ELEVEN
Little Isabel, the namesake of her mother and grandmother, was almost eight when at last she became a big sister.
Her mother the queen had experienced seven long years of infertility, of waiting and hoping, as the conception and delivery of healthy infants was the single most important responsibility of royalty. Queen Isabella anxiously consulted doctors; she prayed at sanctuaries where she sought intervention by saints known to aid with childbirth; she starved herself and engaged in self-mortification. She had at least one miscarriage during those years, and the fact that the child had been a male made the disappointment all the more acute.
Then Ferdinand came home for a few months in the fall of 1477, and matters resolved themselves. Isabella became pregnant once again, to the relief of all. The pressure had been palpable. “It is good, Your Excellency, for here is the most grave and grand matter of Spain, and nothing is more necessary or desired,” a courtier wrote to Ferdinand in March 1478.1 While awaiting the baby, Ferdinand fervently prayed for a son and pledged that he would show his appreciation to God if his wish were fulfilled. Isabella, meanwhile, had an idea in mind for how to show their thankfulness.
This baby was born in Seville on June 30, 1478, when Isabella was twenty-seven years old. The birth followed royal custom: Isabel was attended by a midwife, and the room was packed with noblemen and city officials, who would all be able to swear the infant was indeed the child of the queen. When Isabel finally da a luz, or “gave light” and life to the infant, the entire city erupted in paroxysms of joy—a wild and boisterous celebration that lasted three days and nights.
The child was a boy, the long-desired male heir, and the disappointment of little Isabella’s birth was quickly forgotten. They named the baby Juan, the name shared by both his maternal and his paternal grandfathers. That was also the name of Isabel’s patron saint,John the Evangelist, and of Ferdinand’s, Saint John the Baptist. But Isabel’s joy was such that when she referred to her son, she most often called him her “angel.” He even looked like a cherub, with his pale blond hair and delicate features. Spaniards all over the kingdom rejoiced, seeing the boy’s arrival as proof of God’s favor. This child would reign over both Castile and Aragon, making a lasting political union of the two kingdoms that were now linked only by marriage.
Unlike the birth of Queen Isabella or her daughter Isabel, this child’s arrival was greeted with ostentatious ceremony. On July 9, about a week after Prince Juan was born, a stately procession wound its way through the streets of Seville from the palace to the cathedral, as throngs of onlookers and well-wishers crammed into the narrow streets to add their shouts of welcome to the baby heir to the throne. The child’s nurse, riding a mule, carried the infant swaddled in brocade cloth, under a brocade canopy, flanked by eight city officials decked in black velvet cloaks. Three young court pages followed behind, bearing gifts of gold and coins. Elegantly attired courtiers vied for spots in the line; clerics held aloft silver crosses. The archbishop of Seville, Pedro González de Mendoza, whose support had been won with the gift of the cardinal’s hat, officiated at the baptismal service.
“All the crosses from all the churches in the city” were hauled into the open to greet the procession as it passed through the streets. “Infinite numbers of musicians playing all sorts of instruments, of trumpets,” and drums and flutes welcomed the infant prince.2
A month later a second ceremony, even more elaborate than the first, took place. This time, Queen Isabella, having recovered from childbirth, marched in the procession, dressed in a bejeweled gown shimmering with pearls, surrounded again by Castile’s highest courtiers. She attended high mass at a service conducted at the main altar of the church.
“The queen went to mass to present the prince to the temple, and to offer him to God according to the custom of Holy Mother Church, very triumphantly,” wrote the chronicler Andrés Bernáldez, in an obvious analogy to the New Testament stories of the presentation of the baby Jesus.3 According to the Gospel of Luke, Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem forty days after his birth, following Jewish custom. It was a popular ceremony in the Middle Ages and included prayers of thanksgiving for the mother’s survival and the baby’s continued good health.
Indeed, Juan’s birth seemed nothing short of sacred and miraculous to loyal Spaniards. Isabella and Ferdinand were increasingly identified with the Holy Family—and Isabella, especially, as the abundant and fertile mother, the Mary figure to the Catholic way of thinking, the woman who bore the sacred male child, the queen not just of the earthly plane but also of heaven. To the conversos in the court, Catholics of Jewish descent, such as Diego de Valera, Hernando del Pulgar, and Isabel’s new confessor Hernán de Talavera, the child’s birth was the kind of event predicted in Holy Scripture. “Clearly we see ourselves given a very special gift by God, for at the end of such a long wait He has desired to give him to us,” wrote Pulgar in a letter to a colleague.
The Queen had paid to this kingdom the debt of male succession that she was obligated to give it. As for me, I have faith that he has to be the most welcome prince in the world, because all those who are born desired are friends of God, as were Isaac, Samuel and Saint John.… And not without cause, then were they conceived and born by virtue of many prayers and sacrifices.… Because God rejected the temple of Enrique and did not choose the tribe of Alfonso; but chose the tribe of Isabel whom he preferred.4
The happiness of the birth offset some of the bitterness of the previous years. It wasn’t surprising that Isabella had failed to become pregnant for such a long time, because Ferdinand had almost never been home in the initial years after she became queen. At first the war against the Portuguese provided a plausible explanation: Ferdinand’s presence was frequently needed on the front lines. But the periods of separation were often lengthy. In the early months of her reign, Isabella and her husband had been together, but for much of the rest of 1475 they had lived separately. In 1476 the couple spent only about eleven weeks together and forty-one weeks apart. In 1477, 1478, and 1479, they were together about only half of each year. It’s hard to imagine that people who were deeply in love would willingly spend that much time apart.
One letter from Ferdinand, written in May 1475, suggests that the periods of separation were now more Isabella’s choice than his, perhaps because she was generally working so feverishly and galloping from place to place to deal with problems on the ground:
My ladyship, now at last it is clear which of us two loves best… I can see that you can be happy while I lose my sleep, because messenger comes after messenger and brings me no letter from you. The reason why you do not write is not because there is no paper to be had, or that you do not know how to write, but because you do not love me and because you are proud. . . . Well! One day you will return to your old affection. If you do not, I shall die and the guilt will be yours.5
Is it possible that Isabella sometimes treated Ferdinand badly? At least one observer said she treated him cavalierly, ordering him about. “The queen is king, and the king is her servant,” a foreign visitor wrote. “He immediately does whatever it is that she decides.”6
Certainly they had their tiffs. In July 1475 in Tordesillas, they exchanged sharp words in other people’s presence. Ferdinand had left Tordesillas and set out against the Portuguese, who appeared, ready to do battle, just as his supplies were running low. Outnumbered, Ferdinand decided to withdraw back to the town to gather supplies and more troops. Isabella lashed out at him for what she saw as his timidity and failure, her words laced with sarcasm: “Although we women lack the intelligence to know, the courage to do, and the tongue to speak, I have discovered that we have eyes to see,” she said to him scornfully. “The truth is that I saw a great army departing from the fields at Tordesillas and it seems to me, as the woman that I am, that I could have conquered the world with it, as it included such good knights, horses and soldiers.”7 He needed to have shown more grit, she told him. “The one who begins nothing ends nothing.”
Ferdinand, for his part, defended his action, saying that he had been outnumbered ten to one, and that to have joined the battle would likely have meant many deaths. She seemed disappointed that they had returned alive but without a victory, he said, instead of offering more appropriate “words of consolation.”8 “There has never been a man born who can satisfy you,” he told his wife bitterly. Soon thereafter the Battle of Toro was joined, and at least for practical purposes, it was won.
The occasion at Tordesillas wasn’t their only point of disagreement. They also quarreled over women, and Ferdinand’s inability to remain faithful to the queen. Most of his known philandering occurred far from the court, when he was at home in Barcelona or traveling elsewhere in his kingdom, but sometimes he engaged in affairs closer to home as well.
A young woman who became a particularly notorious seductress had entered court through her connections with Isabella’s closest friend and confidante, Beatriz de Bobadilla. Beatriz’s proximity to the queen was advantageous to her own extended family, who also moved into the inner circle of the court. Through this means Beatriz’s alluring niece, also known as Beatriz de Bobadilla, attracted Ferdinand’s eye. She and Ferdinand soon began a passionate affair. The young woman’s father had been the royal master of the hunt, a fact that inspired much ribald humor around court, where people tittered about amorous individuals stalking and capturing their prey. Someone drew charcoal pictures of what the Italian courtier Baldassare Castiglione termed “lascivious animals” on the door to the young woman’s home, and it happened that the queen passing by spotted the drawings. One court wit was so bold as to point them out to her, saying, “Behold, Madam, the heads of the beasts that [Señorita] Bobadilla slays every day in the hunt.”9 The jest was clever but must also have shamed and embarrassed the queen.
The queen finally ordered the young woman to marry a nobleman visiting the court, then dispatched the newlyweds to the distant Canary Islands to subdue the rebellious native population. Beatriz was not the only young woman to be married off and sent away in this manner. There is no record of Ferdinand ever protesting this method of handling relationships that had become tedious or awkward. Perhaps he grew tired of the young women himself and didn’t mind being relieved of a potentially acrimonious ending.
The king and queen also differed over the administration of the church. Isabella was preoccupied with reforming the church, easing out people who saw their posts as sinecures and replacing them with priests and nuns who had a real commitment to preaching and leading the flock. It must have been supremely irritating to her that Ferdinand was pursuing a church position for his illegitimate son—exactly the kind of conduct that church reformers were singling out for criticism.
In late 1475 Ferdinand’s illegitimate brother Juan of Aragon died. Their father had arranged for Juan to be named archbishop of Zaragoza, the highest church official in the Kingdom of Aragon, who had responsibility for the souls of many parishioners and also controlled vast wealth and a large number of vassals on church-owned estates. Now, with the position open, Ferdinand asked his father if the job could be given to his own illegitimate son, Don Alonso of Aragon, who was six years old.10 This request was problematic: how could a six-year-old provide spiritual guidance to a congregation? And it was on its face corrupt because the obvious goal was to gain control of church funds that would be administered and used by the archbishop—or his father. To make matters worse, the job had already been promised to a well-qualified, mature prelate, Ausiàs de Puggio, who was well along in his preparations for taking over the post.
In March 1476, Ferdinand asked again. The Vatican’s preferred candidate, Ausiàs, refused to step aside. Ferdinand and his father warned the man that if he persisted in seeking the spot, his family’s lands in Aragon would be seized. At this point Ausiàs prudently decided to drop his claim. Falling quickly into line, Pope Sixtus IV named Ferdinand’s child, now seven years old, as archbishop of Zaragoza.
For Isabella, who was sincerely interested in cleansing the church of simony, or the corrupt awarding of church offices, these negotiations must have been touchy on several levels. She disapproved of just the kind of thing Ferdinand had accomplished for his illegitimate son. Unlike her husband, she always sought the strongest and best candidates for these church offices. Vatican officials generally didn’t like being pressed by kings and queens to appoint particular people of their own choosing to church posts, something they called “lay investiture,” but in Isabella’s case, the people she chose exemplified altruistic church ideals. “Isabella, however, it must be said, used her privilege in favour of really excellent men,” wrote the Vatican historian Ludwig Pastor, noting that most church appointments at the time went to the wealthy and well connected, not to those most deserving or worthy of their clerical posts.11
But if Isabella and Ferdinand differed on some fronts, in other ways their religious convictions, dynastic ambitions, and sense of divine mission welded them together. To celebrate Ferdinand’s purported victory against the Portuguese in the Battle of Toro, Isabella initiated the construction of a new church at Toledo. She named it San Juan de los Reyes, to honor her deceased father, King Juan II of Castile, and Ferdinand’s still-living father, King Juan II of Aragon. That name also allowed her to simultaneously give homage to their two patron saints, Saint John the Evangelist and Saint John the Baptist.
Isabella was growing very interested in architecture, and in this building she began to develop her own style and taste, elaborating on what was known as the Plateresque style and molding it into what came to be known as Isabelline. This style featured traditional Iberian elements, with simple but soaring and cavernous Gothic-inspired interiors, and rich sculptural treatments for the exteriors, all carved in golden stone. Soon churches, colleges, and hospitals built in this style were erected in Salamanca, Segovia, Valladolid, Aranda de Duero, Burgos, and Seville, all bearing her personal marks—her coats of arms and the yoke and flechas, the epigraphic symbols for her marriage to Ferdinand. Ropes signifying the Gordian knot tie these elements together. That is a reference to the riddle of the Gordian knot that Alexander the Great famously confronted, and a problem he solved by slashing the rope in two with his sword. And that, in itself, represents an idea: that the end justifies the means.
The first Isabelline-style building, and the one that most clearly bore her personal mark, was San Juan de los Reyes. Construction was started in 1477, and within a year, the church and attached monastery were already housing a contingent of Franciscan monks. But when the queen and king came back in 1479 to inspect the work under way, she was scathing in her evaluation. “Have you built such a trifle for me here?” she was said to have asked.12
More complex and ornate plans were quickly drawn up under the queen’s supervision by architect Juan Guas. Isabella’s tastes evolved, in keeping with the development of Renaissance styles coming into vogue, and later she would sponsor something entirely different in Rome. But for Castile, this style came to be her hallmark, a mixture of classical, Iberian, and Muslim motifs. These buildings became the enduring visual record of the places she came, saw, conquered.
The structure Ferdinand and Isabella jointly undertook to build in Rome, to honor the birth of their son Juan, became the world architectural masterpiece known as the Tempietto. It is located on the site where Isabella and Ferdinand believed that Saint Peter—the apostle whom Jesus called the “rock” on which he would build his church—was crucified about A.D. 64. Peter is believed to have died during a persecution initiated by the emperor Nero, who blamed Christians in Rome for a fire that destroyed the city. The actual location of Peter’s martyrdom is unknown, but this particular site had a legendary association with the event and also with an earlier monument, the Roman Temple of Vesta, the goddess of hearth, home, and family.
Consequently, an ancient monastery had been located on the site, known as San Pietro in Montorio, for hundreds of years. By the 1470s, the institution had become neglected and been abandoned, and in 1472 Pope Sixtus IV decided to revitalize it. He asked his personal confessor, Amadeo Menes da Silva, to undertake restoration of the site.13 And this led to the connection to Queen Isabella—for the monk Menes da Silva had been born a Portuguese nobleman and happened to be the brother of Beatriz da Silva, the saintly noblewoman who founded the Conceptionist religious order.
Beatriz’s brother Amadeo took to this new responsibility to restore the sacred spot with particular gusto, reporting that he had experienced mystical visions at a grotto on the property, which attracted additional support for the work at hand. In 1480, when little Prince Juan was two, King Ferdinand announced that he intended to pay for the construction work at the site because of a vow he had made to build a church to Saint Peter.14 It was the family’s way of thanking God for the gift of a son.
Amadeo Menes da Silva died in 1482, and within a few years, Ferdinand and Isabella had shifted responsibility for the work to Bernardino López de Carvajal, whom they sent as their ambassador to Rome. He assigned the task of building the special commemorative structure to a little-known, middle-aged architect from Milan who was beginning to make a name for himself by combining ancient and modern styles of construction and building ornamentation. His name was Donato Bramante, and what he built on the site is considered the first example of High Renaissance architecture in Italy. It would delight, fascinate, and amaze generations of art historians. Domed, with Doric columns, the “circular plan symbolizes divine perfection,” according to the World Atlas of Architecture. “Inspired by ancient temples, the Tempietto is both a homage to antiquity and a Christian memorial.”15
Juan’s birth, when it came in 1478, had seemed to have eased the tensions between his parents and provided the means by which they could project themselves as an ascendant Christian monarchy with a long history and a great future. After 1479 Ferdinand andIsabella were together more than they were apart. The babies started coming like clockwork, one after the other.
In November 1479, in Toledo, Isabella again gave birth, this time to another daughter, whom they named Juana. She too was named in memory of all the great men named John. “And they gave her the name of that glorious Juan, he whom God had chosen among men,” sang a minstrel about the child’s birth.16
This time, however, the name had special poignancy because in January of that year, Ferdinand’s pugnacious and resolute father had finally died, at age eighty-one. Ferdinand had succeeded him and was now finally and fully ruler of Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia as well as Sicily. His new daughter was a living memorial to her grandfather Juan’s fierce determination that his bloodline would rule Iberia. She was an unusually beautiful child, more impulsive and willful than her dutiful older sister, Princess Isabel, and her agreeable and charming brother Juan.
Then Isabella became pregnant again, growing unusually large and uncomfortable in comparison with previous pregnancies, making it difficult for her to travel. The thirty-one-year-old queen went into labor in June 1482, in Córdoba, and it soon became apparent that something was unusual with the delivery. She quickly gave birth to a baby, but the labor went on for another day and a half, and then a second child, a twin to the first, was delivered stillborn. The surviving twin, a blond-haired girl, was named María. After that dramatic birth, however, María’s childhood drew little notice. With three older siblings, she somehow got lost in the crowd and did as she was told.
Three years later Queen Isabella delivered still another little girl and named her Catalina, or Catherine, after their ancestor, Catherine of Lancaster. This baby was ushered into an increasingly majestic world on December 16, 1485, a setting of wealth and opulence in a beautifully tapestried bedchamber in a palace in Alcalá de Henares. Strong, intelligent, and determined, she looked much like her sisters, fair-skinned with strawberry blond hair that darkened to light auburn as she left early childhood. She later received an identifying sobriquet that would tie her to her father’s hereditary kingdom in the memory of future generations: she became known as Catherine of Aragon and soon thereafter as the Princess of Wales, the future queen of England. Of all Isabella’s children, she was the one who was most like her mother.
Queen Isabella delivered all her children with her typical stoicism and extraordinary fortitude. “I have been informed by the ladies who serve her in her chamber that, neither when in pain through illness nor during the pains of childbirth… did they ever see her complain, and that, rather, she suffered them with marvelous fortitude,” a court observer commented.17
At thirty-three, with five children, Isabella’s family was complete. The independent queen, once easily able to jump astride a horse and travel effortlessly from town to town, now traveled with a vast entourage. The court remained itinerant, and so the queen needed to move not just her own things but the accoutrements required by a large brood of children at various stages of development.
They traveled constantly, as the demands of administering the kingdom never slackened. Queen Isabella started the year 1481, for example, in Medina del Campo and moved to Valladolid in February, staying there until April, when she moved to Calatayud in Aragon. In June she went to La Muela and then to Zaragoza. From August to November she was in Barcelona. In the last month of the year, she and Ferdinand moved almost daily, traveling from Molins de Rey, to Tarragona, to Cambrila, to Perello, to Tortosa, to San Mateo, to Almenara, to Murviedro, to Valencia, and on the last days of the year, back to Murviedro.
Traveling was no simple affair. In 1489 Queen Isabella employed about four hundred courtiers and household staff workers, all of whom traveled with her.18 Her highest-paid ladies-in-waiting, representing the highest-ranking noblewomen in the kingdom, included not only Bea-triz de Bobadilla, now known as the Marquesa de Moya, but also Teresa Enríquez, Inés Manrique, María de Luna, Leonor de Sotomayor, and Ana and Beatriz de Mendoza. Guards, pages, cupbearers, cooks, laundresses, musicians, and court physicians rounded out the staff. Isabella’s obligations included feeding them, housing them, and frequently clothing them as well.
Her children had their own assigned households. Prince Juan employed eighty-two people in 1493, when he was fifteen years old. Catherine’s household staff numbered fifteen when she was thirteen.19
These peregrinations resulted in lengthy processions. Tetzel, a pilgrim who visited Castile around that time, described watching a nobleman’s itinerant court on the move. The man would ride a mule, he said, while his servants would run alongside him on foot, sometimes foraging for food along the way, then hurry ahead in time to prepare meals and arrange lodging or campsites. He saw household servants who were so tired “they can hardly walk.” He came away impressed with their fortitude. “The Spaniards,” he said, “are a people who can endure hunger and work.”20
Traveling by horseback or on mules, accompanied by heavy-laden carts, must have been not just exhausting but a testament to careful planning, for Isabella and Ferdinand were required to move from place to place with imperial good grace and polish. The dress and appearance of the children, for example, was not just a source of pride but also an imperative of governing, conveying the family’s social status and importance. They dressed in jeweled gowns, in velvets and brocades. All this clothing had to be cleaned, mended, transported. Regal settings had to be composed at every location as well, which meant that paintings, illuminated manuscripts, tapestries, and rugs were hauled from place to place to accompany the royal family. Court documents, legal decrees, and correspondence were transported in great leather and metal chests.
Isabella, acutely aware of the gaps in her own education, placed extreme importance on how the children were raised and educated. She had not been taught Latin in childhood, which meant she had to undertake the more difficult task of learning it as an adult, and she had had to hire a tutor for herself, the female scholar Beatriz Galindo. Isabella and all the ladies in her court, including her daughters, participated in these lessons.
Humiliated when she made errors in Latin, Isabella was careful not to repeat the mistake of giving her children a second-rate education when they would be expected to operate in the most elevated intellectual levels of society. Isabella’s emphasis on girls’ education helped spawn an academic revolution for women across Europe, as her court set a new standard of expectations for females who would rule either on their own or in partnership with their husbands. Under Queen Isabella’s watchful and demanding eye, the children of the court received an extraordinary education.
Isabella’s children were taught not only the Bible and the works of Saints Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory, but also the classics, including Seneca, Prudentius, and the Roman historians. Isabella saw humanism not as the antithesis to religion but as a complement to it. Descendants of the Greeks, she and other Spanish nobles were creatures of the classical world as well as the biblical one.
Isabella retained as tutor to the boys the brilliant Italian humanist author and scholar Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, also known as Pedro Martír de Anglería, whose place in their household gave him a unique window into Spanish history and international affairs. And he, in return, made the children objects of marvel throughout Europe. The Dutch scholar Erasmus would later describe Catherine as “miraculously learned for a woman” and a better scholar than her eventual husband, the erudite King Henry VIII.21 Princess Juana could converse easily and casually in Latin with courtiers from other countries, and by the time she was a teenager, she was reciting and composing verse in that language.
Instruction at court operated as a kind of academy, as famous scholars led groups of children in Aristotelian discussion and debate. Artists and scholars mingled with noblemen, sharing thoughts and perspectives, writing poetry, songs, epigrams, and soon, the first of the early novels. “A key feature of Isabella’s court was her patronage of artists and her love of culture, and she was the driving force behind artistic policy,” writes a scholar of Renaissance art. “A number of painters made their living almost exclusively from court patronage, such as Juan de Flandes, Melchior Alemán and Michael Sittow.… Isabella’s conspicuous patronage of the arts established a fashion that was followed by the noble families in Spain.”22
In addition to crafting artworks and literature, these artists were also required to teach the royal children and their pages and attendants. Prince Juan, for one, was tutored in these early years by a Dominican who was a professor at the University of Salamanca. As the children grew, the curriculum expanded to include catechism, Latin, and Castilian grammar, religious and secular history, philosophy, heraldry, drawing, music, and singing. A German scholar described a Latin class taught by Peter Martyr, with the students clustered around him: “His students were the duke of Villahermosa, the duke of Cardona, don Juan Carrillo, don Pedro de Mendoza, and many others from noble families, whom I saw reciting Juvenal and Horace,” he wrote. “All these are awakening in Spain the taste for letters.”23
Soon to join the youngsters were two new arrivals, the sons of a Genoese explorer who called himself Cristóbal Colón, or in English, Christopher Columbus. These two boys, Diego, sixteen, and Ferdinand, six, who was named after the king, came to Isabella’s court as pages to her son Juan. They became fixtures. Diego was described by the historian Bartolomé de Las Casas as “tall, like his father, of gentle manners, well proportioned with an oval face and high forehead,” well liked but lacking his father’s intense intelligence. The younger brother, Ferdinand Columbus, was charming and popular, “of great affability and sweet conversation,” and he took to the stimulating environment with great enthusiasm.24 His father frequently traveled, and so Diego and Ferdinand Columbus were essentially raised to adulthood at Isabella’s hands, first as pages in the court of her son and then as pages to the queen herself.
The two boys took advantage of the opportunities around them. Books were a rare and precious commodity, but young Ferdinand Columbus owned 238 of them by the time he was sixteen.25 He was such an able pupil that he came to serve as an unofficial assistant and protégé of Peter Martyr, which exposed him directly to developments in Renaissance Italy. “In the Court of the Catholic Sovereigns, patrons of Italianate Renaissance culture,… Ferdinand formed the taste for books [and] for scholarship that grew into a ruling passion,” wrote scholar Benjamin Keen, in his introduction to Ferdinand’s fascinating biography, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus, which he wrote in defense of his famous father’s achievement.26
In time, and as wealth came his way in adulthood, Ferdinand Columbus developed into one of the most notable scholars of the Renaissance in his own right, amassing what is believed to have been the largest private collection of books in Europe, some 15,400 volumes that he acquired in his travels on behalf of the Spanish monarchs, whom he served for more than fifty years. His carefully catalogued personal library included valuable ancient manuscripts, works from the classics, mathematical and scientific treatises, religious works, and the first books produced on printing presses. His collection of 3,200 prints included many works by the painter Albrecht Dürer.
In this environment, intellectual competition flourished, and soon many of the court’s children began attracting attention from scholars in other parts of Europe. Peter Martyr took enormous pride in what he had helped to bring about. “I was the literary foster father of almost all the princes, and of all the princesses of Spain,”27 he later said, when his charges’ accomplishments drew compliments across the continent.
Many of the scholars and artists drawn to Isabella’s court, who subsisted on her patronage, formed friendships that lasted for decades, enjoying a common bond that reached from court to court all over Europe. These ties extended to the young nobles they had tutored, who were soon in positions of becoming artistic and literary patrons themselves.
The girls received an education similar to that of the boys of the court, but they were also trained in the domestic arts, as though they were being groomed not just to be consorts to kings but to be practical and dutiful wives as well. They learned to sew, weave, embroider, and bake. Catherine famously sewed her husband’s shirts in marriage, as her mother had in hers.
The royal daughters were urged to emulate their mother, who was developing a larger-than-life persona, and to similarly see themselves as warriors for Christianity. One militant melody from a cancionero, or book of songs, for example, urged Princess Juana to “follow the shining great Queen of Castile who is the fountain of virtues” and to go forward to “carry the cross” in conquest.28
The royal children were raised with acute awareness of their future stations and duties. In addition to receiving the general education offered to all the court’s children, the prince and princesses were also instructed in court ritual and the arts of self-presentation. They were expected to make a decorous, dignified, and impressive appearance. Specific rules were attached to their clothing, to keep them in bandbox perfection.
To look his best, Prince Juan was expected to order two new pairs of shoes each month, and two new pairs of slippers or Moorish boots each week. He was allowed to wear his hats, caps, and other clothing only three times before giving them up. He was expected to wear a new belt every day. He was required to give away these garments to his household staff, for their use or resale, on a particular schedule. The queen became very angry when she learned that Prince Juan and Princess Juana hoarded their favorite items rather than passing them along to their attendants. She also required the children to distribute uneaten or excess food to the household staff so that nothing would go to waste. This could sometimes amount to a vast quantity of food because there were so many rituals surrounding mealtimes in the court.29 These gifts constituted part of the compensation received by courtiers for working in the royal household, so Isabella’s wrath reflected a profound sense of noblesse oblige, a core belief that those of superior rank had to be both generous and just.
The fact that Isabella and Ferdinand had only one son was a cause for concern. Having more boys would have given the monarchy a more solid base for the future. Juan’s delicate health made the situation seem all the more fragile. But the births of the girls also offered advantages because each of them could secure a unique diplomatic alliance with another kingdom. Each could serve as a sort of living treaty, an ambassador in another capital.
This advantage was predicted very soon after Juan’s birth secured the succession. “If your highness gives us two or three more daughters,” Hernando del Pulgar wrote to Isabella in 1478, “in 20 years time you will have the pleasure of seeing your children and grandchildren on all the thrones of Europe.”30 And indeed, Isabella and Ferdinand would seek to use their daughters’ marriages to firm up their alliances and shore up their defenses in western Europe.
The memory of the recent war with Portugal was much on their minds, and though they toyed with a number of possible marriage prospects for their oldest daughter Isabel, they ultimately negotiated an engagement and gave her in marriage to the Portuguese heir, which was suggested to them at the time of the truce with Portugal. The little Princess Isabel soon came to be known as the future queen of Portugal and was treated as a monarch-in-training. She was slated to marry the grandson of King Afonso V, the son of his son King João, a boy named Afonso. (The Portuguese royal family had the same habit as the Castilians and Aragonese in naming children after their fathers, mothers, and grandparents.)
Isabella and Ferdinand sought to encircle their French rivals by establishing a double alliance with the Hapsburg family. The future Holy Roman emperor, Maximilian of Austria, who ruled Germany, had married Mary of Burgundy, and they had two children roughly the same age as two of Isabella’s children, Juan and Juana. Juana was engaged to Archduke Philip of Austria, known as Philip the Handsome, and Juan was to be married to Philip’s sister, Margaret of Austria. The double marriage would bind Castile tightly to the court of Burgundy and to the Hapsburg family.
Little Margaret of Austria, even though she was only a child, had already had a turbulent marital history. At age three she had been be-trothed to the French dauphin, the future king Charles VIII, and was raised in the French court as his consort and the future queen of France. But Charles jilted her to marry Anne of Brittany, the heiress to that kingdom and the wealthiest woman in Europe. The unfortunate Margaret lingered in France for two more years, until she could be shipped back home. This humiliating treatment made the young princess all the more eager to cast her lot with a rival of France, and she welcomed, and eagerly awaited, the proposed marriage with Prince Juan of Castile.
Isabella’s two younger daughters, María and Catherine, were considered for a number of matches. Ultimately the youngest, Catherine, was affianced to the English court in marriage to Prince Arthur, the oldest son and probable heir of King Henry VII. The English court was considerably less powerful than those of France and Castile and more fitting for a younger daughter. King Henry, eager to claim a Spanish bride for his son and heir, made the first overtures to Castile about Catherine in 1487, when she was still a two-year-old and Arthur was just an infant.31
As the children grew up, foreign diplomats described Isabella and Ferdinand’s family in glowing terms, both for their splendor and for the affectionate nature of their relationships with one another. Roger Machado, an envoy from France, attended a bullfight where the king and queen were present with their children; he noted with interest that Queen Isabella held baby Catherine on her lap during the event, lovingly interacting with her.32
Not everyone, however, received the news of the expanding family with such jubilation. In 1478, according to Pulgar, the emir of Granada, Abu al-Hasan Ali, sent ambassadors who noted the birth of Prince Juan—but they took the occasion to tell Isabella and Ferdinand that they would no longer send the customary tribute money to maintain the truce between the kingdoms, and they immediately stopped doing so. Abu al-Hasan Ali may have gone even further. He reportedly added that the kings of Granada who had given such tribute were now dead, and that he himself planned to turn the mints that made the coins into factories for forging lances to attack the Christians.
These menacing remarks came at the same time that the Castilians received word that a large Ottoman army was massing to attack the island of Rhodes in the eastern Mediterranean or perhaps, even more frightening, some other southern European objective. The young queen, a new mother with the heightened protective instincts of most women toward their vulnerable young, was troubled by these reports, which carried the most dire threats for her kingdom as well.
Her state of mind in these years, from the 1470s to the early 1480s, was captured in an unusual painting housed in the Monastery of Las Huelgas in Burgos, near the mausoleum and shrine to her parents in that city. It depicts Isabel and Ferdinand, standing in prayer next to each other, with three of their children—likely Isabel, Juan, and Juana—grouped behind them. Perhaps the painting was completed before María and Catherine had been born, which would date it to the early 1480s. Isabella’s face appears sad and anxious. A cluster of nuns stand nearby, their faces likewise drawn with worry.
In the center of the painting, a giant figure of the Virgin Mary rises up into the sky, stretching her arms out to protect the family and the nuns, who are sheltered under her embroidered cloak. Mary is holding clusters of arrows in her hands. Across the top of the canvas, two demonic figures with horns and clawed feet prance across the sky, menacing the family beneath. One devil carries arrows, longer and sharper than those held by Mary, and the second is heavy-laden with books. It is unclear if he is bringing the books or taking them away.
Isabella’s home life may have been all that she could have asked for, but, in the broader world, the queen saw herself painted into a terrifying scene.