Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  Everything was going so well. Now all that remained was securing the Castilian border with Portugal with another marriage between the Castilian and Portuguese royal families. Queen Isabella continued to negotiate with King Manuel of Portugal, urging him again to accept María, but he remained insistent that Princess Isabel, and only Princess Isabel, would do. He rejected María again. Princess Isabel continued to say no. Manuel persisted in asking for Isabel’s hand. It became a test of wills between Isabel and her mother.

  Of course the outcome was predetermined. There was no test of wills that Queen Isabella did not win. Finally Princess Isabel agreed, to King Manuel’s delight. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand spent the summer together in Medina del Campo and visited Juan and Margaret in Salamanca, then headed west to Valencia de Alcántara, where the marriage between Princess Isabel and King Manuel was going to occur. The reluctant bride had asked that the wedding be celebrated with as little festivity as possible, so the events that had been planned were subdued in nature.

  As the wedding day of Manuel and Princess Isabel approached, however, word came by fast horsemen that Prince Juan had suddenly fallen seriously ill. Friar Diego de Deza, bishop of Salamanca, wrote that Juan, who had been so happy just days before, was weakening and had lost his appetite. “All of us here are begging Your Highnesses to come here, that there can be an improvement in his health; it is of such a necessity that we did not wait for your command to call the queen’s doctor and other physicians,” he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella.52

  Ferdinand rushed to Juan’s side; Isabella could not come because she was deep into the preparations for Princess Isabel’s wedding. In the next few days, the king sent his wife conflicting messages designed to hide the fatal prognosis. Crazy with grief, he even sent a vague report implying that he himself had died, thinking that it would lessen the queen’s pain if she eventually discovered her husband had been spared even as her son was taken.

  King Manuel also wanted to fend off the news. When he heard that Juan was dying, he asked that the information be withheld until he and Princess Isabel were wed, to prevent her from experiencing that pain at her wedding. He probably also feared the princess would attempt to delay their nuptials during the period of mourning.

  Prince Juan, for his part, meanwhile, had accepted his fate with serenity, trying to comfort his father, who pleaded with him to make a greater effort to live. He said he was content with going to God. His placid acceptance of his precipitous death suggests he had been ill or weak in the past. He was known to be sickly, with a weak stomach, and he may have finally succumbed to tuberculosis.

  Juan’s final act, besides asking his parents to care for his young wife, who was now pregnant with their child, was to request that money from his estate be used to buy freedom for Christian slaves held captive in Muslim hands. That bequest dwarfed all the other bequests in his will, even that of providing for his unborn child. He died on October 4, 1497. When Queen Isabella received the terrible news, she accepted it with sorrowful resignation: “God gave him to me and He has taken him away.”53

  Prince Juan was buried in Salamanca and later transferred to Ávila, where he had wished to be buried. Margaret, grief-stricken, fell desperately ill herself. Isabella rushed to her side and nursed her back to health lovingly. Margaret later told her father that she thought Isabella’s ministrations had saved her life. Her baby, however, was born prematurely and died. Margaret’s father Maximilian privately harbored suspicions about what had caused the healthy young woman to lose the baby. He speculated that the French might have found a way to place abortion-inducing herbs into Margaret’s food so that she would miscarry. It’s not impossible: certainly the French would have viewed the infant—who would have been heir to Castile and Aragon and linked to Burgundy and the German confederation, but under Spanish domination—as an enormous geopolitical threat.

  Regardless of what caused the miscarriage, however, the fact of the matter was that Juan’s child was gone as well. “This new loss” dashed the hopes of Isabella and Ferdinand, Zurita wrote, and “their woes deepened.”54

  This tragic news—the death first of Juan and then of his heir—spread across Europe. The kingdom descended into a pit of mourning. “The only light of all Spain is extinguished,” Peter Martyr wrote to Hernán de Talavera, now archbishop of Granada. “… The sovereigns endeavor to dissemble [their] so great grief, but we discern their mind prostrate within them. They often cast eyes at the face of each other sitting in the open when what is hid comes out.”55

  Even their enemies felt compassion for the family. The French ambassador Philippe de Commynes said that Juan’s death caused “unspeakable grief of the king and queen, but especially the queen, who was more like to die than to live, and certainly I never heard of so solemn and universal a mourning for any prince in Europe.”56 Commynes said he was told that all the tradesmen donned coarse black garments and shut up their shops for forty days. Even the animals were dressed in mourning. The nobility and the gentry covered their mules with black cloth down to their very knees, and all over their body and heads, so that there was nothing to be seen but their ears. Black banners were hung on all the gates of the cities.57

  What a terrible blow must this be to a family, which had known nothing before but felicity and renown, and had a larger territory (I mean by succession) than any other family in Christendom!… What a sad and surprising turn must this accident be, at a time when they had reduced their kingdom to obedience, regulated the laws, settled the administration of justice, were so well and happy in their own persons, as if God and man had conspired to advance their power and honor above all the rest of the princes in Europe.58

  But this turn of events, tragic for Castile and his family, was another piece of extraordinary good fortune for King Manuel the Fortunate of Portugal. In one fell swoop, he had attained the wife he wanted and also became heir to a truly huge empire. He and the young Princess Isabel, now the heir apparent in Castile and Aragon, would dominate the entire Iberian peninsula, as well as all overseas holdings of Portugal and Spain. By 1497, it had become apparent that those overseas territories might be immense.

  Conceivably Queen Isabella had anticipated this series of events when she negotiated the division of the New World with Portugal at the Treaty of Tordesillas. Is it possible that when she gave half the world to King João, she had known then that the other half would likely devolve to her daughter Isabel as queen and heiress to Castile? Had she sat at the table knowing that Manuel would likely inherit the throne, that he would cast his eyes on Isabel, and that Isabel would likely become the queen’s heiress as well? When she split the world in half, in other words, did she know she was keeping half of it for herself and giving half to her beloved daughter as the queen of Portugal, and that the two halves were likely to come together in the next generation?

  All that is of course unknowable, but given Isabella’s keen perception about politics and family dynamics in Portugal and Spain, it seems more than probable. When the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed in June 1494, King João had no legitimate male heir to his throne, and he was attempting to have his out-of-wedlock son, Jorge, legitimized by Pope Alexander VI so that he could inherit the throne. But the pope refused, and so in that last year of João’s life, it had become obvious that Manuel would one day be king of Portugal.

  Prince Juan’s death meant that Isabel and Manuel had to return to Spain to be sworn in as the heirs to the kingdom. The succession was complicated by the fact that Princess Isabel was a woman. That was not an issue in Castile, where Queen Isabella’s success in governing had made the issue a moot point, but the Cortes of Aragon balked at the idea of a female succession. For that reason, there was great excitement when it was discovered that Princess Isabel was pregnant. If she had a son, the boy would inherit everything. In this matter, Princess Isabel had once more done everything expected of her. She became pregnant within months of her marriage to Manuel, and she produced a male child on August 23, 1498,
in Zaragoza.

  But Princess Isabel’s fasting and self-denial at last took its toll. She was very thin when she gave birth, and she died within an hour of the baby’s arrival. She had asked to be buried dressed as a nun and to be interred at the Convent of Santa Isabel in Toledo, in Castile. In death she wanted to remain at home. Queen Isabella held her daughter in her arms as she expired.59

  This new and terrible tragedy befell Isabella and Ferdinand just one year after Prince Juan’s death, when they were still grieving the loss of their son. This time, however, they were able to take consolation in the birth of a son, the new heir to the thrones of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon, as well as all the overseas dominions held by both countries. Aragon quickly granted him the right of succession. They named the infant boy Miguel de la Paz, but it soon became apparent he was weakly and would need careful tending to survive. King Manuel, now a widower, was needed back in Portugal, and so he went home, trustingly leaving the child in his mother-in-law’s care. Queen Isabella gave the child her full attention, but observers saw that the boy had only a small chance of growing to adulthood.

  As these sad events unfolded, Princess Margaret had been staying with her in-laws, lovingly and supportively. She was close to her mother-in-law and had learned much from her about governing. But now she needed to decide what to do with her own life. Her Flemish attendants had never really taken to Spain, and it seemed to her that it was time to go home. Her departure was painful for Queen Isabella, because she had had such high hopes for Margaret’s marriage with Juan and had hoped that her intelligent and thoughtful daughter-in-law would be the mother of her grandchild and heir. Juan’s death made that dream go up in smoke, or so it seemed at the time.

  Margaret returned to Flanders and took up residence at her brother Philip’s court, where she had friendly relations with Juana, whom she had met three years earlier when Juana arrived as a bride-to-be. Margaret remained loyal to Spain, wearing Spanish costume to underscore her allegiance. Almost immediately, however, the men in her family began pondering other marriage alliances for her, and soon she was shipped away to the Duke of Savoy, who ruled an area of southeastern France adjoining Italy and Switzerland. She made the best of it, as she always did, and within a few years her new husband died, and she was home again for good.

  But she was in Ghent for a very happy event in early 1500. It was the birth of Charles, the firstborn male child of Philip and Juana. He was born on February 24, which was, under the Roman Catholic calendar, the Day of Saint Matthias, a point that Isabella considered particularly significant. It was a day freighted with fortune and obligation, because according to Christian belief, after Jesus died and ascended to heaven, the eleven remaining apostles discussed among themselves how to replace the turncoat Judas, who had killed himself, as the twelfth member of their group. Two men were considered, and after praying, the apostles cast lots to decide who would be named. Matthias won the honor but also the obligation, as many of the disciples knew they faced the possibility of martyrdom. “Believe me, Sire,” Isabella told the king when she learned of Charles’s birth, “that as the lot fell on Matthias, so the lot has fallen on this one to be the heir to these our realms.”60

  Again Queen Isabella had been prescient. In the summer of 1500, just a few months after Charles was born, little Miguel de la Paz, Manuel and Isabel’s son, died in his grandmother’s arms. Charles, living in faraway Flanders, was now the heir to the kingdom but was being raised far from the land that Isabella had spent her life so fiercely defending. This final blow, the death of Miguel, was like a wound to Isabella’s chest, and from this time, she began a downhill slide in energy, health, and drive.

  The widowed Margaret was there for the baptism of little Charles, however. She was named the godmother and was selected to hold the infant over the baptismal font before the Ghent Altarpiece, also known as The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Again loyally wearing Spanish clothing and still grieving over her husband’s death, Margaret cradled Juan’s little nephew in her arms. She had asked that the boy be named Juan, both for herself and as something his mother, Juana, might have appreciated as well, because of the name’s long history in their family. But Archduke Philip, Juana’s husband, insisted on naming the boy Charles after his own father.61

  Just the same, Margaret was there now to watch over things, just as she would have done with her own child.

  NINETEEN

  TURKS AT THE DOOR

  As Isabella fully entered middle age, when she was in her forties, she realized that the problem that had haunted her since her youth—the aggressive expansion of the Ottoman Turks—was not going away and in fact seemed on the verge of accelerating. That was a terrifying prospect for the Christians of southern Europe, who could see the Turks were heading their way.

  It meant that Queen Isabella, even after twenty years on the throne, would get no rest. She had spent the first four years of her reign at war with Portugal to bring peace to Castile’s western flank; she had spent the next three years crisscrossing Castile to bring order to a kingdom that had been torn by civil war and rampant criminality; she had spent the next twelve years fighting the Nasrid dynasty to secure Granada and hence the Iberian peninsula. The next nine years of her life—from 1494 to 1503—would be absorbed by efforts to protect and strengthen southern Europe from assault by the Ottoman Turks, who seemed invincible.

  The Ottoman Empire was a kind of perpetual war machine. Military operations were at the core of its existence. Circulating the booty won in war was the cornerstone of its economy. Extensive slaving operations gave the empire a constant supply of human fodder to send off to battle. “The ideal of gazâ, holy war, was an important factor in the foundation and development of the Ottoman state,” wrote Turkish historian Halil Inalcik. “Society in the frontier principalities conformed to a particular cultural pattern, inbued with the ideal of continuous Holy War and continuous expansion of the… realms of Islam until they covered the whole world. Gazâ was a religious duty, inspiring every kind of enterprise and sacrifice.”1

  It was also a system of “endless predation.”2 According to the historian Jason Goodwin, “The Ottoman Empire lived for war. Every governor in this empire was a general; every policeman was a janissary; every mountain pass had its guards, and every road a military destination.… Even madmen had a regiment, the deli, or loons, Riskers of their Souls, who were used, since they did not object, as human battering rams, or human bridges.”3

  The Turkish empire presented Christians with a daunting ideological challenge as well as a military threat. The Turks were admirable in many ways: at home they were well ordered, philanthropic, personally clean, and often devoutly religious, something that can make people kindly, patient, and at peace with themselves. For those under their domination, the Turks were remarkably tolerant for the age: many of the Jews who left Spain found safe haven in Turkish lands; homosexuality, which was a crime in western Europe at the time, was accepted without criticism. A number of Catholic clerics who had been opposed to Isabella’s insistence that they live simply and honor their vows of chastity found that life in the Muslim world was more pleasant. They took their concubines with them and settled into happy married life. Islam itself is an attractive religion, and most people under Ottoman rule eventually converted to that faith, either out of sincere belief or because it made life easier. For many men it would have been a fairly easy transition, assuming they were not deeply committed Christians or Jews. People who wished to retain their own religious beliefs could do so by paying extra taxes and accepting the embarrassment of being treated as a despised infidel, but it was more advantageous to convert. For all those reasons, people who lived in Muslim lands generally converted to Islam.

  But people in other lands who resisted Turkish domination for religious reasons, or because they preferred self-rule or feared life under the Turks, found themselves facing an entirely different prospect: enslavement, pedophilia, theft of children, robbery, death, and annihilation. For w
omen, there were the additional threats of rape, sexual abuse, and submission to increasingly conservative rules governing female behavior. For Queen Isabella, there was no option but resistance.

  The Turkish challenge was growing. Long feared for their powerful land armies, the Turks were beginning to move into the maritime arena as well. They were amassing a huge fleet of ships to make new rounds of attacks on western Europe and were becoming masters of the Mediterranean Sea. Turkish-supported piracy, meanwhile, was becoming a plague along the coasts of southern Europe, causing people to abandon the coastal regions.

  Meanwhile childish squabbles among Christian rulers in western Europe were destabilizing the balance of power and making the Italian peninsula, in particular, appear weak and ripe for the plucking. In 1494 the French king Charles VIII had proceeded with his crazy scheme to seize Naples, and amazingly enough, he had been able to march through Italy almost unimpeded, looting and pillaging all the way down the peninsula. The callow and corrupt tyrants who ran Italy’s city-states simply surrendered, one after the other, as he arrived and offered him free passage through their lands. When Charles VIII arrived in Naples, his men descended into an orgy of drinking and licentiousness, just as syphilis from the New World was making its unhappy appearance in Europe. Fewer than one-tenth of his army ultimately staggered back home; the rest had died through battle, starvation, or disease. Italy had been exposed as completely vulnerable to assault, and Ferdinand’s Aragonese cousins who ruled Naples had proven themselves so incompetent and unpopular among their subjects that they had ended up fleeing for their lives rather than remaining to defend their people.