Reign of Madness

by Lynn Cullen

  Truth: It was generally known by cartographers in Columbus’s day that the world was not flat. What was not known was how far the “Ocean Sea” stretched from the edge of Europe. Sailors were afraid of sailing beyond the capacity of their food supplies, a reasonable fear, but not afraid of dropping off the edge of the world.

  Truth: Colón’s “discoveries” were not immediately heralded as great feats. He brought back relatively little gold from his voyages. He found no spices or precious woods—among the main trade items from the real Indies—and Spanish crops like wheat went to ruin in the semitropical climate. After his second voyage, disappointed colonists returned to Spain calling Colón the “Lord of the Mosquitoes.” The joke was made only richer by his visibly high self-esteem. When he returned from his third voyage under arrest and in chains for his harsh treatment of the colonists, he received little sympathy in Spain, although Isabel ordered him released upon hearing of his imprisonment. As the historical record shows, and as I hope to convey in Reign of Madness , the Queen saw something in Colón that most of his contemporaries did not.

  Colón did find some pearls. I like to think that one of them was the Great Pearl in the story, which came to be known as La Peregrina (the Wanderer or Pilgrim). It was brought from the Americas during Juana’s lifetime, and was part of the crown jewels of Spain for centuries. We have a visual record of it in a 1554 portrait of Mary Tudor, the second wife of Prince Felipe (Philip II), Juana’s grandson. It was owned by Elizabeth Taylor, a gift from her husband, Richard Burton—a power couple from another time and sphere.

  Aside from some pearls and a bit of gold, Colón’s voyages did not prove to be the moneymakers he had hoped. To make up for the paucity of profits, he pushed to capitalize on “human gold.” It was Isabel who put her foot down about trafficking in slaves. She thought of the indigenous people as her subjects, and repeatedly stated that she wished for them to be treated humanely. Though her wish to convert them to Catholicism might seem bigoted today, she acted with the best intentions. Her sincere religious faith gave her peace and strength, and she felt it was her duty, punishable with her own damnation if she failed, to bring all others to her beliefs.

  It was this same well-meant but ultimately disastrous desire that would inflict so much pain on her Islamic and Jewish subjects. Under her rule, Jews who would not convert to Christianity were ordered to leave Spain in 1492. Some historians think Isabel felt that her threat to expel the Jews from Spain would be enough to make them convert to Catholicism; she never believed they would actually go. But leave Spain they did, by the hundreds of thousands. During this same period, she allowed the Spanish Inquisition to operate as a means to root out those converts who were not true to their new faith: these backsliders practicing Judaism or Islam would supposedly weaken the faith of the “good” converts. She never imagined how much the inquisitors would come to enjoy their power, jealously guarding it against those like Fray Hernando de Talavera, Archbishop of Granada, who opposed this new mandate from Rome. He argued that converts must be encouraged and nurtured in their new faith, not tortured if they had doubts. Nor did Isabel foresee how ordinary people would come to use the threat of the Inquisition to bring down their enemies. She could not fathom that something initiated with such pious intentions might spiral into the corruption and misery that would dim Spain in the eyes of the world for centuries. Even Fray Hernando would himself fall to the Inquisition, in 1505, the year after Isabel died. He and his extended family were hounded by people who did not agree with his “soft” attitude toward converts and who resented his opposition to the movement. He died after two years of harassment. Isabel was not there to protect him.

  Whether Isabel and Hernando de Talavera enjoyed a deeper relationship than their official one of queen and confessor is a matter of my own conjecture. What is apparent to me is that the two were matched in intellectual power, in their beliefs and outlook on the world, and in charisma. How could she have not fallen in love with him? As a rule of thumb in this novel, the more unbelievable an episode seems, the more likely it was drawn straight from historical records. I constructed the story around actual events, taking most of my liberties when exploring relationships between characters.

  Which brings us back to Juana. Just as children in the United States have been taught that the brave sailor Christopher Columbus discovered America, Spanish schoolchildren have heard that the mad queen Juana la Loca was locked in a tower in the little town of Tordesillas because she was too insane to rule. She loved her handsome husband, Philippe, so much that when he died, she went off the deep end. She traveled around Spain at night, opening his casket to gaze lovingly upon his remains until finally, for her own sake, her father locked her up and ruled Spain for her; when he died, her son Charles took over. Even worse, she had a tempestuous relationship with her saintly mother, shortening that good queen’s life. But like the legends surrounding Columbus, most of the legend of Juana the Mad is false.

  Truth: Juana may have loved Philippe, but if so, he certainly must have tried her patience with his callous treatment of her. It is true, as recounted here, that he didn’t pay Juana’s ladies-in-waiting or her household expenses, as was agreed to in their marriage contract. He withheld gifts to her until she produced a son. He was generous again when they embarked on their trips to Spain, but only for the sake of appearances. He spent much time apart from her, pursuing his love of sport, feasting, and the company of other women. As soon as Juana became heir to the Spanish crowns, he started to make deals with her father to undercut her power. He claimed that she had gone mad from an excess of love and jealousy, and therefore was unable to rule.

  Court visitors backed this up by writing about instances of her madness, but their reports would have been shaped by the tales Philippe fed them. It was his word against hers, and he, not the isolated Juana, had the ear of the courtiers. All Philippe had to do to take the power that was rightfully Juana’s was to make the story of her madness stick, and it has, for half a millennium.

  Yet records indicate that Juana was one of the most intelligent of Isabel and Fernando’s five children. She studied under the famed Latinist Beatriz Galindo, whom I tried to portray much like the real-life scholar, although I altered the date of her marriage to fit the story. (You may be happy to know that Beatriz became a professor at the University of Salamanca, where she taught rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine. She founded the Hospital of the Holy Cross in Madrid, still there today, and had five children with Francisco Ramírez. She is commemorated by a district in the capital named after her, La Latina, as well as by statues in that city and Salamanca. And yes, it is said that she dressed in the habit of a nun.) Juana was a gifted musician, and so poised and well-spoken that Henry VII of England, who had met her when her ship sank off the coast of Portsmouth, sought her hand in marriage after Philippe died; “old Henry” judged her a sensible woman. Hostile sources claim that Juana was a poor mother who did not care to see her children after leaving the Low Countries, but I doubt this, not when she kept her youngest daughter, Catalina, with her until her son Charles had the girl forcibly taken away as a teenager. It was Philippe and then Juana’s father who would not allow her children to be brought to her; court records are full of her pleas to see them. I wonder whether Juana allowed Charles to have her power because he was a sickly child, with a defect that threatened his health, and she was trying to protect him. Although he had the world’s best portraitist, Titian, to tidy him up in one picture by reducing his misshapen jaw and placing him on a magnificent stallion, the fact remains that Charles suffered from a deformity that caused him difficulty in eating and speaking all his life. But who dared mock a man who, with his titles in Spain and Austria, would become Holy Roman Emperor? This, I believe, is one of the reasons Juana did not throw her weight behind the Comuneros who wished to free her and restore her to the throne in 1520. She did not want to undermine her son. Charles showed little mercy to the rebels. He hunted them down and had them hung. A statue of J
uan Bravo, one of their leaders, still stands in Segovia and is decorated with wreaths every April. To this day, not everyone in Spain believes the history found in old schoolbooks.

  In May 2008, I visited the town of Tordesillas, the scene of Juana’s imprisonment of forty-six years. As I entered the Plaza Mayor, a quiet space surrounded by crooked plaster-and-timber buildings and given to flocks of bobbing pigeons, my husband pointed to the window of a narrow shopfront.

  “Isn’t that a picture of your Juana?” he asked.

  I couldn’t believe it. The windows of the store were crowded with what looked like posters of the Mad Queen of Spain, “my” Juana.

  A Juana shop? It seemed as unlikely as it sounded.

  I hurried across the bricks of the square, passed under the sagging timbers of the arcade, and pushed open the battered door. There, on the ocher walls of the shop, were scores of hand-tinted woodcuts of Juana, and views of Tordesillas as drawn in 1543 by Anton van den Wyngaerde, along with smaller prints of Philippe and Charles V. I was greeted by a handsome young man with long, curling dark hair—Carlos Adeva, the artist, I learned, who hand-reproduced the woodcuts, among other works of art displayed around the shop.

  Señor Adeva was delighted by my interest in Juana, and soon launched into legends of her intelligence and bravery—my favorite being the one according to which Juana gave birth to Charles while dancing at a party. She had popped into a privy and came out smiling (although surely a bit careworn) with her newborn son. When I asked señor Adeva if he believed Juana was insane, he bristled at the suggestion. She was made to look that way, he told me, so that others could take her inheritance. Calling her Juana la Loca was offensive to him and many others in Spain, especially in this town.

  “What should she be called?” I asked.

  He pointed across the square, to the plaza entrance under which I’d just walked. A banner, wafting in the spring breeze, stretched across several storefronts. Its letters, each as tall as a child, spelled out the five-hundred-year-old signature:

  JUANA LA REINA

  Acknowledgments

  So many people have helped me on my journey to bring Juana of Castile to life. At the start was my agent, Emma Sweeney, upon whose calm and sage advice I always depend. I am grateful to Peternelle van Arsdale for nurturing the story (and me) in the early drafts. I count myself as lucky indeed to have benefited from the sure editorial hand of Christine Pepe as the book took shape. Her confidence in me and in the story has meant the world to me. She promised that we would have fun working on this book, and she was right.

  My deepest gratitude goes to Ivan Held for his unwavering support for the project at all stages. I must thank Marilyn Ducksworth, Catharine Lynch, Meredith Phebus, Kate Stark, Katie Grinch, Rich Hasselberger, Meaghan Wagner, and the design team of Claire Vaccaro and Chris Welch, all indispensable in their various capacities in bringing this book along. I owe a huge debt of thanks to Anna Jardine, upon whose expert copyediting skills and knowledge of everything under the sun I greatly depended. I would also like to thank Leslie Gelbman, Jackie Cantor, and Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski at Berkley. To the energetic Penguin sales force, I owe my appreciation, as well as to the stalwart Eva Talmadge and Suzanne Rindell at the Emma Sweeney Agency. And thank you, John Burgoyne, for creating the evocative endpaper maps.

  One of the best parts of traveling the road to discover Juana is the fascinating and unforgettable people I have met on it. In Belgium, I had the good fortune of being taken under the wing of Rudi van Poele and Marie-Paule Rombauts, who welcomed me into their hearts and home while opening my eyes to the richness of their Flemish heritage. Thanks to Rudi, I met Paul Behets, Dieter Viaene, and Axel Vaeck at the city archives in Mechelen (Malines), who kindly showed me documents pertaining to Philippe the Handsome and Juana. What a thrill it was to hold in my hands a five-hundred-year-old paper, complete with its crumbling wax seal, that had been signed by the archduke himself—a loan agreement, unsurprisingly. (Philippe needed money to support his appetites.) Thanks to Rudi, I had the opportunity to bicycle through the Flemish countryside to Lier, where the church in which Juana and Philippe were married still stands, little changed. Rudi also arranged an instructive afternoon in Damme with Gustaaf Dierckx, to whom I am grateful for sharing his time and his knowledge of the Burgundian court, and a visit to the Cathedral of Our Lady in Mechelen for an impromptu concert by the brilliant organist Wannes Vanderhoeven on a centuries-old instrument. I am grateful for the friendship of Peter Meuris and Patricia Gobein, also from Mechelen. The many hours spent chatting with them at their lovely B&B, Luna Luna, were informative and entertaining. Both Peter and Rudi are official city guides in that fabled place—if you have the luck to go to there, ask for them!

  In Spain, I was greatly helped by the talented artist Carlos Adeva. He, like his shop in Tordesillas, is a treasure trove of Juana lore. It was a joy to meet someone who loves her as much as I do. I would like to thank Laura Martín Velasco for sharing her knowledge of Segovia and the Monasterio de San Antonio el Real. I am grateful to José L. Ardura for hosting a magical evening at the Posada Monasterio Tórtoles de Esgueva, the very place where Fernando caught up with Juana after Philippe died. At dinner, Rosa Guillén generously shared her knowledge of Spanish history. Besides having the best meal of my life, I learned much that night.

  I would like to thank my companions on my trips to Spain, Steve and Ruth Berberich, and my husband, Mike. Because of their unflagging energy, no road, village, church, or monastery was left unexplored as we traced Juana’s steps. I am grateful to Steve for often rallying us with his cry “What would Juana do?”

  Stateside, seeking Juana took me to Columbus, Ohio, where I was able to board a replica of Columbus’s ship the Santa María, my trip made easier thanks to my sisters, Jeanne, Margaret, Carolyn, and Arlene. I am deeply grateful to my brother David, who was among the first to encourage me to tell Juana’s story, and who continues to be one of my staunchest supporters. I am fortunate to have had constant encouragement from the members of my long-standing book club—thank you, ladies. I’d like to thank in particular Sue Edmonds, Jan Johnstone, and Karen Torghele for nourishing me in mind and spirit.

  Although my quest to know Juana has taken me across the globe, it started at home, when I first read Bethany Aram’s Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.) Informed by that definitive work, and by the biographies on Isabel of Castile by Peggy K. Liss and Nancy Rubin, my story took root and grew. But none of it would have been possible without the love and encouragement of my daughters, Lauren, Megan, and Ali, who not only inspired this story about mothers and daughters, but are the shining lights of my life.

  List of Illustrations

  Page 1 Michel Sittow, Portrait of a Young Woman [Juana of Castile?], 1503–1504. Oil on oak, 29 x 20.5 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna.

  Page 7 Attributed to Gerard David, detail from “The Virgin of the Fly”: The Holy Family with Mary Magdalene and Saint Catherine [Isabel of Castile?], 1522. Oil on panel, Collegiate Church of Saint Mary Major, Toro (Zamora), Spain.

  Page 63 Hans Memling, The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria [with Mary of Burgundy, Philip of Burgundy, and Margaret of York?], 1479. Oil on wood, 172 x 162 cm. Memlingmuseum, Sint-Janshospitaal, Bruges.

  Page 203 Michel Sittow, Ferdinand II of Aragón, late fifteenth–early sixteeenth century. Oil on wood, 29 x 22 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna.

  Page 319 Artist unknown, Portrait of Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, Wife of Charles the Bold, c. 1468–1470. Oil on wood, 20.5 x 12 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

  Page 363 Juan de Flandes, Portrait of a Girl [Catherine of Aragón?], c. 1498. Oil on panel, 22 x 32 cm. Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid.

  Page 373 Juan de Flandes, Philip the Handsome, c. 1500. Oil on oak, 30 x 19.3 cm. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna.

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