Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  The baton had been passed to Isabella’s male grandchildren, to Charles and his brother Ferdinand, and then to Philip II and Don Juan. They remained the only formidable opposition to the Ottoman Empire, organizing their defenses against an overpowering foe by unifying themselves under a single religious banner, with a single-minded focus on religious orthodoxy. They continued to view themselves as the defenders of Christianity, bringing all their resources from the New World to bear in this struggle. They also expanded their list of enemies to include the new, and to their thinking heretical, branch of Christianity, the Protestant movement. Just as their grandparents had done against others they considered heretical, they used the mechanisms of the Inquisition against wrong-thinking people—in this case, Protestants. But the Protestant threat never materialized in Spain to the same degree as elsewhere in Europe. The religious reforms that had been undertaken in Spain under Isabella’s rule had rooted out many of the worst abuses in the Catholic Church long before the Counter-Reformation swung into action.

  Fighting alongside the Hapsburgs in this new Christian army were descendants of the Indians from the New World, including the grandchildren of the Aztec leader Moctezuma and the Extremaduran explorer Hernán Cortés, who had intermingled and had children together. In the New World, in the next 120 years, the Spaniards would build seventy thousand churches, five hundred monasteries, and three thousand church-sponsored schools and hospitals; they would found at least four universities, located in Colombia, Peru, and Mexico. They also extracted some $1.5 billion in gold and silver, used for their enterprises in Europe.38

  When Isabella was born, Christianity had been a dying religion, weakened from within and under withering assault from without. Today, five hundred years after her death, it is the world’s largest religion, encompassing some two billion people in hundreds of countries. One of them was a man who was born in Latin America, in Argentina, and when he became pope in 2013, he called himself Francis I. The first saints he named were the eight hundred people—whom he called the martyrs—killed at Otranto in 1480.

  Isabella’s direct descendants remain in positions of power throughout Europe. The ruling families of Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Monaco all share a common ancestry from Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.

  AFTERWORD

  Every booklover has a favorite place to steal away to read and dream of distant lands. When I was a girl living in the American-controlled Panama Canal Zone, my special spot was a concrete seawall near my house where I could look out over the Caribbean Sea. I didn’t have to travel far in my imagination because the place where I sat, dangling my legs over the water, had been visited by explorer Christopher Columbus in 1502, on his last voyage, when he was still desperately eager to bring back good news to his sponsor, the intense and dynamic Queen Isabella of Castile.

  Isabella’s legacy was visible everywhere in Panama, once the hub of Spain’s colonial empire, where tons of gold and silver were transported to Europe so that the queen’s descendants could expand their power and dominion in the Old World. There were dozens of sites, mostly crumbling, abandoned ruins, covered in jungle vines, where the Spaniards had lived and worked when they ruled the planet. The derelict Castillo de San Lorenzo and the tumbled-down walls of Panama Viejo were evidence that even awesome political power can be fleeting. This made a vivid impression on me, a child of the American empire overseas, then at the apex of its strength, both admired and resented around the world.

  In college I continued to pursue my interest in Spanish history, art, and literature. When I attended Spain’s University of Salamanca, a college favored by its patroness Queen Isabella, I toured the country, visiting the palaces, castles, and museums that the wealth of the New World had financed. General Francisco Franco had just died, and the country was once again opening itself to the world after a dark phase in its history.

  Then one day when I was traveling to Madrid, the train made an unexpected stop at the forlorn hamlet of Madrigal de las Altas Torres. With time on my hands, I wandered about its dusty alleyways and stumbled upon a brick building that caught my eye. A small sign noted that Isabella had been born there. The medieval structure was unprepossessing, not looking at all like a home to monarchs. The sight underscored to me how humble Isabel’s beginnings had been, and how unlikely her meteoric rise to power. It seemed almost unbelievable that a young woman from this background, at a time when women seldom wielded power, would pave the way to world domination for her grandchildren. I was fascinated, and I think the idea for the book began percolating in my mind at that time—although I spent some decades in journalism before circling back to my early interest in history. I was curious about Queen Isabella, puzzled by her actions, and I wanted to better understand her, what she did and why she did it. It seemed essential to try to understand her from the context of her own times, which is what I have attempted to do.

  Queen Isabella’s life is a Rorschach test for her biographers. Everyone brings a point of view, an internal bias, to the subject of her life. Catholics see her one way; Protestants, Muslims, and Jews see her very differently. Some false information about her has circulated widely. Spanish history has been systematically distorted by propagandists, in a process that is known as the Black Legend, and the era of Muslim control has been painted in an inaccurately rosy hue. Moreover, the conquest of the New World is seen differently by Europeans and Native Americans, and by their descendants. Consequently, Isabella is one of the world’s most historically controversial rulers, both adored and demonized.

  It seems only fitting that I should bare my own particular biases here as well. First, on the issue of faith: I am not religiously active; I am primarily descended from a mix of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews from Europe. I have attempted to be open-minded about the sensitivities of all the participants to the events I am describing, but I have a particular bias in that I think killing or enslaving people is evil, regardless of who the victims are or why the cruelty was rationalized at the time.

  On balance, I think the fact that Isabella sent Christopher Columbus to the New World was a good thing. Why? Because I myself am a product of what has been called the Columbian Exchange.

  When I was a child, my mother would proudly say that her family first came to the New World at Jamestown, meaning that she hailed from early American stock. And my father, partly of Native American heritage, through the Lenni Lenape tribe, would laughingly respond, “Yes, we met your boat and we greeted you when you arrived.”

  Consequently, I am sympathetic to the claims of Native Americans that their lands were stolen. And I am also sympathetic to the challenges faced by the Europeans when they arrived, for they suffered hardship and loss, too.

  I also bring to the task a profound appreciation for the courage and daring shown by the early explorers to the New World. The first time I saw a Spanish fort in the New World was when I was six years old and visited Fort Saint Augustine in Florida. A few years later, my family moved from the United States to Panama, a trip that then entailed a three-day car ride along modern highways to reach New Orleans, where we embarked on a four-day voyage by sea. It was a long journey even in the 1960s.

  One day we drove through the jungles on the Caribbean coast of Panama to Fort San Lorenzo, which I realized with amazement was a sister fortification to the one I had seen in Saint Augustine. I early saw the massive scope and scale of the Spanish empire, how far it had reached across the oceans, and how effectively it had imposed its culture, language, and religion in places thousands of miles apart. Whatever you might think of Spain during this period, its achievements and accomplishments cannot be denied.

  Another part of my perspective comes from my life experience as a journalist. I’ve covered the present manifestations of some of the same issues and problems that were confronted by the Iberians of the fifteenth century. As a reporter, I place great value on primary accounts of events that occurred, and so in researching
this book, I always looked first to what had been said from the beginning by people who were there and saw things occur themselves. I have paid attention to later critiques of these sources as well, but generally tend to favor eyewitness reports over later interpretations of events by people who were not there. I was fortunately able to find a great many of these primary resources at the Library of Congress, the world’s preeminent library, where dozens of librarians helped me track down titles or provided access to ancient books and manuscripts that allowed me to find the first published accounts of many of the incidents described in this book.

  I made a special effort to locate nontraditional or “outsider” accounts to round out the story as clearly as possible. For accounts of the Inquisition and its effects, I sought out Jewish sources and found valuable material in the Judaica Collection at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. For accounts of what transpired in the Kingdom of Granada and during the Ottoman advances, I sought Arabic accounts and first-person contemporary reports from Eastern Europe. Some of these accounts have only recently been translated into English. In some cases, I paid for translations of original materials that have not yet been published in English. I traveled to Spain, England, France, Panama, and Puerto Rico in pursuit of the tale, using libraries and archival resources wherever they could be found.

  I sometimes quoted older history books rather than more contemporary sources simply because of the beauty of their language. The work of William Hickling Prescott and Benzion Netanyahu, to cite just two examples, has been superseded by other, more contemporary research, but these men’s accomplishments remain seminal in the field and have provided the foundation for much that came later.

  That means this book is somewhat different from those that are written by most academic historians today. There are a couple of areas where this is most obvious—the topics of cannibalism in the Caribbean and the probable origins of syphilis in the New World. Many modern historians have expressed doubts about the accounts of those things, probably as an overcorrection for the deep-rooted racism and ethnocentrism of some of the original European chroniclers, who were eager to justify seizing land in the Americas. However, numerous first-person accounts agree in describing the same basic sets of facts, and so I have presented them as likely facts myself.

  Moreover, cannibalism has had ritual elements or been the result of human desperation a great many times in history. I don’t see mentioning it as pejorative to any individual group. New research has found signs of cannibalism in Jamestown, so no culture had a monopoly on the idea that human flesh could be palatable under the right circumstances.

  On syphilis, the arrival of the disease in such a virulent form in Europe at that particular time does not seem coincidental to me. Many of the first-person accounts at the time described a terrible new disease spread by sexual intercourse. Moreover, contagion is usually a two-way street. Syphilis may have gone east, but smallpox, the measles, influenza, and the bubonic plague went west at the same time, producing a far greater number of deaths. And it was the Americans and Europeans who introduced syphilis for the first time in the Hawaiian Islands in the 1800s.

  The discussion of the distinct possibility of childhood sexual abuse in Isabella’s family comes from my own journalistic work and that of my colleagues, and after consultation with psychologists who are experts in the field. Isolated archival records discussing events in Isabella’s family, taken together, paint a picture of the kind of predation that has been around forever but that is only now being investigated and exposed. The patterns in the Castilian court in the late 1400s are remarkably similar to those that have been revealed in recent public scandals involving the clergy and other powerful figures.

  What I have tried to do is place Isabella within the context of the time and place in which she lived. She was a religiously fervent Catholic, living in an era when the Ottoman Turks seemed on the verge of wiping Christianity off the map. I am convinced that much of what she did was a reaction to this perceived threat, and to her belief that she was being called upon to bolster the faith against a very formidable enemy.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It will be difficult for me to thank everyone who deserves acknowledgment for the completion of this book, because in many ways I have been working on it all my life—whether at the time I knew it or not—and many people gave me guidance, thoughtful perspective, and encouragement along the way.

  My mother, Melinda Hoppe Young, is an avid reader and a romantic, and she inspired me to look for the stories everywhere we traveled. And oh the places we went! She loved the jungle, and the ruins, and the history of Panama, and she took us everywhere fearlessly, on expeditions to see what we could find. With her at the wheel, we forged riverbeds in a van, explored deserted tropical beaches, and hiked into the interior to remote villages that were seldom visited by outsiders.

  My childhood best friend, Laura Gregg Roa, who was the same age as me, shared our fascination with Panama and its Spanish and Indian heritage. She frequently accompanied us. Then Laura got her driver’s license ahead of me, and we two ventured out on our own, this time with Laura at the wheel, sometimes riding a motorcycle and sometimes more sedately in her parents’ station wagon.

  Laura stayed in Panama when the United States returned the former Canal Zone to the Panamanians in 2000, teaching Spanish and French, and then moved to Belgium to teach in the American military school there. She had hoped to help me research this book about Queen Isabella but died of cancer when she was fifty-two years old, leaving a daughter and two sons behind. I dedicate this book to her.

  After I left the Canal Zone to go to college, I studied journalism at Pennsylvania State University, a happy choice that eventually led to my career in the news business. While I was there I indulged my passion for Spanish and Latin American art and history, and took a number of courses in those areas. I spent a semester at the Universidad de Salamanca in Spain, and it was then that this book actually started to take shape in my mind. The professors in both locations, at Penn State and in Salamanca, gave me an excellent foundation in the history of the era, something that formed the basis for the research that I later did on my own.

  Once I began researching the book in earnest, several highly respected scholars gave me invaluable assistance in understanding the time period and context within which Isabella lived. First and foremost was the wonderful Teofilo Ruiz, a history professor at UCLA who spoke with me at various points during the research and writing of the book. His brilliant scholarship, personal generosity, and profound humanity have been inspirational to me. He did me the great honor of reading the manuscript in its nearly completed form and making dozens of suggestions for changes and improvements. Professor Ruiz, thank you.

  Simon Doubleday, a history professor at Hofstra University, spoke at length with me at the beginning of my work. At the end, although he was traveling in Spain for his own research, he nevertheless took the time to weigh in with some important suggestions for changes in the manuscript.

  Theresa Earenfight, a history professor at Seattle University; and Nancy Marino, a professor of Spanish literature at Michigan State University, offered advice and encouragement. I frequently consulted Chiyo Ishikawa’s brilliant and beautiful book on Isabella’s private devotional art, which contains pictures of remarkable paintings that are otherwise unavailable to the public because they are housed in parts of Madrid’s Palacio Real that are closed to visitors. She also discussed my manuscript with me as I reached the final stages of writing. David Hosaflook’s pathbreaking research into Albanian history offered the explanations for obscure references I found in Isabella’s papers to terrifying events taking place in Eastern Europe.

  If there are any errors in fact or interpretation in the book, they are my own.

  My wonderful agent and friend, Gail Ross, made this book possible, and her partner at Ross Yoon agency, Howard Yoon, masterfully prepared the proposal so that it appealed to editor Ronit Feldman at Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. Roni
t encouraged and guided me throughout the research and writing process and served as a sounding board year after year as we learned new things about Isabella and reflected on what they meant. Ronit is a gifted wordsmith with excellent organizational skills, and she shepherded the book deftly through to production. Nan A. Talese, who is justly famous for her editing genius, did some skillful surgery on the final product. Others on the Doubleday team whom I’d like to thank include interior designer Pei Loi Koay, production editor Nora Reichard, and copyeditor Janet Biehl. I am grateful to them all.

  I received assistance from knowledgeable experts at a great many libraries and art museums. There are too many individuals to specify by name. The bulk of my work was done at the Library of Congress, where I began in the Hispanic Reading Room with subject-area experts who set me on the path and directed me toward significant works in both the general collection and in rare books and manuscripts. I would like to specifically thank Juan Manuel Pérez, Everette E. Larson, Barbara A. Tenenbaum, Georgette M. Dorn, Katherine McCann, Tracy North, Eric Frazier, Betty Culpepper, Janice C. Ruth, and Sheridan Harvey.

  The people in Spain were unfailingly gracious, submitting yet again to another round of questioning by Americans who come seeking information about their roots. Barbara Minguez Garcia and Jorge Sobredo, at the Spanish embassy in Washington, D.C., paved the way, providing introductions to key archivists who were able to give access to rare and valuable early manuscripts. Severiano Hernandez Vicente, Gonzalo Anes Alvarez, Carlos Martinez Shaw, Manuel Barrios Aguilera, and Gregorio Hernandez Sanchez were particularly helpful. All archives are wonderful places to spend an afternoon or a month, but I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the Real Academia de la Historia and the Biblioteca Nacional, both in Madrid, and public libraries and archives in Segovia, Seville, Simancas, Valladolid, Granada, and at the Escorial. Significant works of art that were referenced in this book are housed at the Prado in Madrid, the National Galley of Art in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Monasterio de las Huelgas in Burgos. I traveled all over Spain tracing Isabella’s path, and enjoyed many a glass of wine and plate of tapas along the way.