Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  Eager to establish a family military dynasty to expand the territories under their control, Pope Alexander VI made Cesare commander of the papal army, and Cesare set off on a rampage through Italy, seizing control of the cities of Imola and Forlì. Cesare went on to command French troops in the sieges of Naples and Capua, which were defended by the Italian condottiere Prospero Colonna. He thereby ended up participating in the destruction of the Aragonese ruling family of Naples once and for all. It was at this point that Ferdinand and Isabella, seeing that their cousins’ reign was effectively at an end, threw in with the French and partitioned Naples between them.

  Cesare’s successes were made possible because of his father’s role as pope but were also the result of the son’s real genius at duplicity and deceit, combined with flashes of personal charm that disarmed the people who stood in his path and allowed him to gain popular support in unexpected places. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, he won the admiration of his contemporary Machiavelli, who became obsessed with him. But his victories never led to lasting institutions, and all he left behind was a trail of death and destruction.

  For all those reasons, Queen Isabella was not very sad when she was informed of Pope Alexander VI’s death in August 1503. She showed little overt reaction at the time. But she fervently rejoiced when she learned of his replacement, a pious man who in fact took the name Pius III.

  Isabella did not appear to receive the news of Rodrigo Borgia’s passing “grievously,” Martyr wrote cautiously. “But when [she heard] that Cardinal of Sienna, the nephew of Pius II who wishes himself to be called Pius III, was put in his place, she gave proofs of joy.” She ordered special prayers to be given by the priests of the city, and called residents to the churches to pray for the new pope’s health and good leadership of the church. “Then she caused thanks to be given to the Omnipotent with hymns and canticles and psalmody, the Te Deum Laudamus, because he had afforded such a pastor to the Church, for the queen always thought highly of the man.”23 Pope Pius, however, died soon afterward and was replaced by Pope Julius II. It was Julius who issued the needed dispensation for Catherine’s marriage, cautiously noting that the previous marriage to Arthur had “perhaps” been consummated.24

  Like so many other aspects of the lives of the Borgias, the facts of Alexander VI’s death were shadowy, contradictory, and complicated. The pope was said to have been dining with Cesare when both became violently ill. Peter Martyr, who had a wide network of correspondents in Italy and within the Vatican, was convinced that the pope and his son had poisoned themselves by accidently consuming a toxic wine mixture they had prepared for a guest. The pope was seventy years old, and after he died, his body quickly began decomposing and became swollen and malodorous. Cesare was only twenty-seven and survived, thanks to being wrapped in a warm muleskin that helped him maintain his body temperature while he fought for his life.

  When Cesare recovered, he sought safety among family friends from Spain, who were plentiful in Naples and included, he thought, the master of Naples, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. But when Cesare got to Naples, Gonzalo, under orders from Isabella and Ferdinand, took Cesare prisoner and sent him off to a prison in Spain.

  Isabella wanted Cesare Borgia tried for murder. Ultimately, therefore, Cesare Borgia, the cynical man whom Machiavelli called a political genius, was undone by the hyper-righteous Isabella, who had decided it was time to take him out of action once and for all. He was bundled off to the fortress of Chinchilla, in Valencia, but after he attempted to strangle the prison warden and throw him off the ramparts, he was moved to the well-guarded fortress of La Mota in Medina del Campo, under Isabella’s watchful eye, with strict limitations on his movements. His hunting falcons became his only companions.

  Quietly, and attracting little attention to herself, Isabella had become Cesare’s “most relentless enemy,”25 invisible to everyone, including the astute political observer Machiavelli, who never noticed that his hero’s most effective enemy was someone he had not even bothered to mention in his book The Prince. Unbeknown to Machiavelli, who missed it entirely, Europe’s most strategic and most effective prince of that generation was in fact a princess, for it was Queen Isabella who possessed many of the qualities that Machiavelli most lauded.

  Cesare Borgia was delivered into Isabella’s custody at the fortress of La Mota by Prospero Colonna, who had become a key ally of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba in Naples. When he arrived in Medina del Campo, Colonna asked to see the queen, who was by now virtually housebound in her private apartments in the palace on the edge of the town’s central square.

  “I want to see the woman who governs the world from her bed,” Colonna told Ferdinand.26 And so he was ushered in to make her acquaintance.

  TWENTY-THREE

  THE DEATH OF QUEEN ISABELLA

  Between 1502 and 1504, there was no masking Isabella’s decline in health, and it was limiting what she could accomplish. She had good days and bad, and she couldn’t predict when they would occur. She explained this to her son-in-law, King Manuel, in a letter of November 21, 1502:

  I received your letter brought by Juan de Ferreyra, your ambassador. And I much wanted to dispatch to you [an answer] before now [but could not] because of my bad condition. Then I felt better, but I had two relapses and I am unable to write by hand.… Thanks be to God, I am doing better but still am not able to do it.… Serene and excellent king, my very dear and very beloved son, may God have you in his special guard and protection.1

  But in October 1504, Isabella’s health suddenly took a turn for the worse. She was swollen with dropsy, burning with fever, gasping for breath, desperately thirsty but unable to eat. Tumors and lumps were visible under her skin. The physicians attending the queen gave up any hope for a possible cure. Queen Isabella, almost completely bedridden, used the final reserves of her strength to compose her last will and testament.

  The Castilian court grew hushed and fearful, worried for her but also increasingly worried for itself. The succession seemed troublingly uncertain with Juana and Philip far away in Flanders and King Ferdinand’s position uncertain. Everyone was wrestling with the need to pick sides in the coming conflict. “Woe to all Spain!” wrote Peter Martyr to his friends Hernán de Talavera and the Count of Tendilla, describing the queen’s worsening symptoms. “… We see the faces of the King and the internal servants cloudy. It is already murmured what will come to pass if she departs.”2

  They were fearful about the future of Spain, because Isabella had dispelled the chaos of the past and nobody was certain whether the transfer of power would occur peacefully or through violence. Many Spaniards had come to believe that Isabella alone was the bulwark that kept mayhem at bay, that she had brought peace to a tortured land. Martyr wrote to another courtier:

  You inquired yesterday when we sat together sorrowful in the palace what I think of the sinking Queen. I dread lest virtue and religion should desert us with her. It is to be desired that where she herself goes, we when called from earth may depart to the same place. She has lived having surpassed every human height so that she cannot die; she will finish her mortality with death, not die. Therefore we must grieve but she is to be envied for she will enjoy a double life. For she will leave the world adorned with [her] perpetual fame, but she herself will live for ever with God in heaven.3

  All over Spain, people went to church to pray for Queen Isabella’s survival, pledging to do penance or to make pilgrimages if she were to be spared. They read doom from dark portents—an earthquake that had hit in the spring had caused walls and towers to tumble and crushed people in debris; freakish bad weather that struck unexpectedly in Andalusia, causing famine and then disease. Spaniards had time to weigh all such omens, for Isabella had been sick since 1502 but grew progressively weaker and weaker over about a three-month period in the fall of 1504.

  In England Catherine, waiting anxiously for word about her mother’s health, wrote to ask how she was doing. Catherine said she had been encour
aged to hear from her sister Juana that her mother’s attacks of ague were lessening, and she was hoping her mother was improving. She told Isabella to write back soon, because she could not be “satisfied or cheerful” until she received a letter from her letting her know that she had recovered.4 Frantic for word, she sent multiple copies of the letter on November 26, just to make sure one of them reached her mother.

  Queen Isabella, meanwhile, was hanging on, waiting for a particular document to arrive—the dispensation that would allow Catherine to marry Prince Henry. A copy of it was sent to her ahead of its formal release and under a “seal of secrecy,” the English bishop of Worcester told King Henry VII, “for her consolation, when on her deathbed.”5

  When that arrived, her work was finished. At last the time came when the queen saw the end was drawing near, and she asked that last rites be administered to her. The Holy Sacraments were performed, including a ceremonial anointing of her eyes, ears, nose, lips, and hands with holy oil blessed by the priest, and with the doctors, family, and close friends gathered round saying prayers.

  Ferdinand was there, and Isabella’s childhood friend Beatriz de Bobadilla, as well as her confessor Cisneros, the archbishop of Toledo.

  She asked King Ferdinand to promise not to marry again. This request may have come from jealousy of a future bride, but it also may have reflected her desire to discourage Ferdinand from remarrying so that their children’s inheritances would be protected. Ferdinand swore he would not, according to Zurita, who said that “several people affirmed” that that pledge had been made.6

  Normally the sacrament of Extreme Unction involved anointing the feet of the person who was dying, but Queen Isabella would not allow anyone in the room to see her feet except the priest, an odd action that chroniclers attributed to her modesty and chastity.

  Isabella’s last recorded action was making the sign of the cross with her hand across her chest as the priests finished their prayers. She died about noon on November 26, 1504, the same day Catherine was writing to her so frantically. Isabella was fifty-three years old.

  “And so ended the days of the Most Excellent Queen Doña Isabella, honor of the Spains and mirror of all women, in Medina del Campo,” Santa Cruz wrote. There was a spontaneous outpouring of grief “at the court and in all the cities, and with great reason, for they had lost a queen of such a kind that nature had never before made such a person ever before to rule over a nation.”7

  The sky itself seemed to be weeping, as the most tremendous storms in living memory broke loose from the clouds. King Ferdinand notified rulers throughout Europe of her death and ordered her body transported to Granada, though he did not accompany it himself. And so the entourage, including the loyal Peter Martyr, set out for Andalusia.

  The word went out everywhere, and Isabella’s passing was deeply grieved in many places. “In all the realms,” wrote the historian Jerónimo Zurita,

  her death was mourned with such great pain and sentiment, not just by her subjects and countrymen, but commonly by all, that the least of the praise was that she had been the most excellent and valiant woman seen, not just in her time but for many centuries. This very Christian queen took great account of sacred things and to increasing our Holy Catholic faith, and she did it with such study and care that it served to the advantage of everyone who reigns in all Christendom.8

  In the Book of the Courtier, the Italian Baldessare Castiglione, who had lived in Spain, called Isabella one of the greatest rulers of Europe in recent memory.

  Unless the people of Spain—lords and commoners, men and women, poor and rich—have all conspired to lie in praising her, there has not been in our time anywhere on earth a more shining example of true goodness, of greatness of spirit, of prudence, of piety, of chastity, of courtesy, of liberality—in short of every virtue—than Queen Isabella; and although the fame of that lady is very great everywhere and among all nations, those who lived in her company and who personally witnessed her actions, all affirm that this fame sprang from her virtue and merits. And whoever considers her deeds will easily see that such is the truth. For, leaving beside countless things that bear witness to this, and that could be recounted if it were to our purpose, everyone knows that, when she came to rule, she found the greater part of Castile held by the grandees; nevertheless, she recovered the whole with such justice and in such manner that the very men who were deprived of it remained greatly devoted to her and content to give up what they possessed. Another notable thing is the courage and wisdom she always showed in defending her realms against very powerful enemies; and in such a long and hard war against obstinate enemies—who were fighting for property, for life, for religion, and (to their way of thinking) for God—she always showed, both in her counsel and in her very person, such ability that perhaps few princes in our time have dared, I will not say to imitate her, but even to envy her.9

  Castiglione said she had set a new standard for behavior in Spain:

  There arose thus among the people a very great veneration for her, comprised of love and fear, and a veneration still so fixed in the minds of all that it almost seems that they expect her to be watching them from heaven, and think she might praise or blame them from up there; and so those realms are still governed by her fame and by the methods instituted by her, so that, although her life is ended, her authority lives on—like a wheel which, when spun a long while by force, continues to turn by itself for a good space, even though no one impels it any more.10

  Even her enemies in other countries recognized her merits. Isabella was “by report, one of the wisest and most honourable persons in the world,” wrote the Frenchman Philippe de Commynes.11

  She had spent the last two months of her life writing and rewriting her will, which she left as a blueprint for what she wished to happen in Spain after her death. She was farsighted in seeing what was likely to go wrong.

  She ordered that the succession go to her daughter, the Princess Juana, as “Queen Proprietress of these my said Realms, lands and lordships, whom God has allowed me to name head of the kingdom.”12 The crown was to go directly to Juana. But Isabella added this caveat: that if Juana were absent or “should prove unwilling or unable to govern,” then Ferdinand should serve as regent until Prince Charles, Juana’s oldest son, was twenty years old and could assume the throne. Isabella specifically urged Juana and Philip to be “very obedient” to Ferdinand because of his “eminent virtues.” She pointedly excluded Archduke Philip from any specific role in ruling Spain, a conscious decision on her part.

  Isabella made sure to provide comfortably for Ferdinand by ensuring that he would receive the lucrative masterships of the three religious military orders, as well as half the income each year that came to the throne from the discoveries in the Americas. In her will, she praised him effusively. The vast wealth she was leaving to him was, she said, “less than I could wish and far less than he deserves considering the eminent services he has rendered the state.”13

  She expressed her deep attachment to her husband in words that far exceed the typical pleasantries of legal documents. She was leaving him her jewels “so that, seeing them, he may be reminded of the singular love I always bore him while living, and that I am waiting for him in a better world; by which remembrance he may be encouraged to live the more justly and holy in this.”14

  She asked that the dowries for Catherine and María be paid in full, under the terms of the agreements made for each marriage. This would allow the young women to move ahead in their marriages without financial quarrels.

  She asked to be buried in the place that marked her greatest victory—in Granada, in the Church of San Francisco in the Alhambra. People should not wear mourning clothing but instead use the money that would have been spent on such clothes as gifts for the poor. She asked that her debts be paid.

  She ordered large sums for charity, including 2 million maravedis to give dowries to poor girls so they could marry or enter religious vocations. She asked that money be provided to
buy the freedom of two hundred captives who were being held by what she called the infidels. The money for these bequests should come from selling her personal possessions.

  She asked that the kingdom appreciate the valuable contribution made by Andrés de Cabrera and his wife, Beatriz de Bobadilla, so that they would hold their posts as Marqués and Marquesa of Moya for all time, as would their descendants. She also singled out for specific praise Gonzalo Chacón, her childhood tutor and mentor, and Garcilasso de la Vega, who had served as her ambassador to the Vatican. Chacón was one of the men who had impressed upon her the possibility of a female role model in Joan of Arc, all those years ago, back in Arévalo. Garcilasso de la Vega was the courtier who had battled on her behalf with Pope Alexander VI about his corruption.

  Her religious principles remained at the forefront of her thoughts. Queen Isabella sought to impress upon her children and grandchildren their obligation to protect and advance the Christian faith, instructing them to follow the commandments of the church and to maintain the Inquisition. She told them to never give up Gibraltar, the rocky outcrop where the North Africans had staged their invasion of Spain back in 711, saying that the city and area should be permanent properties of the crown and part of the royal patrimony.

  One of her most interesting gestures was toward her brother Enrique, the king with whom she had so dramatically differed when she married Ferdinand and took the throne. As though to make amends with him, Isabella left her single most valued possession, a relic that she believed to have been owned by Jesus Christ and that she believed had healing powers, to his beloved Church of San Antonio, on the edge of Segovia. The relic was a small piece of bloodied cloth said to be a remnant of Christ’s seamless tunic, worn on the day of his crucifixion.