpiece.8
Simple, unaffected clothing that conceals sexuality, therefore, was viewed as the ideal in Isabella’s mind, even as her own court clothing grew more and more ornate in keeping with the new spirit of the Renaissance. The problem of properly balancing the secular and the spiritual would manifest itself in different ways for her and her children in the years ahead. All the children internalized the religious obsession that drove Isabella and came to share it, even while they struggled with the worldly power they wielded.
The way she saw the religious conflicts among Europe’s three faiths is also apparent in these paintings. In the canvas showing the mocking of the blindfolded man, for example, a Jewish high priest in a broad-rimmed hat hurries away, aware of the cruelty of the action but doing nothing to stop it. In a scene depicting the moment where Jesus is ridiculed by having a crown of thorns pressed onto his head, a turbaned man who looks like a Turk watches but does not intervene. Both, however, look troubled and pained by the events. The Jew and the Turk, as individuals, are not presented as intrinsically evil but are depicted as enabling painful events to unfold.
The paintings Isabella commissioned also illustrate the ways she viewed herself and her family as the defenders of Christ and his interests. In the depiction of a humbly garbed Christ calming the waves in the Sea of Galilee, for example, Jesus’s boat is flying a flag with the coat of arms of Castile and León. In another scene that is supposed to have occurred after the crucifixion, when Jesus appears to his mother, the Castilian escutcheon is painted on the roof of Mary’s home.
Interestingly, however, in the New Testament, Christ does not appear to his mother at all after his death, although he reportedly made appearances to over five hundred other people on at least a half dozen occasions. The fact that Queen Isabella added this noncanonical image to the mix suggests that she was interested in giving the mother of Jesus a more important role in the Christian story, either for her own reasons or because she felt Mary’s role was being undervalued by the church. At the same time she was actively advocating the growth of the female religious order called the Conceptionists, which promoted the Virgin Mary as holy in her own right, not just through her son.9 Of course, it is a law of nature that mothers feel underappreciated for their efforts on behalf of their offspring, and perhaps Isabella thought Mary deserved more credit than she was getting.
As the children grew from childhood into adolescence, Queen Isabella kept them close at hand. They joined her at war during the turbulent 1480s and 1490s. These were not children who spent their early years frolicking in the countryside. Isabella’s children spent their childhoods at war against the people they commonly called the “infidel.” They lived in heavily fortified castles on the frontier of enemy activity and in encampments while on campaign. The travels were grueling, over steep mountain passes and arid plains, in blazing heat and freezing cold. They sometimes lived in tents, sweltering in the summer and huddled next to coal braziers for warmth when the winter set in. A portable altar allowed them to worship on the road; a contingent of priests, including confessors to the king and queen, and chaplains to the family, accompanied them, holding large crosses aloft as they marched. They lived a kind of perpetual and militarized pilgrimage.
This level of direct family involvement in a war is unusual. Most rulers don’t want to put their own families at risk, certainly not their wives and small children. Most wars entail rulers sending people they barely know off to distant lands to risk being killed. The core of the Ottoman army at the time, for example, was made up of slave soldiers. Similarly, the Italian rulers of the same period relied on mercenary soldiers hired to fight their battles for them. When noblemen in the recent Middle Ages had gone to war, they had tended to treat their trips as sporting expeditions to be limited to the pleasant summer months. Their ritualized play at battle, the jousting tournaments, survived into Isabella’s day as a popular amusement at festivals and holidays.
But for Isabella, Ferdinand, and their children, war was real, immediate, and personal. The campaign against Granada lasted ten years. Isabella’s oldest child, Isabel, named for her mother, spent almost her entire childhood with her parents on campaign, first against the Portuguese and then against Granada. She was twenty-one when the Muslims’ capital city surrendered in 1492. The youngest, Catherine, was seven. Isabella was in a war council when she went into labor with her daughter María.
The family was totally absorbed in the effort to reconquer Spain. They spent their daily lives surrounded by soldiers who were members of their own extended family or else friends and relations of their friends. When a contingent went off to battle, frequently with King Ferdinand leading the troops, they watched and waited to see who would come back and in what condition. Often the warriors killed in combat were just a few years older than Isabella’s children and may have been their playmates just a few years earlier. Queen Isabella knew personally the noblemen who commanded the units and their parents and had visited the cities where they lived. When one of them died, she often knew firsthand the people who would be most affected by the loss.
Isabella and her family lived with constant wartime risks. One night at their camp outside Granada, for example, after Ferdinand had fallen asleep, she was up praying through the night in her tent. She accidently dropped a torch, setting her bed linens on fire. The fire spread quickly in her temporary quarters. Amid cries of alarm, everyone was rousted from bed. The men scrambled to grab their swords in the belief they were under enemy attack. As the flames leaped higher, the queen quickly gathered up her maps and battle plans and went out in search of her husband and thirteen-year-old son, finding them both safe. But the camp was destroyed. All their possessions were lost. The family donned borrowed clothing when they returned to the work of fighting the enemy.
The children had occasional intense, frightening, or sad interactions with their opponents. When the troops were besieging a city, they could sometimes hear the cries and lamentations of the inhabitants inside the city walls. They saw the enemy, and they also saw the innocent victims of war.
Even the act of accepting the surrender from the town could be hazardous duty if tempers suddenly flared. When the Spaniards
accepted a town’s surrender, it was King Ferdinand who typically marched in to receive the oath of fealty from its leading citizens. Often the decision to surrender had been controversial. The residents wondered if they had been betrayed, and their suspicions were not infrequently grounded in truth.
Ferdinand wasn’t the only one who directly placed himself in harm’s way. Isabella entered at least four cities herself to accept their surrenders, including Almería and Baza. In Baza, she was accompanied by the teenaged Princess Isabel. Princess Juana joined Queen Isabella at the surrender of Moclín. Prince Juan was part of the contingent at Jaén. When Boabdil surrendered in Granada, the keys to the city were given first to King Ferdinand, then passed to Queen Isabella, and then to thirteen-year-old Prince Juan. All five children spent considerable time at the forward command post, the Alcazaba in Córdoba.
Princess Isabel was drawn into specifically perilous situations on at least two separate occasions. When her parents were at war with the Portuguese, she had been left behind in Segovia under the care of Beatriz de Bobadilla’s father, Pedro. Isabella had granted control of the city to Beatriz and her husband, Andrés de Cabrera, and many residents of Segovia were unhappy about the transfer of power and wealth. The residents of the city rose up against the new administrators and seized the city and the citadel where the princess was staying. Princess Isabel, who was about seven years old, was trapped for some days in a tower of the Alcázar while milling crowds inside the fortress shouted and demonstrated their rage. When she got the news, Queen Isabella rushed to her daughter’s aid, galloping to Segovia with only a handful of companions. The citizens of Segovia tried to block the queen’s entry, complaining that they were unhappy with the governance by Andrés de Cabrera, who was also unpopular because he was a converso. The queen haughtily demanded that the residents permit her to enter, and she promised to investigate the situation. On her own, the queen entered the city and took back her daughter. As she had promised, she looked into the matters at issue but remained adamant in her decision about who would rule the city. For her daughter, however, it must have been a terrifying experience.
Isabella: The Warrior Queen Page 38
