Once Ferdinand was fully in charge, he was also free to vent his jealousy on Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the soldier who had stood by the monarchs’ side when they were young and vulnerable, who had fought for them against the Turks, and who had won one of the first real victories against them in fifty years. He was the man who had secured for Spain the much-coveted realm of Naples, something the French had wanted so badly that they allowed tens of thousands of Frenchmen to die in their bid to obtain it. Gonzalo had always been loyal to Isabella, ever since their childhood together, when Isabella’s brother Prince Alfonso died after eating the trout pastry in Cardenosa. He had once said that his greatest source of pride was knowing that he had her faith and support.
He had been devastated by her death. Two chroniclers called Gonzalo grief-stricken. One noted his “extreme sadness and weeping,” while another said that every Spaniard lamented her death, “but none more than Gonzalo Fernández, who from his 14th year, when he began to serve her as a page, had been brought up at her court.”27
The Great Captain continued to be heaped with accolades from everyone with whom he came in contact. According to the chronicler Hernando del Pulgar:
Neither lack of sleep nor hunger affected him when on his fighting campaigns, and when need required he took upon himself the hardest tasks and the greatest risks. Although not a man for jesting, being always very much in earnest, in times of danger he would crack jokes with his men to cheer them and raise their spirits. He used to say that kind words from a captain won him the love of his soldiers. He was as competent in perfecting many affairs as he was diligent in bringing one to a successful end. Ability and diligence were so united in him that he not only defeated his foes by his great intelligence and vigorous efforts, but surpassed them by his intelligence and wisdom.28
Green with envy, Ferdinand probed for flaws in Gonzalo’s management of affairs in Naples and convinced himself that the Great Captain was undermining his authority and had become potentially traitorous. Ferdinand called him back to Spain, telling him he wanted to honor him by making him the Commander of the Order of Santiago. But when Gonzalo returned, that offer was forgotten, and Gonzalo was given the job of holding the reins of the horse when Queen Germana went riding. Gonzalo soon went into seclusion in Loja and was given no further military assignments. When his nephew became involved in the protest against the misconduct of the inquisitor Lucero, Ferdinand said the young man was a traitor and ordered the family homestead, the castle at Montilla, destroyed. This nephew was the son of Gonzalo’s brother Alonso de Aguilar, who had been slashed to pieces defending Castile in the uprising in the Alpujarras. The ancestral home of Alonso and Gonzalo was now destroyed so that Ferdinand could assert his dominance.
Ferdinand wasn’t all that interested in bringing Cesare Borgia to justice either. Borgia was still imprisoned in the fortress of La Mota in Medina del Campo, where Isabella had wanted him tried for murder. Queen Juana had shared her mother’s belief that Cesare Borgia was a dangerous man and had kept him imprisoned. But in 1507 Borgia managed to escape from the castle and made his way to Navarre, where he found work as a mercenary. But he didn’t last long: he was killed in a skirmish and his body was found sometime later, with multiple wounds and stripped naked for the value of his clothes and armor. And so Cesare Borgia came to a sorry end, despite the honors and accolades that had been heaped on him by his father, Pope Alexander VI.
King Ferdinand also showed himself careless and callous in his dealings with the Americas. Columbus came back from his fourth and last voyage in 1506, old before his time. He had had a terrible ordeal, having been shipwrecked and abandoned in Jamaica for months before he was rescued. He arrived in Castile right at around the time Isabella died, and he too deeply mourned her death. Columbus knew, his friends later recalled, that Ferdinand would never recognize his accomplishments the way that Isabella had.
Columbus knew his career was over when he heard the queen was dead. “In Seville, the news that Queen Isabella had died filled Columbus with intense grief,” the human rights advocate Bartolomé de Las Casas later wrote.
To him, she represented protection and hope, and no amount of pain, hardship or loss (even loss of his own life) could afflict and sadden him more that such news.… She had received his services humbly and with gratitude. As for the Catholic King Ferdinand, I do not know why he was not only ungrateful in words and deeds but actually harmed Columbus whenever possible, although his actions belied his words. It was believed that if, in good conscience and without losing face, he could have violated all the articles of the privileges that he and the Queen had justly granted him for his services, he would indeed have done so. I have never been able to ascertain the reason for this dislike and unkingly conduct toward one whose unparalleled services no other monarch ever received.29
Columbus died in Valladolid in 1506. He was more comfortable in his old age than he liked to pretend. He had relished creating a perception of some sort of martyrdom, but in fact he left his two sons very wealthy men, and his descendants, as he had hoped, became high nobility.
The New World no longer got the same attention it had received from Isabella, and things on the ground there began to go wildly awry. Ferdinand wasn’t interested in discoveries, except as they could provide him with new sources of cash. Voyages of discovery declined for most of the first part of his solo reign. They had slowed to a crawl when Isabella first grew ill. Scholars have described themselves as perplexed by the drop-off. “For six years after Columbus’s departure on his last voyage in 1502, there is a curious lull in Spain’s exploring activities,” Roger Merriman writes. “Only one or two smattering expeditions were undertaken, and with practically no results.”30
Unfortunately, abuse of the native Americans grew much worse as a result of neglect, avarice, cruelty, and poor stewardship. It was Las Casas’s belief that far fewer Indians would have died if Isabella had lived: “Queen Isabella’s holy zeal, intense care, tireless efforts and meritorious will to save the Indians are attested by the royal decrees she issued in the few years she lived after the discovery of the Indies, and these years hardly came to ten when one considers that for quite some time, information concerning the Indies was a matter of guesses and hearsay.”31
With her mother dead and unable to intervene when her father undertook self-serving and callous courses of action, Princess Catherine of Aragon, living far away in England, suffered as well. In 1509 she finally married young King Henry VIII. Her father had allowed her to dangle at the English court for years, almost penniless at times, while he dickered with Henry VII over the remainder of the dowry. On his deathbed, King Henry VII acknowledged Catherine’s merits and urged his son to marry her, which he soon did. Then, soon after Catherine and Henry were married, Ferdinand entered a pact with Henry VIII to fight together against the French, then betrayed and humiliated him to win some lands for himself in Navarre. That infuriated Henry, who was an ambitious young man trying to establish himself on the world stage, and it caused damage to the young couple’s marriage.
This additional strain imposed even greater burdens on Catherine, who endlessly worried about her inability to produce the male heir that her husband desired so ardently. The quarreling between Henry and Ferdinand caused her physical distress and contributed to the loss of a pregnancy in 1514. “The Queen of England has had a miscarriage, brought on by her distress over the discord between the kings, i.e., her husband and her father, owing to her unbearable sorrow she is said to have delivered a premature fetus,” Peter Martyr confided to Luis Hurtado de Mendoza. “The husband blamed the innocent queen for the desertion of her father and kept voicing to her his complaints.”32
The limited horizons of Ferdinand’s interests became apparent once Isabella was gone. He spent the rest of his reign bickering over territorial borders, warring with one European power after another. In another effort to remove a rival for public esteem, he did allow Cisneros to lead an expedition into North Africa, assuming the
seventy-three-year-old prelate was too aged to make much of an impact. Cisneros squared his shoulders, set out, and conquered the city of Oran. In so doing, he freed about fifteen thousand Christian slaves held captive there.33
But this conquest, and a few others made around the same time in North Africa, had the effect of exacerbating tensions with Muslims in North Africa and gave renewed impetus to Muslim pirates attacking the Mediterranean coast. Raiding expeditions led by the corsair Hayreddin on unsuspecting towns, sometimes with the assistance of people who had previously lived in Spain, were so successful that Bayezid’s son, known as Selim the Grim, made Hayreddin admiral of the Turkish fleet. The Turks conquered the Mamluk empire of Egypt in 1517 and, as Isabella had feared, moved menacingly ever closer to Spain.
During the years of Ferdinand’s regency of Castile, the Christians benefited from a fortuitous outbreak of heresy in the Muslim world that distracted the Turks’ attention from further conquests in Europe as they pursued conflicts closer to home. In this case, the wrong thinking involved a mystical order led by Sheikh Safi ad-Din, who claimed descent from a son-in-law of Muhammad. It was called Safawiyya. “The Ottomans, who were sternly orthodox Muslims, abhorred the teaching of Safawiyya as heretical,” writes the historian V. J. Parry. “They rightly regarded the movement, however, as far more than a religious danger; for them it was also a grave political menace.”34
Spain had a little breathing space during this period, as it had during the infighting between Bayezid and Djem. During these years young Charles, the heir to the throne of Castile, grew to adulthood back in Mechelen in Flanders, under the careful tutelage of Margaret, Isabella’s beloved daughter-in-law, who ended up raising Isabella’s heirs, just as Isabella had hoped she would. Margaret carried the torch for Isabella’s legacy. She even bought from the hurried estate sale of Isabella’s possessions many of the paintings of Christ’s life, keeping them close at hand. It was there in Mechelen that the artist Albrecht Dürer saw them and famously praised the paintings for their “purity and excellence.”35
Margaret made sure the paintings were kept as a set and presented as a gift in adulthood, as a final bequest from her, to Isabella’s grandchildren. Today most of them remain in Madrid’s Royal Palace; the rest are part of the treasured collections of major art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Margaret’s enthusiasm for art made the family home in Mechelen one of the first great centers of Latin American art in Europe, for the golden masks, obsidian ritual objects, and feathered headdresses that Hernán Cortés collected when he conquered Mexico were sent to Prince Charles but placed in Margaret’s care. This was the first glimpse Europeans had of the rich and varied artistic traditions in the Americas.
Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba lived out the rest of his life in some seclusion and was never sent to battle again by the king. But his military leadership had transformed the Spanish armies, and his influence lasted for generations. He died after suffering a high fever in December 1515, and was greatly mourned by the kingdom. In his deathbed confession, he said he regretted only three sins—betraying the king of Naples and betraying Cesare Borgia, both of whom had come to him in faith of their safety; the third, he said, would be known only to God. He had remarried but was buried in Granada, in the Monastery of San Jerónimo, just a short walk from the final resting place of Queen Isabella. Hanging over his tomb were the one hundred battle pendants he had won in his victories for the Castilian crown.
Peter Martyr, who had managed to retain his place at court by carefully adapting to the political winds, said all Spain grieved at the news of Gonzalo’s death. “Woe to thee, All Spain!” Martyr wrote in his characteristically florid style, recounting in a letter all the great successes that Gonzalo had achieved and noting that he had rightly earned the name the Great Commander. King Ferdinand also seemed regretful at the news of Gonzalo’s death. “The news was very troublesome to the king, or so it seems to have been, God is the only searcher of hearts,” Martyr wrote. “For that man’s magnanimity was sometimes suspected: therefore he allowed him to live at leisure in a secluded place.”36
King Ferdinand died in 1516, just a few months later. His health had been undermined by the side effects of a concoction made of bull’s testicles that he had consumed at his wife’s behest to boost his sexual potency. It was puzzling that Ferdinand was never able to produce healthy children with his eager young wife. He had always previously been notably fertile. Ferdinand and Germana had only one child together, and that infant died soon after birth. Of course, given Ferdinand’s record of promiscuity, he may have been one of the earliest Europeans to contract syphilis, which was rampant in his kingdom and probably got its start in Barcelona at the time when he was living there. Recent forensic evidence has found that syphilis was widespread among members of the Aragonese royal family; and it was then incurable and caused sterility.
The disease is thought to have traveled from Barcelona to an explosive epicenter in Naples in 1494. Many members of Ferdinand’s extended Aragonese family either fell victim to it or were likely exposed, whether they became ill with it or not. His cousins frequently traveled back and forth from Spain to Barcelona and throughout Italy, often with extensive entourages of fawning and flirting courtiers in tow.
Archaeological pathologists who have studied the Neapolitan royal family have discovered that Ferdinand’s cousin King Ferrante, who was born in 1431 and died in 1494 at age sixty-three, died of colon cancer and did not appear to have contracted syphilis. But his younger family members most certainly did. Ferrante’s granddaughter, the beautiful Isabella of Aragon, born in 1470 and married to the Duke of Milan, had markers for syphilis and is believed to have tried to treat her condition with a course of mercury, which caused her teeth to become blackened. She tried to chisel away the evidence by having the enamel removed from her darkened teeth. A stepsibling of hers, María of Aragon, had deep ulcerated syphilitic lesions on her lower limbs. Sores on the legs and elsewhere on the body were a common marker for syphilis at the time.37
Ferdinand had died in a tiny house in a small village, Madrigalejo, while he was traveling. Unlike Isabella’s death, however, his passing did not cause enormous sorrow in Spain. He was buried next to her in Granada, in a spectacular mausoleum quite at odds with the simple resting place she had requested. Isabella had asked that her daughter Isabel be buried near her, but her daughter’s body was left in Toledo. Instead, it was Ferdinand who was laid to rest next to Queen Isabella, Queen Juana, and King Philip, together for eternity, in a triumph of public relations and a cynical assertion of dynastic harmony.
In the centuries ahead, Ferdinand became a famous man, credited for many of Isabella’s achievements. The fact that his name appeared first on official documents—sometimes because she requested that he be added—meant that future historians, sometimes blinded by their own sexism, would cite him as the primary architect of events, even when he played only a minor role in them.
For generations, scholars have looked at the twenty-five-year marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella and tried to deduce the contributions that each made to the success of their reign, which decisions were hers and which his. An easy test for answering those questions is to look at how Ferdinand ruled alone after Queen Isabella’s death. He lived until 1516, twelve years after she died. When he ruled with Isabella, he could rank among the great kings of Europe and be viewed as a man of consequence. Without Isabella, he produced almost nothing of significance and frittered his time away in pointless international intrigues.
In the Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione, an Italian who had spent some years in Spain after Isabella’s death, pondered the relative significance of their lives. The book recounts a long series of parlor conversations held at the palace of the Duke of Urbino. At one point Castiglione’s verbal sparring partner asks him whether Isabella really did what he claims. Wasn’t it really Ferdinand? he queries.
Castiglione answers that Ferdinand deserved to be compared with Isabella, but only because she chose to love him. “For since the Queen judged him worthy of being her husband, and loved and respected him so much, we cannot say that he does not deserve to be compared with her,” Castiglione wrote. “Yet I believe that the fame he had because of her was a dowry not inferior to the kingdom of Castile.”
Love can be inexplicable.
Isabella’s Hapsburg grandchildren, benefiting from their tutelage at Margaret’s hands, took on the heavy mantle of responsibility for their holdings, which encircled the world. Charles became king of Spain in 1516 and Holy Roman emperor in 1519, when he was nineteen years old. Under his reign, the Spaniards conquered Mexico and Peru, fabulous empires with wealth beyond reckoning.
Juana’s younger son Ferdinand, who had been born in Spain during her visit to Castile with Philip and who had been raised in Spain, was given control of the family’s Austrian lands. He took charge of watching over the frontiers with the Ottoman Turks. He halted the Turkish advance by land when he successfully withstood a siege at Vienna in 1529; he became Holy Roman emperor himself in 1558, when his brother retired to a monastery in Spain. A generation later Charles’s son Don Juan led the naval force against the Ottomans near the port of Lepanto in 1571, in one of the Christian West’s first major naval victories against the Turks. Neither of these victories was in itself decisive, as some have claimed, but both were watershed moments in world history nonetheless. They marked a crucial turning point, and made it clear that the West was going to fight, and fight effectively, and would eventually contain the Turkish expansion.
Isabella: The Warrior Queen Page 54
