Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  To meet her new family, Princess Isabel was accompanied by her Portuguese cousin Don Manuel, who had lived in Castile during the hostage swap. He was now Duke of Viseu and also Duke of Beja, having been granted the titles by João II after the king had killed Manuel’s older brother Diego, who had originally been the heir. Manuel was the same age as Isabel, and in the course of traveling across the two kingdoms, he came to particularly admire her.

  The young Isabel was greeted with immense enthusiasm when she arrived in Portugal. As she passed through the streets, such a happy clamor of trumpeting and cheers greeted her that, according to a Portuguese chronicler, “truly it seemed the earth trembled.”21 The living accommodations for the young couple were prepared with “rich brocades and fine tapestries,” and the princess was given many gifts.22

  Isabel and Afonso were married on November 25, 1490, in the town of Évora. Many “great festivals,” banquets, balls, and other celebrations were scheduled for the weeks ahead.23 At one event, called a mummery, King João initiated a joust, “ornamented artfully as the Knight of the Swan, with a great deal of wealth, charm and graciousness,” the chronicler recalled.

  He entered through the doors of the hall with a large fleet of great ships, set on bolts of cloth painted as stormy and natural waves of the ocean, with great thunder of ordnance being fired, and trumpets and horns and minstrels playing instruments, with wild shouts and the turmoil of whistles by make-believe masters, pilots and mariners who were dressed in brocades and silks.… The king sallied forth in his very luxurious masquerade dress and danced with the Princess, and in like manner the others with their ladies .… And they danced that night, and there were many farces and festivities.24

  It was a spectacular send-off for these two beloved children of increasingly wealthy nations. Afonso was only fifteen years old and Isabel was twenty, but despite the difference in their ages, their childhood friendship kindled into intense love. Things got off to a very promising start, and when the events were concluded, the chronicler noted, “all left very happy and content.”25

  This was a vital marriage for Spain because the war with Portugal was still a recent memory and the peace treaty between Portugal and Castile had left lingering resentments. João’s father had done in Portugal what King Enrique had carelessly done in Castile: given lands, properties, and benefices to top-ranking noblemen to win their support and loyalty, weakening himself in the process. During his grandfather’s reign, there had been only two dukes and six counts; but at the death of King Afonso V, this tally had grown to four dukes, three marquesses, twenty-five counts, one viscount, and one baron, according to the historian Antonio Henrique de Oliveira Marques, who notes that all had been given valuable lands and revenues. By the time King João II finally inherited the throne, he noted with disgust that the only property his father had left him by right was the land under the roads.26

  When his father died and João became king in 1481, he embarked on the same program of centralized royal administration that other successful European countries, including Spain, France, and England, were employing to stabilize themselves and place a check on nobles who had grown arrogant and lawless during times of disorganized governments and civil chaos. He set out to bring the nobles to heel—but in this respect he clashed again with his relative Queen Isabella. Isabella’s mother’s family included the Dukes of Braganza and Viseu, and they were Portugal’s wealthiest and most powerful family—similar to the Mendoza clan of Castile. King João learned that they had been corresponding with Isabella in ways that he believed to be traitorous. After finding some suspicious documents, he imprisoned the Duke of Braganza, put him on trial and, after he was convicted, ordered him to be executed. Later, in a fit of anger, he killed Don Manuel’s older brother, who may have involved himself in a plot against the king. Nobody was clear on the details of how the duke was stabbed to death—some said the king had done it himself, others that he had had the help of courtiers—but the action horrified people across western Europe. The French courtier Commynes, for example, called João “barbarous”—he was one of many who believed João had murdered his cousin with his own hand.27

  Queen Isabella had been greatly disturbed by the killings and had offered refuge in Castile, giving land and property to many of the grandees whom João had persecuted. She did not utter João’s name much after that. From then on she called him, in tones of withering contempt, El Hombre, or “The Man.”

  Young Isabel, although greatly beloved by her parents, had clearly pulled the short straw in taking on the challenge of restoring international harmony. This, obviously, was going to be no easy task for a young woman. Isabel had some things working for her, however. Her childhood years in Portugal meant that she already spoke Portuguese and was familiar with the kingdom’s customs; she performed its dances so elegantly that her movements were a source of pride to her family and she was asked to perform at court events and diplomatic banquets. But she bore her mother’s stamp and made her marriage a splendid success. She even managed to win the affection of her father-in-law, the tough and cold-blooded King João.

  The first few months of the young people’s marriage was idyllic. On one lovely day, the couple sailed on a river in a flag-festooned barge, picnicking joyfully in the countryside. Then one day in July 1491, King João proposed a late-afternoon horseback ride, and the prince decided at the last minute to gallop off to join his father. Sometime on the ride, his horse stumbled and fell, and the prince landed on the ground, crushed by the horse’s weight. His mother got word that the prince had been injured, and she and Isabel rushed to his side. They begged and pleaded with God to save him, but he never spoke again, and within three hours he was dead.28

  Prince Afonso had been greatly loved by the Portuguese people, and the whole kingdom grieved at his death. Men tore out the hair from their heads and beards; the women ripped at their faces, leaving large bloody gashes from their nails. “Very sorrowful cries and exceedingly loud lamentations” were heard everywhere.29

  Afonso’s parents were bereft. But no one suffered more overtly than his wife, Isabel. She grieved so ferociously that it attracted favorable comment in the family for generations. Sobbing, she cut off her golden hair, put a veil over her head so no one could see her face, changed into mourning clothes, and refused to change her outfit for forty days to chasten her body. She stopped eating almost entirely and grew very thin, finally consenting to sip a small amount of broth. She took ill with fevers. She spent her days in a darkened room with only a single candle for illumination, reading religious and devotional texts. She attended mass daily and received communion over and over. She became preoccupied with dark imaginings about what had caused this disaster to befall her and Portugal. She engaged in intense self-examination about ways she might have displeased God.

  This level of grieving was not unusual at the time. It was customary for people in Portugal to cut off their hair, neglect their hygiene, wear dirty clothes for extended periods, and do other things to express their sorrow. During this period King João and his wife, for example, stopped sitting at a table to eat and instead ate “seated on the ground and off of vessels of pottery, deprived in every respect of all magnificence.”30

  The grief that his widow demonstrated helped to distract the young man’s parents. Worried about her well-being, even her survival, they moved her bed into their own bedchamber, where she consented to accept only minimal comforts, including merely a very thin Indian bedspread for warmth.

  Isabella and Ferdinand were both saddened by the news of Afonso’s death as well. Isabella wrote her daughter letters of tender, heartfelt consolation, as did Archbishop Talavera, according to an account of the events that was preserved in a book about proper conduct for Christian women that was commissioned by Queen Isabella’s granddaughter fifty years later. The letters, according to the account, were themselves heart-rending: “There is no one who, unless they had a heart of stone, could hear it without shedding many tears!”31
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br />   As Princess Isabel mourned Afonso’s death, she became preoccupied with what sins they may have committed to cause God to take the young man from them. She became convinced that Afonso had died because Portugal had allowed heresy to fester.32 No one knows who came up with this idea, but the growing suspicion that God was punishing Portugal for harboring nonbelievers would have far-reaching consequences in the years to come.

  Isabel’s parents sent for the princess to come home, eager to have her back and to help her recover. She returned devoutly religious and continued to starve and scourge herself. She said she would never again marry. Instead she stepped back into her comfortable role as companion and assistant to her mother, Queen Isabella, who was forty by now and juggling problems both at home and abroad.

  Afonso’s death had led to political turmoil in Portugal. The succession was thrown into dispute—João hoped to name his illegitimate son Jorge his heir, but many would clearly view Jorge’s succession as invalid. In Portugal, where Juana la Beltraneja, the child that King Enrique had believed to be his daughter, was still living in a convent, even the suspicion of illegitimacy was enough to destroy a monarchy. But this was no longer Princess Isabel’s problem, and she left her life in Portugal behind.

  In late 1495, however, King João II died. He had reluctantly decided to leave the throne to his cousin, Manuel, who had received the title Duke of Viseu after his older brother had been killed. It was a stroke of almost unbelievable good luck. Manuel had been the eighth of nine children and, for most of his life, a most unlikely inheritor of the throne. But his older brothers had all died, one by one. Manuel’s placid disposition and tact had helped him survive the king’s tumultuous reign. Portugal’s new prosperity, moreover, meant that the nation, even though small, was developing a valuable global trading empire. Soon the young man was being called, appropriately enough, Manuel the Fortunate.

  Manuel had one particular further stroke of luck in mind. He wanted to marry Afonso’s widow Princess Isabel. He had first been attracted to her when he escorted her to Portugal. Maybe it was her charm, or maybe it was her enchanting way of dancing. It probably didn’t hurt that she was second in line for the crown of Castile and Aragon, after her brother Juan. Some were whispering that Prince Juan did not seem altogether healthy. There was a chance that Manuel could end up as king of Portugal, Spain, and all their combined dominions.

  Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand offered King Manuel the younger daughter, María, but he could not be swayed. It would be Isabel, or he would look outside Iberia for a bride. So Isabella and Ferdinand began pressuring the young widow to renounce mourning and her exaggerated religious rituals and marry Manuel. Isabel refused, with complete resolution. A determined young woman, she adamantly insisted that she would never again “know another man,” Peter Martyr wrote, and “up to this day she can by no means be conquered.”33

  There the matter rested. A lot was going on in Castile already—wars and voyages of discovery were under way—and the issue was temporarily set aside as less pressing than other matters.

  The family spotlight shifted to Juan, his mother’s beloved “angel,” who continued to receive the favored treatment enjoyed by the firstborn male of all families at that time. By 1496, when he was eighteen, he had a large household of his own, with a minutely structured schedule of activities each day. Dozens of attendants waited on him, making sure that each garment he placed on his body, with the assistance of the proper official assigned to that role, was perfectly prepared so that his appearance was impeccable. His wardrobe was extraordinary, consisting of numerous garments made of brocaded satin, cloth of gold, and velvet. One man’s primary task was to keep the prince’s silver chamber pot close at hand for convenient use.

  Juan kept his own court of advisers and associates as well. They were primarily the sons of wealthy and noble families, but a few others, such as the two sons of Christopher Columbus, were also fit into the mix.

  The boys of the court continued to be tutored in the latest humanistic learning by the Italian scholar Peter Martyr, who took enormous pride in preparing the future king of Spain. He playfully described himself as operating a palaestra, the ancient Greek term for a wrestling school for youths. “I have a house crowded all day with the petulant youths of the Nobles,” he wrote with a boastful swagger to the archbishop of Braga, a top Portuguese cleric.

  They are now beginning by degrees to turn themselves from the empty loves, to which as you know very well they have been badly accustomed from tender years, to letters. They now begin to learn that letters are not a hindrance to warfare as they had falsely imbibed from their ancestors, may they also confess that they are a great help. I strive to persuade them that no one can otherwise become famous in peace or war. This our palaestra so pleases the Queen, a living example of all the virtues in the royal scepter, that she has ordered… her cousin to frequent my house, and has also ordered the Duke of Villahermosa, nephew of the king by his brother, [to do the same] and that they are never to leave it unless as urgent cause presses. All the young heirs of potentates, as many as either Spain possesses, follow there. They bring with them two tutors to listen that they may go over with them at home the rules of grammar according to my plan, and what they hear they repeat together.34

  Martyr and others described the prince as a sensitive and scholarly young man, who had great potential but was not terribly strong. Martyr commented on the young man’s “tender palate,” noting that the prince’s diet was carefully monitored to help him maintain his strength. There was a bit of foreboding in one letter: if only the young man should live, “you will see the world happy with Spain.”35

  Many good things seemed to be in store with Prince Juan, and also for his younger sister Juana. As a result of the family’s dynastic planning, Juan was to marry the lovely Margaret, the granddaughter of the Holy Roman emperor and the heiress, with her brother Philip, to the vastly wealthy realms of Burgundy and Flanders. Juan’s younger sister Juana was to marry Philip.

  It would be a truly thrilling match, particularly for aficionados of early Renaissance art and culture such as Isabella and her children. Margaret and Philip came from a world that was socially and artistically avant-garde and sophisticated. The land over which they reigned was the most affluent in Europe and the home of many masterpieces of the early northern European Renaissance. The Ghent Altarpiece, with its haunting pictures of Adam and Eve, painted by the master Jan van Eyck, had created an international sensation and helped launch a new era in painting. It had been commissioned by Philip the Good, the great-grandfather of the two young prospective spouses. This kind of art was greatly admired in Spain as well, for Isabella’s father had commissioned the Miraflores Altarpiece from a contemporary of Jan van Eyck’s named Rogier van der Weyden.

  The brother and sister, Philip and Margaret, were attractive and highly eligible marriage prospects in their own right. Numerous portraits of them were painted for the family, for public purposes, or for delivery to prospective spouses around Europe. A set of double panels called a diptych, dating from about 1495, contained portraits of both, with their coats of arms hovering around their heads to advertise the vast territories they were slated to inherit. Both teenagers—Philip was about sixteen and Margaret about fourteen—had eighteen separate shields ringing their torsos.

  Both appear in their portraits to have been fair-skinned and russet-haired, with delicate features and full red lips, physical characteristics that were much admired at the time. The portraits also communicated their extreme wealth: Philip is shown with a wide gold necklace, more precisely a golden collar, and an ermine-trimmed robe; Margaret wears a longer gold chain and a pendant with a large red stone at her throat; her dress is made of richly embroidered cloth. Their heads are covered—Philip with what appears to be a black velvet hat and Margaret with a red cap covering her hair and black veil cascading down the back onto her shoulders.36

  Margaret was universally praised, but it was Philip who drew the deep
est admiration. In fact, he was so good-looking that he had become commonly known as “Philip the Fair” or “Philip the Handsome.” But the praise lavished on him didn’t seem to go to his head, as he was uniformly described as having courtly good manners and great personal charm.

  Despite their wealth and position, their childhoods had been tragic and difficult. Their mother, Mary, heiress to the rich Duchy of Burgundy and the grandchild of Philip the Good, had been married to Maximilian, the son of the Holy Roman emperor, and they produced the two children in quick succession. In 1482 Mary and Maximilian went hunting in the meadows near Bruges, and while jumping a waterway, Mary’s horse swerved, the twenty-five-year-old woman fell off, and the horse fell on top of her. She suffered internal injuries, and three weeks later she was dead. Her death raised the usual succession complications, and while their grieving father tried to deal with them, Philip and Margaret were placed in the care of their grandmother. They spent the next years with her in the northern European territory of Flanders. Philip was four years old; Margaret was only a toddler.

  Margaret was soon betrothed to the future king of France, Charles VIII, and at age three was transferred for proper instruction to the French court at the palace of Amboise. But Charles VIII jilted her when a richer heiress, Anne of Brittany, became available on the marriage market, and Margaret, at the vulnerable age of eleven, was sent home to await a different future. This was a double humiliation for Margaret and her father, because the widower Maximilian had intended to marry Anne of Brittany himself. Philip, meanwhile, the child heir to the Duchy of Burgundy, passed into the hands of a variety of self-serving courtiers, not unlike what had happened to Isabella’s father and brothers. When they were betrothed to Juan and Juana, this history should have set off some alarm bells for Queen Isabella.