Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  But to win the rich prize of Spain and its dominions, Philip and Juana had to go there to assert control. They set out to Castile by sea, leaving their children back home in Flanders with Philip’s intelligent and kindly sister Margaret, the young widow of Prince Juan of Castile. She established a household with the four children remaining at home—Eleanor, Charles, Isabel, and Juana’s youngest, baby Mary—in the small and pretty town of Mechelen, some distance from the large Flemish royal palace in Ghent and its scheming courtiers.

  The sea passage was frightening for Juana and Philip. Storms along the way drove them to England, where King Henry VII met and spent time with both of them. Continuing to make their case that Juana was unstable, Philip and his attendants went out of their way to tell the English court that she was unhinged. Henry privately told his courtiers that Juana seemed perfectly sane to him. Envoys from other countries who traveled with the fleet also described Juana as pleasant and appropriate in her behavior, and stoic when others had panicked in the storm.

  By the time Philip and Juana arrived in Castile, Ferdinand had remarried, although not, as he had hoped, to Juana la Beltraneja. He had done an end run around his daughter and her husband by making a speedy alliance with Spain’s old enemy France. He secured for himself a saucy eighteen-year-old French princess, his grandniece Germana de Foix, the granddaughter of his half sister, in exchange for a promise that he would leave Naples to the children he would have with Germana.17 This was appealing to King Louis XII because Germana was his niece as well, and this agreement would bring Naples back into the French sphere of influence. Ferdinand also promised to reimburse Louis for his military expenses.

  King Ferdinand told his subjects that he needed to marry the young French princess to provide a male heir to the throne of Aragon. In reality, of course, he did it to spite Philip by threatening Juana’s children’s right to the throne. The justification of needing an heir was absurd: by this time in his life, Ferdinand had three young and fertile daughters, three grandsons, and four granddaughters in line to inherit the throne. (Juana eventually had six children; María already had three, and Catherine was likely to have children in the future too.) This meant that Ferdinand was attempting to produce children who would be rivals to the children he already had.

  His announcement was particularly harmful to Juana, whose claim to the throne of Aragon would be jeopardized if another child were born, but also to Catherine, who was twenty years old, alone in England, widowed, and hoping to finalize her marriage with young Prince Henry. Losing her place in the line of succession in Castile would complicate that already difficult task.

  Ferdinand’s speedy remarriage, though unseemly, was not too surprising, despite the unfortunate promise he had made to Isabella that he would not marry again. He had perhaps grown tired of being married to an ailing woman. By July 1505 he was the subject of leering gossip at the English court, where envoys told Henry VII that Ferdinand was “right lusty for his age,” which was fifty-three. Moreover, he still was perceived as having “a goodly personage,” despite a lisp he had developed since losing a tooth and a “little cast in the left eye.” And finally Ferdinand was “reputed to be very rich, having during his Queen’s life spent nothing of his revenues of Aragon and Sicily.”18

  Maximilian, the Holy Roman emperor, who was Philip’s father and baby Charles’s grandfather, thought the situation could be handled by appealing to Ferdinand’s high libido. He tried to lure Ferdinand into making another, politically safer choice by offering to let him select “among the most noble virgin princesses… the most beautiful in body and face that can be found in Germany.”19

  But Ferdinand rushed to the marital bed with Germana de Foix instead. Their marriage contract was concluded by September 1505, less than a year after Isabella’s death.20 Ferdinand explained that the reason he was taking a French bride was to win French support to his side rather than to Philip’s, but this was difficult for the families of men who had died in his many anti-French campaigns to accept.

  And it proved impossible to explain his action to the people who had loved and respected Queen Isabella, who could not understand how Ferdinand had been able to replace her so hastily. The new courtship was difficult to watch, particularly because the appreciation for Isabella had only grown since she had died. “It seems hard to all to behold new nuptials so suddenly,” Peter Martyr told Talavera, particularly because the kingdom “venerates” Isabella as much in death as it “worshipped her” while she was living.21

  Ferdinand spent his honeymoon with Germana in the same small town—Duenas—where he had spent the early days of his marriage with Isabella, which struck some people as disrespectful of his former wife’s memory. Soon afterward Germana, who liked to dress in the French style, took up her role as the acting queen of Castile.

  Ferdinand’s popularity in Castile plummeted. Once Philip and Juana arrived in the kingdom, in April 1506, all Spain rallied to their support. Almost the entire nobility deserted Ferdinand, except for a small handful of diehards. Devoted counselors to Isabella, including Garcilasso de la Vega, whom Isabella had honored in her will, turned against her husband.

  Only a handful of people, including Archbishop Cisneros and the Duke of Alba, remained loyal to Ferdinand. Within two months of his daughter’s arrival, Ferdinand announced he would go back home to Aragon and departed Castile with almost as small an entourage as he had had when he first came to marry Isabella, back in 1469. “Of his blood relations,” Peter Martyr wrote to Talavera, almost all “deserted him… partly from fear, partly from cupidity.”22

  Whether Ferdinand saw Juana before he left is unclear; if he did, it was only a brief visit. This would not, in any case, have created a very happy leavetaking. Castile was unceremoniously giving Ferdinand the boot.

  Ferdinand and his wife left Castile for Aragon and then went to his rich new Kingdom of Naples, where he was greeted as a conquering hero. Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, acting as viceroy of Naples since his decisive defeat of the French, honored him upon his arrival with lavish celebrations. Ferdinand was visibly irritated, however, when a number of prominent Italians and even some Frenchmen spoke effusively of their admiration for Gonzalo. Gonzalo was one of those very unusual military leaders who commanded the respect not just of the men he led into battle but also of the men he vanquished. Ferdinand’s jealousy of Gonzalo grew increasingly obvious.

  Meanwhile, in Castile, Philip sought permission from the Cortes to have Juana imprisoned, but Castilian officials would not permit it. They interviewed Juana and gave her their support. Juana said she wanted Ferdinand to come back and rule, but Philip arranged for their joint coronation in July 1506, himself as king and Juana as queen.

  This was the opening Philip needed. He began to do what he wished in Castile. He removed officials whom Isabella had appointed and replaced them with his friends from Flanders. He stripped the rule of the city of Segovia from Beatriz de Bobadilla, although Isabella in her will had expressly pledged it to Beatriz for life and for the life of her descendants. Philip gave the post to his new court favorite, Don Juan Manuel.

  Then in September 1506, Philip unexpectedly died. He was attending a party in Burgos thrown for him by Don Juan Manuel and grew thirsty. He took a long draught of cool water—and then fell ill. He died in stomach distress, just as others who had stood in Ferdinand’s way had come to sudden ends. Philip was twenty-eight years old.

  Did Ferdinand arrange for Philip to be killed? It seems more than possible. By this point, Ferdinand’s older half siblings, Charles and Blanca, and Isabella’s brother Enrique, had all died under circumstances some thought mysterious, and he had benefited in each case. But in an era without antibiotics or autopsies, it is impossible to determine if the cause of death was poison or something else.

  Queen Juana stood vigil over Philip’s sickbed but did not cry at his passing. He had been cruel to her, and she most likely had mixed emotions at his death. Her ways of mourning him, and of observing the sol
emnities of his funeral rites, were odd, however, and added to the already rife speculations about her mental health.

  She wanted to bury him in Granada, which was appropriate for his status as her husband and as the father of the future king of Spain, young Charles, who was still in Flanders. But she was conflicted about how to go about transporting his embalmed body, particularly as she simultaneously faced a growing chorus from her Castilian subjects who wanted her to begin presiding over the nation’s business, something she had never been trained to do and had never shown any desire to do. The challenges were mounting because the kingdom had endured a vacuum of leadership since Isabella’s death two years earlier, and so Queen Juana deferred the burial, moving the corpse from one monastery to another as she pondered how to handle the situation. She had no surviving close family members at hand in Castile to help her make these decisions.

  Moreover, she was pregnant again and bore her final child, a little girl she named Catherine, some five months after her husband’s death. This almost certainly added to her stress.

  Queen Juana tried to fend off some decisions by maintaining an exaggerated widow’s seclusion and mourning period. That behavior would not have seemed unusual for an ordinary woman, but it caused complex and thorny problems when done by a queen who had to address a number of issues of pressing national and international concern. She took one step, however: on December 18, 1506, she signed an order revoking all the rights and lands in Castile that Philip had distributed to his friends.23 She ordered everyone restored to the rights they had been given by Isabella.

  But she didn’t seem to take to the responsibility placed in front of her. It requires a great deal of courage for a woman to do what is unusual in society, and makes everyone uncomfortable. Isabella had been praised, but she had also been viewed as an oddity, an aberration. Women continued to be viewed as inferior to men and less likely to play a significant role, despite Isabella’s success as a ruler. That very year Juana’s brother-in-law, King Manuel of Portugal, spelled that out very clearly when he announced to Ferdinand the birth of his fourth child and second son, Luis:

  If the Queen, my best beloved and cherished wife, had brought forth a daughter, we should have announced this to you more modestly, as befitted the birth of a daughter, but because last night, between two and three hours after midnight, Our Lord delivered her and she gave birth to a son, we wished to let you know this by letter, whereby you may also know that the fear we had lest it should be a daughter like the others, which we felt would shame us both, has increased our pleasure and satisfaction!24

  In that environment, it’s not all that surprising that Juana was reluctant to attempt to take control of her tumultuous kingdom. Most people want to be viewed as part of the mainstream of their culture, not as strange outliers, and so Juana decided that her manner of ruling would be not to rule at all.

  It had became popular, even desirable, for widows to retreat into seclusion after the deaths of their husbands. The dowager Queen Isabel, Isabella’s mother, had done so, and the oldest sister in the family, the young Isabel, had attempted to do so after the death of her husband Afonso, the heir to the Portuguese throne. This “pious enclosure, called recogimiento,” became very popular in the sixteenth century, and Juana was at the forefront of the trend, writes the historian Bethany Aram. “Indeed many of Queen Juana’s practices after the death of her mother in 1504—fasting, frugal dress, silence, solitude, and vigils—may be associated with this type of voluntary and/or enforced confinement.”25

  Juana did, however, prove to be a devoted mother to her daughter, Catherine, the only one of her six children she was allowed to keep. The other five had all been taken from her. Philip had insisted the four older children, including the heir Charles, be left behind in Flanders, where they were cared for by Juana’s sister-in-law Margaret, Philip’s sister. Juana’s other child in Spain, her son Ferdinand, who had been born during Juana’s ill-fated visit home in 1503, had been cared for by Isabella and King Ferdinand, and Ferdinand ended up keeping the boy with him.

  Juana gave Catherine the same excellent education that her own mother had given her daughters, and the girl grew up well versed in Latin and Greek and a good dancer, described as gracious and well mannered. Young Catherine was another exemplar of the high standards for female education that had been set by her grandmother, Queen Isabella, and when she became queen of Portugal in adulthood, she established herself as one of the foremost art collectors of her generation, owning more non-European objects than anyone else on the continent.26

  In short, Queen Juana embraced the life of a traditional upper-class woman in Castile, pious and a good mother, the kind of woman the devotedly Catholic family was inclined to embrace. When an ordinary woman chose this kind of life, it was viewed as admirable, even saintly. But when a queen did it, rather than display the rights and prerequisites of men in order to rule over them, then perhaps she might be viewed as insane. The rumors about Juana came to be seen as fact, and she did not do enough to establish herself in public life and defend herself.

  Soon Juana had a sobriquet of her own. Her husband had been Philip the Fair. She would be known to history as Juana la Loca. Generations of male historians would guffaw in talking about this abused young woman. For them, crazy wasn’t a strong enough term—some even called her “demented.”

  Many people, it seemed, had been uncomfortable with a woman ruler, and when Juana moved slowly to assert control, she appeared weak, perhaps too weak to govern. Lacking her mother’s fortitude and courage to step outside accepted boundaries of female behavior, she failed to act decisively when she took power, and thus soon all that power was stripped from her.

  The de facto regent of the kingdom during this period was the man with the highest ecclesiastical status in Spain, Isabella’s former confessor, Cisneros, whom she had elevated to the post of archbishop of Toledo. After surveying the political landscape, he decided to call for Ferdinand to come back to Castile.

  By this time, Ferdinand and Queen Germana were on an extended tour of their possessions, including his new Kingdom of Naples, but they soon began the journey back home. Upon his return, Juana slipped back into a deferential relationship with her father, perhaps in an effort to follow the stricture in her mother’s dying request that she be “very obedient” to him. Juana remained at court in pious seclusion for a while more, and then Ferdinand and his friends decided to keep her under armed guard. She was at times physically restrained and was told, untruthfully, that there were plagues and dangers afoot to make her afraid of leaving. She spent the rest of her life in confinement in the castle at Tordesillas, visited by her family but seldom interacting with the outside world.

  Now at last Ferdinand was free to rule on his own. He found that he liked Cisneros better than he had at first. Cisneros was a proven ally, willing and eager to abet him in taking power from Queen Juana. Soon after Ferdinand returned from Naples, Cisneros received a red hat from Pope Julius II and became Cardinal Cisneros. Together he and Ferdinand presented the world with an image of Queen Juana as too emotionally frail to rule Spain.

  But other people who had been trusted allies of Queen Isabella did not find themselves in a comfortable spot with Ferdinand in charge. When Hernán de Talavera realized that payments to support his work as archbishop of Granada were not being sent promptly, he asked Peter Martyr to inquire what was happening. Martyr found that he could not get a straight answer. It turned out that Talavera himself was falling into the hands of the Inquisition.

  A fiendish new inquisitor, Diego Rodríguez Lucero, had been appointed head of the tribunal in Córdoba in 1499, after the man who had previously held the post was found guilty of fraud and extortion. He embarked on an aggressive round of prosecutions of wealthy people in the city, saying that a large nest of pro-Jewish sentiment had taken root. Many of the people he accused said he was using the allegations to seize their property fraudulently. According to the historian Henry Kamen, conversos later testifie
d that they were detained in prison and forced to teach Jewish prayers to longtime Christians so that Lucero could accuse the wealthy Christians of having been converted into secret Judaism. People who protested found themselves targets of the Inquisition as well.

  When an investigation called Lucero’s methods into question, the executions suddenly increased in number, with 147 people burned at the stake in 1504 and 1505, to silence them. This happened as Isabella was sick and dying, and it is unclear whether she knew it was occurring, although Ferdinand did.

  As time wore on, even those who had been closest to Queen Isabella found themselves at risk from the Inquisition. This is what happened to Talavera, who was of converso descent. Lucero found people who were willing to testify that Talavera had been using the archbishop’s home in Granada as a secret temple; Talavera’s female relatives were alleged to be performing Jewish rituals in the kitchen. Talavera was jailed and beaten and forced to walk barefooted in the streets to prove his penitence. Many furiously protested this treatment of an eighty-year-old cleric widely seen as a great and good man, and at last Talavera was released. But his health had been broken by the ordeal, and he soon died.

  Afterward there was a great clamor to bring Lucero to justice, but Ferdinand defended and shielded him. Lucero was ultimately removed from office, but Ferdinand’s role in this case makes clear that for him, the Inquisition was purely a political tool to be used to frighten people and take their money. He was willing to allow innocent people to be persecuted, even when many witnesses could testify the charges were concocted.

  Talavera’s fate makes it obvious that Ferdinand was responsible for some large percentage of the deaths during the first thirty years of the Inquisition. Queen Isabella was certainly not blameless and believed that the Inquisition was needed to root out actual cases of heresy, but in the eyes of her children and grandchildren, it was Ferdinand’s initiative that caused the Inquisition to grow and flourish. Years later, when his descendants erected a statue of him to be placed in the Great Hall at the palace at Segovia, the place of their ancestors from Pelayo to their own times, they gave Ferdinand the sole credit—others would say the blame—for creating the Inquisition in Spain.