EIGHT
In these years of Isabella’s isolation and abandonment, when her future was anything but assured, an ally and counselor appeared from the east who had, one might say, celestial credentials.
Powerful in body, overtly sensual, elegant, and magnetically attractive to women, Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia was a Spaniard by birth. He was the nephew of Pope Calixtus III, whose papacy had resembled the founding years of a dynasty more than a spiritual mission. Calixtus had elevated Rodrigo to a cardinalship when he was only twenty-five years old, even before he had become a priest, and soon thereafter conferred a great many other ecclesiastical honors on him as well. After his uncle’s death, Rodrigo had adroitly managed to retain these elevated posts, which required particular cunning. The Italian cardinals who dominated the halls of the Vatican tended to hate and scorn foreigners, particularly those who threatened their stranglehold on power in Christendom, and they could call out Roman gangsters to attack people identified as outsiders. These gangs would have been glad to dispatch Rodrigo to accompany his uncle into the next life.
In the face of this formidable opposition, Rodrigo had managed to maintain his position as one of the highest churchmen in Roman Catholicism. In the summer of 1471, when Isabella was a twenty-year-old newlywed in a precarious spot, Rodrigo was a man with considerable power. This was important to Isabella, because Pope Paul II refused to give the couple the marriage dispensation that would legitimize their baby’s birth. In July 1471 they learned that Pope Paul had died, and that a new pope, the Italian Francesco della Rovere, had been elected to replace him, taking the name Sixtus IV. Rodrigo was in a position to be helpful in obtaining the correct paperwork, for it was Rodrigo who had placed the crown on the pope’s head at the ceremony at the Vatican.
Then, in 1472, when Isabella’s little girl was still a toddler, Rodrigo announced he was coming home to Spain for a visit. Pope Sixtus had decided he too would raise an army to help beat back the Muslim advance, and he sent out envoys to the courts of Europe to solicit support for the cause. Borgia was sent to smooth tensions in Castile and win King Enrique’s backing for the new campaign. Ferdinand and Isabella quickly realized that Borgia’s visit presented them with a unique opportunity to make an ally who could help them in many and profound ways.
Rodrigo had now lived in Italy for more than two decades, but his loyalty and affection for Spain remained paramount to him. He still spoke Catalan as his first language. “For Rodrigo,” writes the historian Marion Johnson, “the return to Spain was also something of a sentimental journey, a chance to refresh himself at the family source and to remind himself that his roots lay in the province of Valencia.”1
Ferdinand and Isabella saw that Borgia’s affinity for his native land gave them an entrée to him. They realized that he needed allies as well. He was an ambitious man, and he must have already realized that the papacy was within his reach, if he managed his career properly and reached out for support as needed. Immigrants like the Borgias were on particularly shaky ground in Rome because of the prejudice against non-Italians. Rodrigo knew he needed firm backing from his native Spain.
Rodrigo de Borja had been born in 1431 in Xativa, a craggy hilltop town with a medieval castle crowning its highest point, located near Valencia. Borja retained a great sense of affiliation with the crown of Aragon, as he believed himself a descendant of an old and venerable line that had fought valiantly in the reconquest of the land from the Muslims. The Borjas were a numerous clan—proud, fearless, and, as it turned out, unscrupulous—and young Rodrigo early took his mother’s last name to more closely align himself with his uncle, his mother’s brother. They were not a wealthy family, and the Borjas were good at making the best of any advantage that came their way.
The Borja clan first moved into high-level church politics through their connections with a Spanish cardinal named Pedro de Luna, the uncle of Álvaro de Luna. Spaniards were rare among the elite order of cardinals at the Vatican. When Pope Gregory XI died in 1378, Pedro de Luna was the only Spaniard among them, all the rest being French or Italian. To be effective in these councils, Pedro de Luna had needed Spanish allies at home, as was soon made abundantly clear. Within days of the pope’s death—Gregory XI had been born in France—a fiercely ethnocentric confrontation erupted. The cardinals, including Pedro de Luna, gathered in conclave with great ceremony to choose the next pope, following custom and tradition. This time, however, the building was surrounded by a seething Roman mob who demanded that the new pope should be an Italian from Rome. The terrified cardinals, fearing they would be torn limb from limb, looked about the room and spotted an elderly cleric who they thought had been born in the city. Despite his energetic protests, they draped him in the papal mantle, pressed the mitre on his head, and shoved him up to the altar, thus naming the next Vicar of Christ. Then they quickly fled the building.
Once seated, this unlikely candidate, Pope Urban VI, decided to take his selection seriously. He set out to reform the church, condemning luxuries and vices. This attitude was as alarming to the cardinals as the street mob had been, so they once more fled Rome. Soon they named a replacement pope, another Frenchman, Clement VII. But Urban vociferously refused to step down, and Christianity found itself with two rival pontiffs, one based in Rome and the other in Avignon. Italy and northern Europe sided with the Roman pope, Urban VI; France and Spain aligned themselves with the Avignon alternative, Clement VII. Church hierarchies everywhere had to choose sides, forcing kings, bishops, monasteries, charitable institutions, and universities to align themselves with one or another of the camps. Even after Urban and Clement both died and replacements moved into their posts, the schism continued until 1418. The moral authority of the church diminished as the faithful witnessed leading prelates behaving like grasping and squabbling children. Spaniards such as Pedro de Luna found themselves navigating these uncharted waters in relative isolation.
Meanwhile back in Aragon, amid this dispiriting scene, a pious young man from Xativa named Alonso de Borja (Borgia in Italian) was growing to maturity. Devout, determined, and diligent, he soon came to the attention of church elders, including a wandering Valencian preacher named Vincent Ferrer who was drawing crowds from all over southern Europe with his fire-and-brimstone sermons. Ferrer was having great success convincing Jews to convert to Christianity, either out of fear for their lives or because of his powers of persuasion. His converts soon filled top government posts in Spain. Spotting Alonso de Borja’s face in the crowd at one of his sermons, Vincent Ferrer prophesied that Alonso would one day be pope. This kind of recommendation was helpful to Alonso and also inspirational, and he began to believe that he might have a special role to play in healing the divide within the church.
Alonso de Borja eventually became a religious adviser to King Alfonso of Aragon. When King Alfonso moved to Naples and never came home, his conscientious and hardworking adviser, Alonso de Borja, went with him, soon adopting the name Alonso Borgia, as the Italians spelled it. Borgia proved his mettle by helping bridge the schism, just as he had hoped, and with a reputation as a peacemaker, he began climbing the pontifical ladder. As a reward for his faithful service to the king and to the pope, Alonso was named a cardinal in 1444. He, in turn, relied on the support of another helpful Spanish ally, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada. Soon the Spaniards formed a tight little fraternity at the Vatican.
By 1451, when Princess Isabella was born, Pope Nicholas V, an Italian, was reigning in the Vatican. The Renaissance was dawning, and Nicholas V became a patron of literature and the arts and amassed a great personal collection of books and manuscripts, which would become the core of the Vatican Library. He arranged for the translation of many ancient Roman and Greek texts into Latin, and rebuilt a great many classical monuments, as well as palaces, bridges, and roads. All these cultural enterprises and public works projects meant his friends in the Vatican had multiple ways to prosper.
By this time Cardinal Alonso Borgia’s high rank and improved financial standing allowed him to help his own relatives, including his able and ambitious young nephew Rodrigo, who was growing up within the crown of Aragon. Alonso secured for his promising nephew his first ecclesiastical post in Valencia when he was only fourteen years old. A few years later Alonso brought Rodrigo to Rome, where the young man soon made himself useful at the Vatican.
When Pope Nicholas V died in 1455, the College of Cardinals selected Alonso as the next pope, and he took the name Calixtus III. Some observers said he had been chosen in spite of his Spanish heritage because he was crippled with gout and looked old. The other cardinals thought he would die soon, giving them more time to prepare their own candidacies. But Calixtus turned out to be stronger than he looked. And in Spain, his ascension was a subject of intense nationalistic pride, viewed as a fitting recognition of the peninsula’s role as a bulwark of Christianity. Through Isabella’s early years, this Spanish pope was Christ’s vicar on earth and the leader of Christendom, the final arbiter of all things spiritual, and congregants prayed for him and for his continued good health.
To bolster his position, Calixtus quickly elevated friends and relatives from Spain. One of his first official acts was to name the deceased Vincent Ferrer a saint. Ferrer, of course, had had the great good luck to have foretold the coming—and unlikely—greatness of Alonso Borgia.
Three weeks after Calixtus’s investiture, Rodrigo, at twenty-four, was named apostolic notary and given a number of lucrative benefices in Valencia, which ensured him a rich income. At twenty-five, though he was not yet a priest, his doting uncle made him a cardinal, and the next year, he was promoted to the most prestigious post in the Vatican after the pope, that of vice-chancellor of the church, as administrator of the “government of Christendom,” a position that provided an annual income of 20,000 ducats.2 Next he was made bishop of Valencia, which added another 20,000 ducats and made him caretaker of the souls of the second-largest kingdom within Aragon.
Pope Calixtus placed other relatives in positions of power throughout the Vatican. “They kept on appearing—relations, and relations of relations—and for every one of them there was a corner in the sun,” writes the papal historian Clemente Fusero, “for each applicant one of those countless sinecures or odd positions which the hypertrophied development of the Papal bureaucracy had created over the centuries.”3 The Italians disdainfully called them “the Catalans.”
As a native of Spain, Pope Calixtus carried with him the ancestral Iberian obsession with the Muslim threat, something that had been part of the peninsula’s culture since 711. He had been deeply disturbed by the fall of Constantinople in 1453, two years before his election, and he avidly listened to reports of subsequent events in eastern Europe. “He ascended the Papal throne,” Fusero writes, “with one great and all-devouring project in mind—to free Christian Europe from the Turkish scimitar which, more especially since the occupation of Constantinople, had been pointed at her throat. All his efforts, all his thoughts, all his political activities converged on this one end.”4
Very few European Christian rulers shared his intense concern. Preoccupied with their own territorial rivalries, the Europeans had done little to prevent the conquest of Constantinople, and their subsequent efforts against the Muslims were halfhearted and ineffectual. This state of affairs made the cities of Europe seem easy pickings to the Turks; their wealth and women seemed available to anyone with the pluck and determination to take them. In the 1450s, in the wake of his victory, Mehmed II began calling himself Caesar and styling himself the emperor of Rome, leading an army three hundred thousand strong and preparing once more for attack. Pope Calixtus issued a clarion call for funds and troops to fight the Turks, but the response was tepid. The threat seemed too distant, too ephemeral, particularly for northern Europeans and for the warring northern Italian city-states.
Pope Calixtus resolved to defend Christianity on his own. To raise money, he introduced an austerity program at the Vatican, a reversal of course after the free-spending ways of Pope Nicholas. Calixtus ordered gold and silver plate from the papal treasury to be melted to raise money for armaments. When a marble tomb was unearthed and found to contain two mummified corpses dressed in robes of gold-woven silk, he delightedly ordered these items to be brought to the Vatican, not to preserve or study them, but to sell them for the value of the gold they contained.
Calixtus also drummed up support by encouraging public admiration for religious warriors. He was the prelate who had pressed for the reexamination of Joan of Arc’s life, which recast her as a God-fearing soldier of liberation against an invading force. Her legend grew as that taint of heresy dropped away. As a result of this review of her case, which happened when Isabella was six, Joan of Arc was declared innocent, rehabilitated, and placed on the path toward sainthood. “Only on the battlefield does the palm of glory grow,” Pope Calixtus once said.5
His preoccupation with Christian self-defense intensified as reports from eastern Europe grew more alarming. Turkish troops were headed for Hungary and up the Danube River. In 1456 Turkish troops engulfed Athens; recognizing that no assistance was at hand, its residents opted to surrender. Having shown no resistance, the Athenians survived and were allowed to follow their own religious traditions. But the people who had coined the term democracy were labeled rayah or slaves by the Ottomans. The Parthenon was converted into a mosque; the Erechtheum, with its statues of the female caryatid statues, was used as a harem. Strong young boys were sent away to be trained as Ottoman soldiers; good-looking girls were shipped off to serve as concubines to wealthy Muslim men. According to the historian T. C. F. Hopkins, “The fall of Athens in 1456 to the Ottomans was a shocking blow for Europeans and Christians, for it had been assumed that Athens would hold out against any and all attacks as a bastion of Western thought and moral superiority.… Many Europeans feared that the Ottoman conquest was coming and they would be helpless against it.”6
During Calixtus’s pontificate, and using the funds he had stockpiled, the pope engaged in the strongest counterattack organized by the Christian world to that time. He outfitted and sent out a fleet to oppose the Turks, and they had some initial success. The Turks were defeated in a sea battle in the Greek Isles. Elsewhere the city of Belgrade, besieged by the Ottomans, succeeded in holding them off.
But Calixtus was eighty years old, and he had been selected for the papacy because of his declining health. In the summer of 1458, when Isabella was seven, he grew ill and was reported to be dying. Churches throughout the Christian world were placed on alert; vigils were held; fervent prayers were raised for his recovery. Rodrigo was vacationing in Tivoli when he got word of his uncle’s illness. He rushed home to Rome, but by the time he arrived, the news had spread everywhere. Disorderly throngs of Italians were converging to attack the Spaniards who had profited and prospered during the reign of the Aragonese pope. Rodrigo’s servants disappeared, and his home was looted. Most Spaniards fled the city. Rodrigo stayed to tend his uncle, who died on August 6. Only one steadfast friend, the Venetian cardinal Pietro Barbo, remained behind with Borgia at this frightening time, and his loyalty earned Borgia’s lasting gratitude.
As Pope Calixtus breathed his last, and despite the seething anti-Spanish sentiment, the younger Borgia held his ground. When the conclave of cardinals convened to elect the next pope, Rodrigo Borgia and Pietro Barbo were still in Rome. They threw their combined support to an Italian who took the name of Pius II, earning the prelate’s appreciation.
Rodrigo prospered mightily in the next years. Thanks to his skillful management of the politics of papal succession, he had maintained all his holdings, even his title of vice-chancellor of the Vatican, and in the subsequent years, he continued to expand his domains, in some cases inheriting the fortunes that other family members had been granted under Calixtus’s papacy.
Rodrigo used this capital to organize his own path toward the papacy. He spent his money to richly reward his friends and allies, and on lavish entertainments that made his sumptuous home a center of attention in a city that appreciated earthly splendor. Rodrigo was a consummate Renaissance man who enjoyed the pleasures of both the flesh and the intellect. Poets, artists, and musicians profited from his patronage; he was an early patron of the printing presses that were beginning to churn out works from both ancient and modern writers. Italian visitors described his home in Rome in tones of awe, referring rapturously to its “storied tapestries,” a massive bed furnished with “crimson hangings,” and a sideboard “crowded with fine-wrought gold and silver vessels.”7
He was, nevertheless, a study in contrasts. He was a religious man, moderate in his consumption of food and drink, abstemious toward liquor, and undeniably pious. But he was also handsome, and his spiritual role gave him the allure of forbidden fruit in the eyes of many women. Rodrigo found it hard to resist temptation. It was difficult to shock a Roman in the Renaissance era, but even by the intemperate standards of the day, Rodrigo’s sexual vices soon stirred scandal. An infant’s baptismal feast in May 1460 somehow sparked a two-week sexual bacchanalia. Many lovely ladies were invited to attend; their husbands were pointedly excluded. Soon Rodrigo’s sexual exploits became so notorious that it was necessary, even in this libidinous time, for successive popes to urge him to restrain himself to protect the church’s dignity.
This kind of notoriety was not what the church needed when it was still struggling to shake off the stigma of the schism. Even as church leaders, notably popes Calixtus and Pius, sought to highlight the threat from abroad—the menace from the Ottoman Turks—it became impossible to overlook the threat from within. Vice and corruption were undermining the Christian church, and making it hard for it to assert the moral authority needed to mobilize the faithful against the invading Muslim forces.
A growing list of ecclesiastical and secular misdeeds drew the attention of church critics. These practices included simony, or the buying and selling of spiritual goods and church offices; nepotism, conspicuously practiced by Pope Calixtus; and widespreadviolations of oaths of clerical celibacy. Another festering problem was the selling of indulgences, which allowed the wealthy to pay for sins and buy off church leaders regardless of the extent of their wrongdoings. Secular rulers, meanwhile, interfered in the appointment and installation of bishops and abbots, a practice called lay investiture. This had the effect of allowing rulers to place their own unworthy and unqualified candidates, often their illegitimate children, in religious posts.
Many of these weaknesses were manifestly observable in Rodrigo, who encapsulated the best and worst of the Renaissance. He was cultured and tolerant, but also a libertine whose cynicism left him without moral guideposts. The hypocrisy was proving problematic for both Borgia and the church.
Still, Rodrigo’s wealth and power continued to grow. Borgia’s friend Pietro Barbo became the next pope, reigning as Pope Paul II, and when Pietro Barbo died, Rodrigo was in an excellent position to help Francesco della Rovere take the papal throne, with the title of Pope Sixtus IV. Sixtus began a remarkable Renaissance reign, building the Sistine Chapel, establishing the Vatican Archives, and rebuilding Rome.
It was thanks to Borgia’s intervention, under Pope Sixtus IV, that Isabella and Ferdinand finally legitimized their marriage by obtaining the long-withheld marital dispensation from the pope.
And now the fates of Borgia, Ferdinand, and Isabella grew closely intertwined. As Sixtus mounted the throne, further Turkish incursions were reported, and the new pope decided to send emissaries throughout western Europe to ensure domestic tranquillity in the lands under his spiritual dominion and to secure financial support to fight off the Turks. It made perfect sense to send Borgia home to Spain as his ambassador there.
Rodrigo voyaged in opulence in early 1472, arriving in Aragon in May, returning in triumph as a prince of the church. Three bishops accompanied him, and he brought along two Italian painters, whom he set to embellishing the cathedral in Valencia that was Rodrigo’s home bishopric.
Borgia met with King Juan of Aragon and Ferdinand in Valencia, having entered the city in a procession, riding under a silken canopy, to the accompaniment of blaring trumpets. Borgia hosted the throng with an elaborate banquet, featuring many delicacies and fine food. Over the next fifteen months, he met with Ferdinand and his father in a series of talks that had far-reaching consequences. The three men found they had much in common.
Rodrigo was, quite literally, their subject, an Aragonese man who happened to be living in Rome. Courtiers said that Juan and Ferdinand were acutely aware of this status. The upheavals in Italy had made it quite apparent to Rodrigo that his fortunes there could never be guaranteed, that a non-Italian pope would always inspire popular resentment. Being a far-sighted and cautious man, albeit one of great ambition, he wanted to give himself an alternative plan if he should ever need to make a hasty exit from Rome. He was therefore inclined to be helpful to his king. And once he and Ferdinand met, each recognized in the other a compatible individual who could prove very useful.
Ferdinand was careful to keep his father informed on all these developments. In August 1472, for example, he wrote him about the progress of his meetings with Borgia.8 In March 1473, in a letter to his father, he referred casually to Borgia as his “compadre.”9
Another important meeting occurred in Valencia in mid-September 1472. This time Borgia was joined by Pedro González de Mendoza, a scion of the rich and influential Mendoza family and the bishop of Sigüenza. Borgia made a grand entry into his native city—and Mendoza an even grander one.10 Borgia was ambitious, but so was Mendoza
Borgia then traveled to Alcalá de Henares at the end of February, where he spent three weeks with Isabella at the home of Alfonso Carrillo, the archbishop of Toledo, the man who had been Isabella’s most constant supporter. Carrillo expended huge sums of money on food and entertainments for Borgia, as he hoped that the Vatican would name him a cardinal of Spain, a position he believed he deserved.11 Borgia seemed impressed with Isabella; Isabella was less impressed by him. But the sign of papal support implicit in this visit strengthened her case as successor to Enrique.
Rodrigo was undoubtedly looking to advance his own career, but he also came, in time, to see the young couple as Spain’s hopeful future, and he gave them his good wishes and practical support. A master at building strategic alliances, he had soon identified the single individual that Isabella needed to complete her team. He was Pedro González de Mendoza, bishop of Sigüenza and Enrique’s most stalwart supporter among the nobility. King Enrique had inadvertently made that alliance easier by sending Mendoza himself to meet with Borgia, hopeful that he could win the Vatican to his side in his conflict with his sister. Instead Mendoza ended up shifting his allegiance to Isabella.
Soon a number of deals were struck. Borgia was promised future lands and titles in Aragon, and King Juan negotiated for Mendoza to be given the cardinal’s hat and to be named archbishop of Seville. In exchange for these grand titles coming from the Vatican, Isabella and Ferdinand eventually received the support of the powerful Mendoza clan, which included not only the bishop of Sigüenza but also the Count of Tendilla, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, and their vast network of vassals and allies.12
This assistance was crucial for Isabella and Ferdinand. “In the last years of Enrique’s reign,” writes William Phillips, biographer of Enrique IV, “the Mendoza family agreed that while they would not oppose the king, they would do nothing to help his daughter Juana after his death.”13 By promising one member of the family a cardinal’s hat, Rodrigo had drawn the Mendozas to Isabella’s side, giving her crucial future support. Mendoza would be loyal to King Enrique during his lifetime, but his investiture symbolized a future commitment between the new cardinal, who would be the Vatican’s foremost prelate in Castile, its spiritual leader, and the princess who wished to reign as its secular leader.
How did Isabella view Rodrigo after these negotiations? It is difficult to know what she thought of him. She was an avid advocate of church reform, of purifying religious practice and rooting out corruption. Her own religious advisers were devoutly spiritual men who emulated the simplicity and poverty of Jesus and Saint Francis of Assisi. But Isabella was able to overlook the earthly sins that plagued some chief prelates. Borgia was not the only libertine among the clerics. Mendoza also had a famously roving eye and was the father of several children, whom Isabella once referred to as the archbishop’s “pretty little sins.”
On some level Isabella must have accepted human nature as it was, particularly when it was to her advantage to do so. And certainly she would have enjoyed some aspects of Rodrigo’s personality, notably his interest in culture and learning. He was moreintellectual than her husband, and certainly well versed on the latest developments in art and culture in Rome, topics that she found fascinating and inspirational. Perhaps they discussed the new styles in art while he was in Spain—she would come to know much about this topic in a short time. By the time he sailed back to Rome, he was firmly in her sphere of influence, as she was in his. He had agreed to legitimize the little princess Isabel, her daughter, and he had even promised to serve as the child’s godfather.
Borgia’s promise may have reflected his belief in Isabella’s aptitude to rule. Or it may have reflected his expectation that Ferdinand would soon come to rule through her. But the deal was almost certainly negotiated for his own future benefit as well. Rodrigo was forty-two years old, and though he was a priest, he was looking to posterity. The scheming prelate, well on his way to becoming a future pope, was starting a family despite his required vows of chastity. He already had one illegitimate son, Pedro Luis, and when he returned to Rome, he would establish a long-term liaison with a young Roman matron named Vanozza dei Catanei, with whom he proceeded to have four more illegitimate children: Cesare, Juan, Lucrezia, and Geofredo. He was an indulgent father and must have known he would need sinecures, properties, and titles to bestow on his progeny. He had a vision of his children returning one day to Spain as landed noblemen. King Juan had promised him lands and titles for his family. Isabella and Ferdinand, if they became the next rulers of Castile and Aragon, would have the ability to guarantee that future.
Rodrigo, who would go down in history as the infamous and spectacularly corrupt Pope Alexander VI, had been converted into yet another invaluable ally.14 The full benefit of the association between Isabella and Borgia would have world-changing implications. But for now in Castile, trouble was brewing.
Archbishop Carrillo realized he had been betrayed and passed over for the cardinal’s job that he most assuredly thought he deserved. His lavish entertainments of Borgia had not produced their intended result. Moreover, the deal had been struck by Isabella and Ferdinand, young people whom he had gone to considerable trouble to back and support, even though he had cast his lot with Isabella and supported and sheltered her in those turbulent years when it was uncertain she would ever reign. Instead the princess and her husband had joined a cabal to grant the highest ecclesiastical honor in the land to a man who had been Enrique’s ally.
How could this have happened? One possibility is that princes—and princesses—are not always notable for their gratitude. Carrillo had been helpful to Isabella and Ferdinand in the past, but Mendoza was essential for their future, and that consideration may have ultimately prevailed. Another possibility is that Ferdinand remembered and resented the years of his teenage frictions with Carrillo. And there was one other possible consideration as well. Mendoza was widely respected and as a human being was simply superior to Carrillo. His judgment would soon prove invaluable to the young couple in myriad ways.
In any case, the decision was made. Pedro Mendoza got his cardinal’s hat in the spring of 1472. The event was celebrated by a procession through the streets of Segovia, with the hat carried by Andrés de Cabrera, Enrique’s mayordomo mayor, or chief of staff, who supervised both the fortress of Segovia and the royal treasury; he was also the mayor of Segovia. He was a leader of Segovia’s conversos and an examplar of the shifting allegiances of the day. Cabrera had been with Juan Pacheco at the farce of Ávila when King Enrique was ritually dethroned, but then had repented and returned to Enrique’s good graces. Now married to Isabella’s childhood friend Beatriz de Bobadilla, Andrés de Cabrera was moving into Isabella’s camp.
By March 1473, power had shifted perceptibly in Isabella’s direction. “All the work that had been done to assure the succession of the most serene princess, my Ladyship wife, and everything that surrounds it has been completed,”15 Ferdinand wrote to his father. All the pieces were now in place—Rodrigo Borgia, Andrés de Cabrera, and Cardinal Mendoza. Isabella had arranged the chessboard. She was ready for her next big move.