TEN
In Segovia, when Isabella got the word of Enrique’s death, she cried, describing herself as feeling “profound sadness.”1 Her emotions must have been mixed, for while Enrique had done many things to her that were cruel, she and he had also had moments of real affection. He had been the last surviving and active member of her immediate family. Her father and her brother Alfonso were both dead, and although her mother was still alive, the dowager queen’s mental health problems meant that she played no role in public life. Ferdinand was far away in Aragon, and Isabella faced Enrique’s death alone. His passing was an important turning point in her life.
Whatever level of grief Isabella felt, however, she seems to have been prepared for the news, because she swung into action quickly. Her friends—Beatriz de Bobadilla and her husband, Andrés de Cabrera; Gonzalo Chacón, her childhood mentor, and his nephewGutierre de Cárdenas—quickly gathered at her side. Nobody else in Segovia knew that the king had died. Isabella’s group wanted to use the element of surprise to decisively assert her right to rule, and to push young Juana out of contention by promptly confronting her with a fait accompli. Within hours Isabella and her allies set their plan in motion. Then, when the preparations were finalized, Isabella donned mourning garb and sent out letters across the kingdom informing Castilians that King Enrique was dead, calling forfuneral services throughout the city.
The day following Enrique’s death was momentous from morning until night, and residents of Segovia would remember the events for decades to come. At ten in the morning the bells of the Church of San Miguel, the main church in Segovia, about a quarter mile from the Alcázar, started ringing; soon the other churches in the city chimed their bells as well, in a cacophony that echoed through the streets. Beginning at eleven a.m., priests celebrated the funeral mass at the Church of San Miguel. Composed of psalms, readings from Scripture, and specific prayers, with responses from the congregation, the mass would have conformed to a familiar and well-established ritual known as the Office of the Dead. Conducted in Latin, it was accompanied by the sound of bells and song, and candles were lit for the repose of the soul.
At eleven thirty, when the service was over, the officials and townsfolk filed out onto the street and gathered in the central plaza. An official called out to the crowd that King Enrique was dead, and that as he had died without a legitimate heir, his sister Isabella would assume the throne. Two people who had attended Enrique at his death publicly confirmed that the king was dead.
Princess Isabella had attended the mass. Within hours after it ended, she took off the dark dress of mourning and reemerged wearing resplendent garb, decked in gold jewelry and precious stones. She headed back toward the same church, to have herself proclaimed queen. She had orchestrated a splendid symbolic transition in a surprisingly short time. It became obvious she had been planning it for months.
Soon a procession entered the plaza. First came men-at-arms bearing Isabella’s coat of arms and those of the Trastámara family, whose members included both Isabella and Ferdinand. They were followed by Gutierre de Cárdenas, nephew of Isabella’s mentor, the loyal Gonzalo Chacón. Then came the glittering princess, astride a milky-white horse rather than the modest mule she had ridden at Toros de Guisando. She made her way to the Plaza Mayor, accompanied by musicians playing kettledrums, trumpets, and clarinets. At the door of the Church of San Miguel, she climbed up onto a platform covered with brocade.2
Following close behind and flanking her were Andrés de Cabrera, Enrique’s trusted treasurer and the mayor of the city, with his wife, Beatriz de Bobadilla. The bishop of Segovia, the converso Juan Arias Dávila, and a number of other city officials and clerics, all on foot, followed the royal entourage. So did members of the Jewish community, including Rabbi Abraham Senior and his followers, visibly lending their support for the princess’s elevation to queen. Others in the crowd, according to a notary, included the papal legate, some knights and nobles, a group of Franciscan and Dominican friars, Segovia’s merchant elite, and a large group of ordinary townspeople, most of whom made their livings as employees of the wool-making firms that were the city’s major industry.
Isabella addressed the crowd loudly and clearly. Standing on the platform, raised above the heads of the crowd, the twenty-three-year-old princess pledged to defend the church and the people of Castile and León. She placed her right hand on the Bible and swore by God that she would obey the commandments of the church. She swore to look to the common good of the people, improve their fortunes, do justice, and protect the privileges of the nobility. The crowd swore its allegiance as well, in traditional words that conveyed acceptance of her as ruler.
The officials then knelt before her and took an oath to her as their queen, and to Ferdinand, her husband. Cabrera handed Isabella the keys to the Alcázar and the treasury, which were now her possessions, and she returned them to his safekeeping. He swore allegiance to her, promising to care for the “castles and fortresses” in the region. Isabella very quickly rewarded her closest friends, Cabrera and Chacón. Cabrera and Beatriz would soon become the Marquess and Marquessa of Moya, as Isabella had promised; Chacón would be elevated to the position of chief of staff to the queen. The point was clear: those who had shown her loyalty in the past would receive visible signs of Queen Isabella’s favor.
Isabella’s four-year-old daughter was lifted up and presented to the crowd as the next heiress to the throne, underscoring the right of female succession in Castile, at present and in the future. No queen had ruled alone in Castile and León since Urraca, from 1109 to 1126, and Queen Berenguela in 1217. More than two centuries had passed with the crown transferred from man to man to man. Now Isabella was the monarch and her daughter was her heiress.
Queen Isabella had made her announcement as a “proclamation” rather than through acclamation, as was traditional in Castile; in effect, she engaged in a form of self-coronation.3 Then the men-at-arms shouted: “Castilla, Castilla, Castilla, for the very high and powerful Princess, Queen and Lady, our Queen Doña Isabel, and for the very high and very powerful king, Don Fernando, as her legitimate husband!” Applause and fanfare burst from the crowd, with everyone trying to make as much noise as possible, townspeople later recalled.
Then the queen and her procession passed back into the church, entering the arched gateway at Las Frutas, as the crowd followed behind. She fell to her knees in front of the main altar, then prostrated herself in subjugation to God. Afterward she rose and took in her hands the royal pendant and placed it on the altar like an offering. Although she was behaving as though her authority were ordained by God, she was actually engineering a coup. King Enrique had vacillated about who would succeed him, but for the last five years of his life, he had been clear that little Juana would follow him as ruler. Now Juana’s name was not mentioned.
The question of whether Isabella or Juana was the legitimate ruler of Castile and León has perplexed historians ever since that day. Perhaps Juana was indeed the king’s daughter, in which case Isabella usurped her throne. But probably Juana was not the king’s child. In any case, on that day in Segovia, where Enrique and his successive wives had spent many of their married years, the local population was inclined to believe that Isabella was indeed the true and rightful ruler of Castile and León.
A procession formed around Queen Isabella again as she exited the church. This time Gutierre de Cárdenas rode in the vanguard, holding a sword aloft, point up, symbolizing the advance of justice. The crowd murmured, Palencia wrote, in a hum of shocked reaction, because this was the first time that a woman had asserted the right to be the bearer of justice and punishment. Isabella consciously adopted masculine symbolism, something she would do in ceremonial occasions thereafter. She even commissioned a tapestry that showed a queen holding a sword, entitled “Fame.”4
It was a carefully planned display. Carrying the sword in that manner, point up, created a visual image of a “militant cross.” From her first moments in office, Queen Isabella began crafting an image for herself—serene, calm, resplendent, holy, and ordained by God through her birth.
She passed through the city, back along the edge of the Jewish quarter to the Moorish-decorated palace that was her home. She rode surrounded by nobles on foot, with city officials following behind. She traveled majestically through the winding streets of the medieval city, heading toward her ancestral home, the fortress on the cliff, taking her place as a living queen among the statues of her ancestors.
She had taken the throne alone. Now she stepped inside the fortress, the Alcázar, claiming it, and the riches stored within its towers, as her rightful possessions. “And that night she slept in the palace,” a Segovian scholar later noted.5
In the next few days, Isabella began to get word of how her coronation had been received by her subjects elsewhere in the country. Archbishop Alfonso Carrillo promptly declared for her, giving her the support of the spiritual head of the kingdom’s primary see,Toledo, and he traveled to Segovia to pledge his allegiance to her. Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, after accompanying Enrique’s body to his final resting place, rushed to Queen Isabella’s side. Rodrigo Borgia’s intervention in making Mendoza a cardinal had borne fruit almost immediately upon Enrique’s death: Mendoza had thrown his support to Isabella, not to Juana.
Reaction poured in from all over the kingdom. Isabella’s self-coronation was applauded in the northern half, particularly in Old Castile, including Ávila, Sepúlveda, Valladolid, Tordesillas, Toledo, and Murcia. Some doubts were raised in the Christian-controlled portions of Andalusia and in Extremadura, where Isabella was not so well known. Clearly she would need to go there soon to make her presence felt. Galicia seemed on the verge of rebellion,6 but its problems also went deeper than those in the other parts of the kingdom.
More personal reactions, however, caused the first two crises in the new reign. One was a marital spat that threatened the stability of the kingdom; the other came from a jilted suitor. These problems erupted amid a general and continuing breakdown in social order and the economy in Castile, which left Isabella furiously juggling many issues simultaneously.
The marital crisis came first. Isabella had not rushed to inform Ferdinand of Enrique’s death. He was at home in Zaragoza, the capital of his Kingdom of Aragon, about 175 miles from Segovia. “She did not appear particularly anxious that her husband should join her,” notes the historian John Edwards.7 She had sent a slow messenger to Ferdinand, telling him about Enrique’s death and advising him to do what he thought best in the circumstances, given conditions in Aragon. And she had not urged the messenger to make any particular haste. By not telling him in time for him to participate in the ceremony, she had cut him out of any chance to make a claim to the succession.
So Ferdinand first learned of the tumultuous chain of events—that the king had died and that Isabella had assumed the throne in his place—several days after the coronation. His father’s old friend Archbishop Carrillo had sent a swift messenger, stressing that Ferdinand’s presence was required immediately in Castile. And Cardinal Mendoza had sent word when Enrique was dying, also suggesting Ferdinand should hasten to Segovia.
Others in Queen Isabella’s entourage were also eager to tell the king what had happened. Gutierre de Cárdenas, for example, wrote to Ferdinand, telling him with innocent pride about his unique role in the ceremony, holding the sword of justice. Ferdinand received this letter on December 21, a week after the ceremony in Segovia. He flew into a rage when he learned that his wife had asserted this authority on her own.8 He promptly jumped on a horse and sped toward Segovia.
“I never heard of a queen who usurped this male privilege,” he told the chronicler Palencia, who was traveling with him from Aragon.9 Palencia tried to calm the king, saying that she was “after all, a woman,” and would doubtless reconsider her actions once she realized she needed his manly presence for her protection. Others in Ferdinand’s entourage were more unsettled; one male chronicler suggested there was “something sinister” in what Isabella had done.10
Ferdinand shook off his anger, persuading himself that Isabella surely had had a momentary lapse of judgment. Once he arrived in Segovia, he told himself, she would realize that she had overstepped and would defer to his authority. He had enormous faith in his sexual power to sway her opinions. “In conquering with patience,” a chronicler recalled, he “felt certain he would triumph through satisfying assiduously the demands of conjugal love, with which he could easily soften the intransigence that bad advisers had planted in his wife’s mind.”11
By the time Ferdinand arrived, Isabella had been ruling on her own for more than two weeks, and she had had time to consider what sort of tone she wanted to set. By then Ferdinand was playing for time as well. When he drew near Segovia on December 30, he didn’t go directly to the city. Instead he waited in the nearby fortress of Turégano, while Isabella and her officials arranged the terms of his ceremonial arrival. Messages flew back and forth as preparations were made.
On January 2 Ferdinand entered Segovia through the city’s great gates, dressed magnificently in furs and cloth-of-gold. Queen Isabella did not go out to greet him; instead, a large throng of officials and clerics, including Mendoza and Carrillo, met him and escorted him with panoply to the portico of the Church of San Miguel, the same place where Isabella had taken the throne two weeks earlier. He was formally asked whether he would reign as the husband of the queen, and he gave his assent. The councilmen of Segovia then pledged their support for him, vowing that “they would obey and receive His Highness as legitimate husband of Our Lady the Queen.”12
Then Ferdinand traveled in procession to the Alcázar, where he found Isabella awaiting him inside the gates. Suddenly their roles were reversed. She was in control. Now he would come to her, not she to him. She was proceeding according to legal precedents established by previous queens of Castile and León, but those women had reigned hundreds of years earlier, and their memory was preserved mainly in old chronicles. Isabella’s accession had seemed something of a theoretical possibility—it was viewed as plausible that a woman would rule in her own right—but it was quite shocking as a reality, particularly for the men in court circles. Male dominance was so customary that even Isabella’s supporters were perplexed and confused about the situation. Scholars turned to the history books to establish the precedent for female sovereignty. What Isabella had done was not unprecedented, but it was highly irregular.
Isabella, therefore, was flying in the face of tradition in Spain and, more dramatically, elsewhere on the continent. “The panorama was similar across Europe, where queens were generally able to rule in their husband’s name only when the king himself had appointed them and was in a position to impose this choice on his subjects,” wrote scholar Nuria Silleras-Fernández.13
Queen Berenguela, however, had ruled for only a few months before turning the reins of government over to her son. Only Urraca, who ruled from 1109 to 1126, had held the throne for an extended period. She had taken a husband, but the marriage splintered and Urraca had ruled on her own.
“Urraca defied the notion that a man who married a ruling queen should automatically share in the governance of his wife’s realms,” writes scholar Theresa Earenfight.14
Ferdinand’s counselors were especially dismayed and struggled to make sense of what had happened. Palencia blamed the situation on “womanly… petulance” that had been urged upon Isabella by people who had “ceaselessly fomented” such behavior in her.15This, however, does not seem to have been the case. For reasons of her own, Isabella had decided that she was better off taking the crown alone than risking the complications that might be raised by Ferdinand’s participation. Possibly she no longer trusted him. His long absences from Castile, his refusal to return home when Isabella needed him, and his sexual infidelities certainly made him appear unreliable. There was also the chance that he would try to maneuver her out of the line of succession.
When at last the royal couple met in person, tempers flared, and a “disagreeable discussion” took place.16 As she had feared, Ferdinand and his relatives thought he should be the undisputed ruler, as the closest living male relative to Isabella’s father. Some of his supporters believed that women did not have the capacity to govern. Isabella and her partisans, however, maintained that Castile and León had a long history of women sovereigns who ruled in their own right, most notably Queen Urraca, who had held the throne in the 1100s. They said that Isabella was the direct descendant of King Juan II of Castile, and that whatever authority Ferdinand might hold in that kingdom would be derived through his marital association with Isabella. Both Isabella and Ferdinand, in other words, saw themselves as the legitimate ruler, and the other as consort.
Ferdinand was deeply offended, his virility undercut by what he viewed as a public humiliation. He announced he was leaving for Aragon. Isabella begged him to stay, “protesting that she would never for any reason have wanted to cause the least humiliation to her most beloved consort, for whose happiness and honor she would sacrifice willingly not only the crown but her own health.” She said she “would not or could not live separated from him.”
Isabella had a true marital crisis on her hands, a breach that could have destroyed her marriage and her kingdom. At this point, she might easily have folded under the pressure and given him control of the kingdom, simply to maintain marital harmony.
She needed a man by her side to help her overcome the gender stigma she was facing. “Women, even those with a clear right of succession, were rarely accepted as monarchs unless they were married,” writes historian Janna Bianchini about Queen Berenguela.17
And the marriage also needed to be fruitful to establish Isabella’s authority, which also required Ferdinand’s presence. “Medieval queenship might be achieved because a woman was the wife or daughter of a king, but almost inevitably, a successful queen was a mother,”18 writes scholar Miriam Shadis.
It was essential that Isabella should find a way to keep Ferdinand in tow. So, while she continued to hold her ground, she did it with such suavity and in such soothing terms that Ferdinand’s resistance eventually dissipated. She convinced him that the division of power would be more superficial than real, and that as her husband, he would enjoy personal power and autonomy. She suggested that if he were to oppose her right to reign, he would also undermine the rights of their only child, their daughter, who was also a female. He also had to acknowledge the validity of the prenuptial agreement he had signed with Isabella, in which he had agreed to serve as prince consort rather than as king.19 He had signed in the rush of excitement over the wedding and had not perhaps at the time appreciated its significance.
Isabella found ways to placate him with a power-sharing agreement he found acceptable. The archbishops of Toledo and Seville helped draft a new contract, called the Concordat of Segovia, that gave Ferdinand little real power but much symbolic importance. Isabella remained “proprietary queen” of Castile, and her children, but not Ferdinand’s children by other women, would inherit the throne. They agreed, however, that Ferdinand’s name would be joined to Isabella’s in documents, in proclamations, and on coins, and that his name would always go first. But sovereignty in Castile and León, as well as the right to appoint officials and decide how to spend money from the treasury, would belong solely to Isabella.
A motto was crafted to present a unified front to the world: Monta tanto, tanto monta, meaning “as one is, so is the other,” Isabella is as Ferdinand, Ferdinand is as Isabella. This saved face for Ferdinand and allowed him to claim responsibility for much that Isabella did in the rest of their marriage. But it was merely a facade of mutuality, because in fact, as Isabella’s associates noted, Ferdinand’s letters were edited and ripped up if she did not approve of what he said, and his limited proficiency in Latin meant that he could not read letters sent between the Castilian court and other heads of state. Isabella, on the other hand, soon embarked on an intensive program of Latin instruction to make herself more competent in the language of international diplomacy, requiring her daughter and ladies-in-waiting to take the same courses.
When Ferdinand and Isabella were not together, however, he would enjoy equal power with the queen and the power to act in her place. The negotiations for the concordat were conducted over the Christmas holidays, and he remained in Castile for the next five months.20 It was Ferdinand’s longest stay at Isabella’s side since the first year of their marriage.
Isabella had held her ground—Castile would be hers to govern—but she had damaged her standing in the eyes of history. During her lifetime, she would hold precedence over Ferdinand, and in fact she ruled in Castile, which was much larger and more important than Aragon. But the nomenclature issue—the fact that his name came first—had long-term effects, for they commonly came to be known as “Ferdinand and Isabella,” which seemed to imply his dominance. The happenstance of the Spanish language exacerbated this situation: in English, husband-and-wife monarchs are known as the king and the queen, but in Spanish they take the male forms in the plural, so Ferdinand and Isabella were known as the Reyes, rather than as Rey and Reyna. English speakers would gain the impression that it was the king in Castile who acted, when actually it was the queen. Isabella’s role in Castile as reigning queen was so rare in world history that observers and commentators seemed unable to comprehend that a woman could be sovereign, and they persisted in identifying Ferdinand as the ruler regardless of the facts. And so it happened that Ferdinand’s name has always been mentioned first, in documents, then in diplomatic circles far from the Iberian peninsula where news accounts arrived secondhand, and finally in history books. In time he began to receive the credit for her accomplishments.
This was a concession Isabella had been willing to make to try to keep her husband happy. And in some ways, it did. He was still young, only about twenty-two, but he was already cynical, and he may have realized that the perception of power can be almost as valuable as the reality.
The extended marital renegotiation and reconciliation between Isabella and Ferdinand eventually led to another odd turn of fate. A local churchman, Tomás de Torquemada, the Dominican friar whose uncle had been a powerful cardinal in Rome, played an important role in bringing the couple back together and helping them reach agreement on the thorny issues of joint administration. Isabella had met Torquemada during her childhood, though it is difficult to say to what extent they interacted. Certainly she knew him, for he was a cleric of considerable standing in Segovia as prior of the Convento de Santa Cruz la Real, or the Royal Holy Cross Monastery, which was an ancient Dominican establishment. Torquemada and Ferdinand soon discovered they had a natural affinity for each other; Torquemada became Ferdinand’s favored confessor and a personal confidant. The Dominican friar soon began accompanying the king as he traveled from place to place in Castile, keeping close at hand, to such an extent that his presence came to be noted by other officials. In June 1475, for example, when Ferdinand traveled to Valladolid and Burgos, leaving Isabella behind in Ávila, he was accompanied by Torquemada. Two months later Torquemada was in Valladolid with the king; he is also recorded as traveling with Ferdinand in November of that year. He was in the king’s entourage again in January and February 1476, and he traveled with the king on extended trips at least two more times that year.
Given the fragility of the marriage at that time, it was not surprising that the couple chose to highlight their unity by showing special favor to Torquemada, who had helped bind their spiritual, marital, and political lives. They ordered an expansion of his monastery, crowning the work with a spectacular new door to celebrate their union. Elaborately decorated with symbols representing them both, and with the inscription TANTO MONTA, MONTA TANTO as a recurring architectural motif, the building was one of the first major construction projects undertaken by the couple. The portal commemorated their accession to the Castilian throne, and in an extraordinary display of royal favor, they gave their closest friends, Andrés de Cabrera and Beatriz de Bobadilla, a conspicuous place in its sculptures. Directly over the great entry doors was a crucified Christ, with the Valencian proselytizing friar Vincent Ferrer, now a saint, at his feet. Below the figure of Christ was a tableau that had as its centerpiece Joseph of Arimathea, Mary the mother of Christ, the infant Jesus, and Mary Magdalene. But Queen Isabella and her friend Beatriz were carved in stone on the right side of the Holy Family, and Ferdinand and Andrés de Cabrera were placed on the left. In that way, Isabella and Ferdinand told posterity of the central role that Beatriz de Bobadilla, Andrés de Cabrera, and Tomás de Torquemada had played in the creation of their reign.
Queen Isabella certainly needed Torquemada’s help in keeping her marriage on a steady course, for at times the power-sharing arrangement seemed more a facade than a reality. Isabella attempted to perpetuate the perception of Ferdinand’s significance because it helped ease marital tensions, and because her position was more secure if a man appeared to be playing the dominant role. Once she established herself as the sole wielder of power in the kingdom, she began pretending that she was acting in partnership with her husband. Hernán de Talavera, confessor to the queen, recalled that when she was dictating a royal order for him to draft, she told him to sign it in the form of a joint effort. Pongase rey y reyna, she told him, or “Sign it king and queen.”21
Isabella promoted an impression that theirs was a happy, unified marriage—two people working together in harness for the betterment of the nation. But we have many indications that the marital bliss may have been illusory, what would later be called a “nuptial fiction.”22 When they were living separately, he had more authority than when they were living together. He frequently took to the road, often heading off in a different direction from her.
Isabella and Ferdinand jointly appointed officials for their household and administrative staffs. Isabella’s longtime friend Gonzalo Chacón was named primary financial officer, and Gutierre de Cárdenas was secondary financial officer. Gabriel Sánchez, of Aragon, was appointed to handle household finances. Many of the leading official posts were given to highly educated conversos of proven ability—people who received their jobs through their own merits and not through inherited position. The Castilian Alonso de Burgos, for example, grandson of the former rabbi of Burgos, served as a political and spiritual adviser to the court and as confessor to Isabella. Just as close to Isabella was Andrés de Cabrera, also of converso background, who was married to her friend Beatriz de Bobadilla.
But even as Isabella eased tensions with one man in her family, problems erupted with another.
King Afonso V of Portugal, who was her cousin and the brother of Enrique’s second wife, Queen Juana, still felt that Isabella’s elopement with Ferdinand had shorn him of his prize—Isabella and the crown of Castile. In the four years since Ferdinand and Isabella were wed, Afonso’s reputation had grown. He had won an important set of victories in 1471, with the invasion and conquest of Asilah and Tangiers, both in North Africa, giving him control of rich gold mines there. Afonso had become wealthy. A vain and proud man, he memorialized his victories in triumphant tapestries, woven from wool and silk, that depicted his troops swarming over the walls of the cities, seizing them, and setting the women and children to flight from their homes.
Afonso depicted himself heroically in these tapestries, showing himself and his son João on horseback at the center of the battle, bedecked in fine suits of armor, jostling among the crush of soldiers who marched alongside them on foot. His actual performance was considerably less glorious than presented. The Muslims at Asilah had wanted to surrender, but while Afonso was negotiating the terms of the truce with them, his adrenaline-fueled soldiers had decided to attack the walls of the city on their own rather than accept an orchestrated victory. Afonso was quickly swept up in the melee, storming the ramparts with his men. The Muslims were unprepared for hand-to-hand combat, and Afonso and his soldiers slaughtered some two thousand of them and took five thousand captive, engaging in a particularly brutal assault on a mosque where some residents had taken refuge.23 Afonso could keep the captives as slaves, because he had gotten a special ruling from Pope Nicholas V that exempted him from the Christian ban on slavery, as long as the people who were being enslaved were “Saracens, pagans and other non-believers.”
Afonso was headstrong, impetuous, and tenacious. He had set a particular day for his landing from the sea, and when that morning dawned cloudy, windy, and stormy, he insisted on heading for the beach anyway. His men followed him, boarding unseaworthy boats that were swamped by the waves or crashed on the rocks. Some two hundred knights and infantrymen drowned that day, their heavy equipment dragging them underwater. The terrible incident was recorded in a section of one of the tapestries: it told viewers that Afonso was willing to pay a high price in human lives to secure a glorious victory for himself.
Because he was accustomed to getting his own way, Afonso still felt “personal rancor” toward Isabella for what he perceived as a rejection, and he was not the sort of man who could easily forget a slight.24 Now Isabella’s enemies saw a way to stir up his old resentment to their own advantage, by offering to make him king of Castile, long a rival to Portugal. Castile would have been a valuable plum to him: it encompassed about two-thirds of the Iberian peninsula and population; Portugal held only about one-quarter.25Gaining control of Castile and León would have turned Afonso, already heady with his recent victory in North Africa, into one of the leading rulers of Europe.
They could even hold out the promise of a replacement bride, because little Juana, the daughter of the late Enrique IV and the Portuguese queen, who had a claim to the Castilian throne, was available to be married. Juan Pacheco, the son and namesake of King Enrique’s old ally, had taken control of Princess Juana when his father died. The princess, now thirteen years old, was offered in marriage to King Afonso of Portugal. Isabella and Ferdinand tried to counter the offer by proposing that Afonso instead marry Ferdinand’s younger sister, who was at home in Aragon.
King Afonso rebuffed that offer and demanded that Isabella and Ferdinand step down, asserting that his niece, little Juana, was the true queen. Isabella responded that the people who were now asserting Juana’s right to rule were the same people who had previously insisted that the child was illegitimate.
The dispute with Portugal was clearly a ground for concern. But at this early point in her reign—still only a few months after the coronation—Queen Isabella had other, higher priorities. Needing to assert her authority over her own kingdom, she launched her reign with pageantry designed to boost the status of the monarchy and her right to rule. She was finally free, and had the resources, to dress splendidly, as did Ferdinand. Golden threads were woven into their garments, and they wore jewels and furs. They had the gratifying opportunity to circulate in places they had known in their earlier lives, receiving adulation and admiration from the crowd. They traveled to Valladolid, where they had been married so hastily to evade Enrique’s guards and soldiers, but this time they were feted with parties of all kinds, jousts and bullfights, great banquets and musical entertainments, where the young people could perform the latest popular dances.
But the celebration ended on a jarring note when the two monarchs learned that King Afonso’s troops were massing on the border with the intention of invading Castile. Juana had accused Isabella of poisoning her father and illegally seizing the throne. King Afonso of Portugal had decided this wrong needed to be avenged and that the Castilian crown was his to take.
In late May the war commenced. Afonso surged into Castile with more than ten thousand warriors on foot and horseback, supplied with two hundred cartloads of provisions, heavy artillery, and other baggage. His wealth was conspicuously on display, as he hauled a vast cache of golden crosses, coins, and engraved silverplate, intending to demonstrate his superior strength and resources. “He spent a great sum of gold” to win the support of Castilian nobles who would accept his proposed marriage to his niece Juana and have him as their king.26 Their close familial relationship required a papal dispensation, but the king pressed on with his plans nonetheless. King Afonso celebrated his engagement to Juana and then their wedding with lavish festivities in Extremadura, near the Portuguese border, then returned to the work of preparing for war.
Isabella and Ferdinand readied themselves for battle as well. As would soon become their pattern, she handled logistics while he led the troops in the field. She urged him on ferociously; he set out almost immediately.
Isabella commanded her subjects to carry the war to Portugal and to attack its cities and towns, not just to wait until the Portuguese troops surged into view. “You are aware that Don Afonso, King of Portugal,” and his troops have invaded Castile, with the goal of provoking “outrages” against the kingdom, she wrote in a letter circulated around the kingdom. And so, she announced, she had ordered Don Alfonso de Cárdenas “to make war, by fire and by blood, against that King of Portugal,” to enter his kingdom, and to destroy towns and places there. She expected her subjects to pick up arms in defense of Castile, she added, to demonstrate their “ancient and accustomed loyalty” to the throne.27
Nine months of intense border raids ensued, with battle lines shifting from place to place. Isabella and Ferdinand mobilized fairly quickly but still seemed at a disadvantage because of King Afonso’s reputation as a wily and experienced soldier. The odds seemed stacked against them. The grandees of Castile were compelled to take sides once again, this time in what became known as the War of 1475 to 1479. Many remained loyal to Isabella, while others were more equivocal, and one important former ally defected altogether—Alfonso Carrillo, the mercurial archbishop of Toledo. The powerful prelate had grown angry at both Ferdinand and Isabella. He was annoyed by Ferdinand’s lack of deference to him; he was insulted by their growing collaboration with his rivalMendoza, who had been given the cardinal’s hat; and he had had that embarrassing public clash with Isabella over the alchemist. Now when Isabella most needed Carrillo’s help and support, he turned against her.
Isabella rode to Carrillo’s stronghold, hoping he would join in her defense. Instead the archbishop rudely informed her, through a messenger, that he had switched sides. “If the queen comes in one gate, I will go out another,” he told his servant.28 She was stunned by this abrupt reversal, as Archbishop Carrillo had been her ally for almost a decade. Observers said she fell to her knees, praying to God for help, feeling abandoned. Archbishop Carrillo had been at her side ever since they had traveled together in support of her brother Prince Alfonso, and his defection wounded her deeply.
But she had had a great many disappointments in her life by this point, and as she usually did, she soon rallied and went forward. Within a year, her outreach to nobles, offering them clemency and rewards if they laid down arms, proved effective and the tide shifted in her direction. King Afonso was forced to pull troops out of Castile to defend his cities in Portugal that Isabella had placed under assault.
The two sides finally and climactically clashed, in the major confrontation known as the Battle of Toro, on March 1, 1476. The Portuguese army, led by King Afonso, his twenty-one-year-old son Prince João, and the rebellious Archbishop Carrillo of Toledo opposed Ferdinand, the Duke of Alba, Cardinal Mendoza, and other Castilian nobles leading the Isabelline forces. Foggy and rainy, it was bloody chaos on the battlefield, where fierce hand-to-hand fighting erupted. Hundreds of people—perhaps as many as one thousand—died that day. Some of the Portuguese who died were not killed in battle but drowned in the Douro River in the darkness and confusion.
It was difficult to re-create later exactly what had happened because the Portuguese and Castilian accounts differed. Troops led by Prince João won in their part of the battle; some troops led by King Ferdinand won in another part. But the most telling fact was that King Afonso had fled the battlefield with his troops in disarray; the Castilians seized his battle flag, the royal standard of Portugal, despite the valiant efforts of a Portuguese soldier, Duarte de Almeida, to retain it. Almeida had been holding the flag aloft in his right arm, which was slashed from his body, and so he transferred the pendant to his other arm and kept fighting. Then his other arm was cut off, and he held the flag in his teeth until he finally succumbed to death. The Portuguese, however, later managed to recover it.
The battle ended in an inconclusive outcome, but Isabella employed a masterstroke of political theater by recasting events as a stupendous victory for Castile. Each side had won some skirmishes and lost others, but Ferdinand was presented in Castile as the winner and Afonso as a craven failure and laughingstock. In medieval terms, the possession of the flag also signified a triumph. Isabella announced it as a sign of God’s will and support for their reign. She walked barefoot in the winter cold to give thanks at theMonastery of San Pablo in Tordesillas, and she vowed to found a monastery and church in Toledo for perpetual remembrance of the triumph.
Management of the perception of the battle rather than the event itself ended up influencing people’s opinions, and ultimately their belief about what had occurred. “Not a military victory, but a political victory, the battle of Toro is in itself, a decisive event, because it [resolved] the civil war in favour of the Catholic Monarchs,” wrote a group of Spanish historians who studied the battle and its aftermath.29
Peace did not come quickly, however, only by fits and starts over the next four years, with continuing loss of life on both sides. The war did not officially end until 1479, when Isabella reached a peace agreement by negotiating it directly with her Portuguese aunt,Beatriz, her mother’s sister. These were high-level talks because of the family ties they represented. Beatriz was King Afonso’s cousin and Prince João’s mother-in-law and therefore was related by blood and marriage to all the disputants. She was an unusually wise woman, as her mother, Isabella’s grandmother, had been, and everyone ultimately agreed to abide by the terms she devised to settle the grievances.
King Afonso himself had dropped out of the war after the first year. But given his military renown and stature, the drawn Battle of Toro was still a humiliating defeat for him. Unnerved, he turned to France in search of reinforcements and assistance and spent a fruitless year there begging for help, until gradually he realized that the faithless King Louis was considering handing him over to Ferdinand. When he began formulating plans to escape from France wearing a disguise, Louis shamefacedly ordered ships to send the humiliated sovereign home.30 Afonso returned to Portugal, where he shared power with his son João, who took the title King João II, until the father finally died in a monastery in 1481. He had been utterly vanquished by the young man and woman whom he had once dismissively viewed as mere willful teenagers. Young King João accepted the truce but stewed with resentment over this turn of events, continuing to view Queen Isabella with enmity. She watched him warily from Castile.
Little Juana’s life also disintegrated. Her father, King Enrique, if he was her father, had not effectively secured her future. Her mother, the former Queen Juana, Enrique’s wife, who had gone on to give birth to two illegitimate children, died in 1475 in Madrid. She was young at her death—only thirty-six—and the cause was never determined. She had disgraced her once-proud brother, King Afonso of Portugal, whose efforts to support her daughter’s cause and uphold the family honor had led to such abject humiliation. “Some say she was poisoned by her brother… and others that she died attempting to abort another child,” writes the scholar Nancy F. Marino. “No one mourned at the time of her death.”31
Little Juana, after her mother’s death and her husband Afonso’s abandonment of her while he wandered off to France, was left adrift. The truce arrangement between Isabella and Beatriz offered Juana the option of joining a nunnery, and she agreed, either willingly or because she believed she had no choice. Four years after the war started, Juana entered the Convent of Santa Clara in Coimbra, Portugal, later moving to the Castle of Saint George. She never gave up her belief that she was the rightful queen and signed her letters Yo, La Reina, for the rest of her life. Living quietly, however, and causing no trouble for anyone, she appears to have had a fairly normal life until her death in 1530.
Did Isabella usurp Juana’s throne and take her place as queen? It is possible that little Juana was indeed the king’s daughter and should have been declared queen. But her mother’s sexual behavior certainly raised questions about the child’s legitimacy.
Enrique’s own sexual behavior raised further questions. The king failed to produce any other children, either legitimate or illegitimate, during his thirty-four years of physical maturity, which included two decades of marriage, first to Blanca and then to Juana. The other rulers who were his peers produced far more offspring. King Edward IV of En-gland had ten legitimate children and possibly five more out of wedlock; Maximilian I had two legitimate children and twelve more who were illegitimate; as a cardinal, Rodrigo Borgia had between four and eight children, despite his vow of chastity; King Louis XI of France had at least eight; King Afonso had at least five. Many women would have been honored to bear a royal child. King Enrique almost certainly had a serious reproductive problem of some sort, and his physicians thought he was infertile. If he was homosexual, he probably had a low level of sexual interest in women as well.
How much of this did Isabella know? Probably a lot. She had lived at court as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Juana, which put her into close, direct, around-the-clock contact with the young queen. She may have witnessed things that persuaded her that Juana was illegitimate.
It is also possible that Isabella wasn’t entirely sure about Juana’s legitimacy but had come to believe that she herself was destined to rule and that her kingdom needed what she had to offer. She certainly took the kingdom’s problems enormously to heart and began, as soon as she took the throne, to confront unaddressed conditions that had deteriorated over the past decades. There is no sign that Juana, in contrast, had any sense of obligation to the citizens at large.
Regardless of the legalities or the ultimate justice of the situation, as the Portugese threat began to fade, Queen Isabella turned her full attention to the core problems facing Castile. She convened her first administrative council, or Cortes, in April 1476. The challenges were staggering. The kingdom’s currency had been debased, its finances were in chaos, consumers were being defrauded, and criminals prowled without fear of apprehension. She began to work at setting things to rights and quickly achieved some notable successes.
She reinvigorated an old system of armed local militias known as the Santa Hermandad, or the “Sacred Brotherhood,” law-enforcement brigades empowered by towns and cities to capture criminals. These Hermandad units, paid for by the municipalities, soon became organized as a kind of independent royal militia, trained to maintain order and accountable to Isabella as queen of Castile. Isabella conducted many trials herself. Some critics might have questioned whether accused people were receiving due process before they faced summary judgment, up to and including execution, but most people were grateful that civil order was being restored after the rampant lawlessness of previous decades.
Isabella also changed the composition of the royal council, which had been dominated by the aristocracy during her brother’s reign. To her new council she appointed three nobles and nine lawyers. The head of the council was a cleric; one of her early choices for this post was the converso Alfonso de Burgos. Through this means she began to administer the government more professionally, creating a bureaucracy comprised of an educated elite chosen by merit, not just by noble birth. Her frequent choice of conversos to hold key positions underscored this shift from medieval to modern management principles, and it encouraged more Jews to see advantages in converting to Christianity.
She also applied new scrutiny to the church. She promoted scholarship, valued education for clerics, and sought to clean out corruption, which was a growing concern throughout the Christian world.
Queen Isabella’s allies watched sympathetically as she juggled the demands of the job. She is “so young” to take on governing “so hard” a nation, wrote the converso courtier Hernando del Pulgar to the Spanish ambassador to Rome, “listening every hour to so much advice, so much information, one thing contrary to another, and… words of trickery that challenge the simple ears.”32 But crime was so widespread that she was obliged to take up those burdens, he added, noting that “the land is in threat of eternal damnation because of the lack of justice.”
But all the while, Isabella was pondering the single most important item on her agenda: creating and financing an army to field against the Islamic emirate in Granada, which she believed could become a beachhead once again for a Muslim attack on the Iberian peninsula. Looking ahead, she feared that a confrontation was looming with Mehmet the Conqueror, ruler of the expanding Ottoman Empire, and she was worried about protecting her family, which was at last starting to grow.