EIGHTEEN

FAITH AND FAMILY

Isabella’s life was changing as her children moved into their teenage years. There were five of them—Juan, her heir, and his four sisters—and she had much to do in monitoring their educations and training them to rule. She was orchestrating their marriages withroyal houses throughout Europe, and each negotiation was separate and complex, requiring consummate political and diplomatic skills. Meanwhile each child needed to be tutored and prepared to step into his or her future role as king or queen.

Queen Isabella was an affectionate but demanding mother. Stern, doggedly determined, and devoutly religious, she expected the same qualities in her family. No one was allowed to shirk responsibility or question obligations. The children’s behavior was expected to be impeccable, not only when they were on display at state events but also privately as they interacted with people inside the court circle. Isabella had a strong view of right and wrong. Her world was almost entirely black-and-white. Self-control was required, not optional.

Her standards for proper dress and demeanor were correspondingly high. She was torn between her need to operate successfully in the public sphere, which called for opulent external display as a demonstration of the kingdom’s wealth and power, and an internal tug in the direction of the traditional Christian values of simplicity and humility in garb and appearance. Ostentatious apparel was an essential tool for mesmerizing the public, intimidating rivals, and impressing foreign envoys. Such magnificence paid dividends—ambassadors went home speaking in awed tones about the continent’s new emerging superpower. The conquest of Granada, moreover, had made Ferdinand and Isabella into celebrities, imposing on them, even more than before, the obligation that appearances be maintained.

Consequently, in public, Isabella dressed herself and her family with splendor that became the talk of Europe, but she also made sure her children were warned about the moral hazards and superficiality that this kind of dress represented. Her choice of clothing was politically and socially savvy, but she also knew that it represented, at its core, false values.

But if court clothes were just vanity, they were vanity on an extraordinary scale. A soldier accompanying the English envoy on a trip to negotiate the marriage between Princess Catherine and Prince Arthur was astonished by the clothing and jewelry displayed by the Spanish royal family. Ferdinand “wore cloth of gold lined with fine sables,” while Isabella wore a black velvet cape lined with gold and set with precious gems.¹ The next day Ferdinand appeared in crimson velvet, and Isabella wore cloth of gold. The oldest children, Juan and Isabel, joined the adults briefly; Juan made his appearance in crimson velvet, like his father, and Isabel dressed in cloth of gold, like her mother, with a great train of green velvet and a cap of “net in gold and black, garnished with pearls and precious stones.”² Day after day, the family entertained the envoys with banquets, balls, bullfights, and jousting tournaments. And at each event, the members of the family appeared in new, different, and dazzling ensembles.

But all the time, Isabella’s confessor, Hernán de Talavera, was exhorting the faithful not to succumb to the snares of conspicuous consumption and to avoid “sumptuous dress.” He wrote a treatise on the ways good Christians should dress themselves and eat so that they would not fall into bad habits that led to sin and gluttony. Excessively revealing clothing, for example, was against the laws of nature because people were intended to cover their bodies to protect them from cold or the burning rays of the sun. Nudity was absolutely forbidden, he added, and had been ever since Adam and Eve. He also recommended that women cover their hair to promote modesty. And he urged people to dress and eat in “necessary and reasonable,” not “costly or extravagant,” ways.³ Each was to dress appropriately for his or her station in life.

Not surprisingly, Isabella’s choice of garb for herself and her family raised some eyebrows in church circles. Talavera several times questioned her about her apparel and behavior, and she squirmed with discomfort. Once he told her that her vanity would “offend God.”⁴ She replied that she had to dress as she did on state occasions and to help shape the image of Spain as rich and influential. But these kinds of issues caused her many hours of anxious reflection about whether she was living up to her own spiritual ideals.

Her inner conflicts were revealed in a set of small but exquisite paintings she commissioned. These were a set of depictions of scenes from the life of Christ, mostly following biblical text, designed for Isabella’s personal devotional use. They were probably intended as components of an altarpiece. Of the forty-seven oil paintings produced for the series, about two dozen are known to have survived. In their totality, they provide a remarkable window into Isabella’s thinking and religious philosophy and the ideas that she communicated to her children. They reveal her life as what the art historian Chiyo Ishikawa calls a “pointedly conservative enterprise” and show her deep desire for a court designed with “simplicity and austere understatement.”⁵

Believed to have been executed by two court painters whom Queen Isabella maintained on her staff, Juan de Flandes and Michael Sittow, both trained in Flanders, the paintings depict characters from the stories of the New Testament. The figures are dressed in the garb that was current at the time they were produced, making the images more directly relevant to the observer than scenes that more accurately portray the distant past. Many of the accessories shown—a convex mirror, a cuckoo clock, a classical entablature, a Gothic arch, a small hunting dog known as a whippet—were trendy objects that would have been found in the homes of the wealthy in the 1480s. It is believed that Archbishop Talavera helped in the conception of the project.

Isabella and her children became integral parts of this series. Members of her family were painted as spectators and participants in scenes from Christ’s life. Placing family members in a painting was not particularly unusual at the time; many noble families commissioned pictures of themselves dressed in splendid robes, kneeling in prayer before an idealized Holy Family. But Isabella’s artworks did not portray herself and her family in the glorious foreground. Instead, they appear as bit-part actors, dressed as ordinary citizens, in the unfolding dramas. In one painting that depicts Christ’s miraculous feeding of the multitude with just a few loaves and fishes, Isabella appears as a humble and pious onlooker dressed in a simple robe and cloak, sitting as part of the crowd.⁶

Her son Juan and his bride-to-be may have been similarly worked into the scene as the wedding couple at the Marriage at Cana. Juan, blond-haired with delicate features, gestures with his hand as he speaks to a blond young woman, her hands held in prayer. Christ, dark-haired and pensive, sits next to his mother at the table, near the young couple. A convex mirror, a popular home accessory at the time, hangs from the wall. The table is set with a white cloth, looking something like an altar, with bread and wine visible, suggesting Holy Communion. In this picture, a wedding is turned into a religious service, a kind of mass.⁷

In other paintings, stylish and revealing garments are equated with sin. In one scene a blindfolded man, who is probably Jesus, is mocked. His tormentors appear as affected and haughty young Castilian courtiers dressed in high fashion. The men’s tights reveal the slender, shapely, and wiry muscles of their lower limbs; one sneering fellow wearing bright-red leggings has a particularly bulging codpiece.⁸

Simple, unaffected clothing that conceals sexuality, therefore, was viewed as the ideal in Isabella’s mind, even as her own court clothing grew more and more ornate in keeping with the new spirit of the Renaissance. The problem of properly balancing the secular and the spiritual would manifest itself in different ways for her and her children in the years ahead. All the children internalized the religious obsession that drove Isabella and came to share it, even while they struggled with the worldly power they wielded.

The way she saw the religious conflicts among Europe’s three faiths is also apparent in these paintings. In the canvas showing the mocking of the blindfolded man, for example, a Jewish high priest in a broad-rimmed hat hurries away, aware of the cruelty of the action but doing nothing to stop it. In a scene depicting the moment where Jesus is ridiculed by having a crown of thorns pressed onto his head, a turbaned man who looks like a Turk watches but does not intervene. Both, however, look troubled and pained by the events. The Jew and the Turk, as individuals, are not presented as intrinsically evil but are depicted as enabling painful events to unfold.

The paintings Isabella commissioned also illustrate the ways she viewed herself and her family as the defenders of Christ and his interests. In the depiction of a humbly garbed Christ calming the waves in the Sea of Galilee, for example, Jesus’s boat is flying a flag with the coat of arms of Castile and León. In another scene that is supposed to have occurred after the crucifixion, when Jesus appears to his mother, the Castilian escutcheon is painted on the roof of Mary’s home.

Interestingly, however, in the New Testament, Christ does not appear to his mother at all after his death, although he reportedly made appearances to over five hundred other people on at least a half dozen occasions. The fact that Queen Isabella added this noncanonical image to the mix suggests that she was interested in giving the mother of Jesus a more important role in the Christian story, either for her own reasons or because she felt Mary’s role was being undervalued by the church. At the same time she was actively advocating the growth of the female religious order called the Conceptionists, which promoted the Virgin Mary as holy in her own right, not just through her son.⁹ Of course, it is a law of nature that mothers feel underappreciated for their efforts on behalf of their offspring, and perhaps Isabella thought Mary deserved more credit than she was getting.

As the children grew from childhood into adolescence, Queen Isabella kept them close at hand. They joined her at war during the turbulent 1480s and 1490s. These were not children who spent their early years frolicking in the countryside. Isabella’s children spent their childhoods at war against the people they commonly called the “infidel.” They lived in heavily fortified castles on the frontier of enemy activity and in encampments while on campaign. The travels were grueling, over steep mountain passes and arid plains, in blazing heat and freezing cold. They sometimes lived in tents, sweltering in the summer and huddled next to coal braziers for warmth when the winter set in. A portable altar allowed them to worship on the road; a contingent of priests, including confessors to the king and queen, and chaplains to the family, accompanied them, holding large crosses aloft as they marched. They lived a kind of perpetual and militarized pilgrimage.

This level of direct family involvement in a war is unusual. Most rulers don’t want to put their own families at risk, certainly not their wives and small children. Most wars entail rulers sending people they barely know off to distant lands to risk being killed. The core of the Ottoman army at the time, for example, was made up of slave soldiers. Similarly, the Italian rulers of the same period relied on mercenary soldiers hired to fight their battles for them. When noblemen in the recent Middle Ages had gone to war, they had tended to treat their trips as sporting expeditions to be limited to the pleasant summer months. Their ritualized play at battle, the jousting tournaments, survived into Isabella’s day as a popular amusement at festivals and holidays.

But for Isabella, Ferdinand, and their children, war was real, immediate, and personal. The campaign against Granada lasted ten years. Isabella’s oldest child, Isabel, named for her mother, spent almost her entire childhood with her parents on campaign, first against the Portuguese and then against Granada. She was twenty-one when the Muslims’ capital city surrendered in 1492. The youngest, Catherine, was seven. Isabella was in a war council when she went into labor with her daughter María.

The family was totally absorbed in the effort to reconquer Spain. They spent their daily lives surrounded by soldiers who were members of their own extended family or else friends and relations of their friends. When a contingent went off to battle, frequently with King Ferdinand leading the troops, they watched and waited to see who would come back and in what condition. Often the warriors killed in combat were just a few years older than Isabella’s children and may have been their playmates just a few years earlier. Queen Isabella knew personally the noblemen who commanded the units and their parents and had visited the cities where they lived. When one of them died, she often knew firsthand the people who would be most affected by the loss.

Isabella and her family lived with constant wartime risks. One night at their camp outside Granada, for example, after Ferdinand had fallen asleep, she was up praying through the night in her tent. She accidently dropped a torch, setting her bed linens on fire. The fire spread quickly in her temporary quarters. Amid cries of alarm, everyone was rousted from bed. The men scrambled to grab their swords in the belief they were under enemy attack. As the flames leaped higher, the queen quickly gathered up her maps and battle plans and went out in search of her husband and thirteen-year-old son, finding them both safe. But the camp was destroyed. All their possessions were lost. The family donned borrowed clothing when they returned to the work of fighting the enemy.

The children had occasional intense, frightening, or sad interactions with their opponents. When the troops were besieging a city, they could sometimes hear the cries and lamentations of the inhabitants inside the city walls. They saw the enemy, and they also saw the innocent victims of war.

Even the act of accepting the surrender from the town could be hazardous duty if tempers suddenly flared. When the Spaniards accepted a town’s surrender, it was King Ferdinand who typically marched in to receive the oath of fealty from its leading citizens. Often the decision to surrender had been controversial. The residents wondered if they had been betrayed, and their suspicions were not infrequently grounded in truth.

Ferdinand wasn’t the only one who directly placed himself in harm’s way. Isabella entered at least four cities herself to accept their surrenders, including Almería and Baza. In Baza, she was accompanied by the teenaged Princess Isabel. Princess Juana joined Queen Isabella at the surrender of Moclín. Prince Juan was part of the contingent at Jaén. When Boabdil surrendered in Granada, the keys to the city were given first to King Ferdinand, then passed to Queen Isabella, and then to thirteen-year-old Prince Juan. All fivechildren spent considerable time at the forward command post, the Alcazaba in Córdoba.

Princess Isabel was drawn into specifically perilous situations on at least two separate occasions. When her parents were at war with the Portuguese, she had been left behind in Segovia under the care of Beatriz de Bobadilla’s father, Pedro. Isabella had granted control of the city to Beatriz and her husband, Andrés de Cabrera, and many residents of Segovia were unhappy about the transfer of power and wealth. The residents of the city rose up against the new administrators and seized the city and the citadel where the princess was staying. Princess Isabel, who was about seven years old, was trapped for some days in a tower of the Alcázar while milling crowds inside the fortress shouted and demonstrated their rage. When she got the news, Queen Isabella rushed to her daughter’s aid, galloping to Segovia with only a handful of companions. The citizens of Segovia tried to block the queen’s entry, complaining that they were unhappy with the governance by Andrés de Cabrera, who was also unpopular because he was a converso. The queen haughtily demanded that the residents permit her to enter, and she promised to investigate the situation. On her own, the queen entered the city and took back her daughter. As she had promised, she looked into the matters at issue but remained adamant in her decision about who would rule the city. For her daughter, however, it must have been a terrifying experience.

Similarly, it must have been upsetting to Princess Isabel when she was traded as a hostage to the Portuguese, as a guarantee that her parents would abide by the terms of the treaty. That had happened when she was eight. She had been sent away from her family to live in Portugal for three years. But no matter what happened, Princess Isabel was expected to go forward, without showing weakness or hesitation.

The threat of a suicide attack, meanwhile, was a constant source of fear. When the Spaniards were besieging Málaga, for instance, a Muslim who entered the camp presenting himself as a helpful informant was allowed to wander around while he waited to speak with the queen. When he spied an elegantly attired couple, a man and woman playing chess in a tent, he assumed they were Ferdinand and Isabella and viciously attacked them with a knife. The woman was Beatriz de Bobadilla, and the man was Isabella’s cousin, a Portuguese nobleman. Through good luck both survived the attack. The assailant was caught and killed. But this attack inside their own camp underscored a troubling fact: that people who presented themselves as allies in wartime could actually be threats, and dangers were lurking everywhere.

It is indeed rather surprising that no one in the family was killed. In addition to being at war with the Muslims, they were also angering a great many other people. Jews, wavering conversos, critics of the Inquisition, and Muslims, in Granada and elsewhere, all had ample reason to want to injure the royal family. Some people in Aragon and Catalonia, meanwhile, had never forgiven Ferdinand’s family for the brutal civil war his father had waged in the 1460s.

Knowing themselves to be at risk, the king and queen lived in a constant state of alert. For that reason, when King Ferdinand was attacked in Barcelona by a knife-wielding madman in December 1493, their first assumption was that it was a premeditated attack. The king was stabbed in the back of the neck and survived only because the heavy gold chain he customarily wore blocked the blade from plunging deeper. Queen Isabella’s first thought was that the attack on Ferdinand was the beginning of an uprising by the Catalan nobles. So she first made sure to protect young Juan, the heir to the kingdoms, ordering him rushed away to safety in a ship offshore before heading to her husband.

When they learned that the attack did not appear to have been fatal, Isabella sent out messages reassuring their allies in France, Spain, and Italy. Then she and the girls took up positions at Ferdinand’s side. For about fifty days, burning with fever, he clung to life, his condition now improving and now declining. They called for the best medical advice. “A crowd of physicians and surgeons is sent for,” Peter Martyr anxiously told the Count of Tendilla and archbishop of Granada. “… We labor between fear and hope.”¹⁰

Queen Isabella and her daughters used every religious tool at their disposal to plead for the king’s survival. She prayed the stations of the cross every day for his recovery, a process that involves imagining oneself walking in Christ’s footsteps from the time he was sentenced to death until he was laid in the tomb. Each of the steps requires special prayers and a time of quiet contemplation before proceeding to the next. The children made their own sacrifice by going on a barefoot pilgrimage over a nearby mountain; some of them climbed on their bare knees, “having so vowed to God for the safety of the King,” as Peter Martyr wrote a few weeks later.¹¹

In addition, the queen swore that neither she, nor her ladies-in-waiting, nor her daughters, would wear hoop skirts “made of brocade or silk,” one of the queen’s favorite styles but one that was disapproved by the clergy as a troublesome, flamboyant new invention, and deshonesto.¹²

As a result of all these ministrations, spiritual and medical—and thanks also to Ferdinand’s strong constitution—the king gradually recovered. Queen Isabella must have soon decided that with the war behind them and God’s favor amply secured, her pledge to scorn brocades and silks was no longer necessary, for soon she was busily engaged in making plans for wedding celebrations, and elaborate clothing seemed to be in everyone’s future.

For as the five children approached adulthood in the 1490s, marriages were being arranged for them that would increase the role of Spain on the world stage and secure its borders as well as the religious practices of Spanish society. After all, the Spanish needed help: they ruled over Sicily and Spain, which were open to attack by the Ottomans, and their cousins were ruling the Kingdom of Naples, which had already been hit hard once by the Turks at Otranto. Ferdinand’s sister, Joanna, the queen of Naples, kept them informed about worrisome developments in southern Italy and the eastern Mediterranean.

It was only a matter of time until combined forces would be necessary to protect southern Italy from Ottoman assault. The strait of Otranto, the narrow waterway between Christian Italy and Muslim-occupied Albania connecting the Adriatic and Mediterranean Seas, is only forty-five miles wide, or a day or less under sail or in a ship rowed by galley slaves. Every alliance would help reduce the chances of another Muslim invasion.

To stabilize her kingdom, Isabella used her family as she had her people, her armaments, and her castles—she employed them to make Spain an impregnable fortress, bolstering its defenses by forging ties around Europe that would reinforce the connections and alliances among the Christian nations of western Europe.

Every match was strategic. The oldest daughter, the dependable and trustworthy Isabel, would protect their backs and promote Spanish interests by marrying the heir to the Portuguese throne. Catherine, their youngest, would marry the heir to the throne of England, which would make that island nation more closely attuned to the needs of the Spaniards and the Christian-controlled parts of the Mediterranean. It seemed a fitting match, as young Prince Arthur, born in 1486, was just one year younger than Catherine. María, the fourth child, was still the subject of consideration and negotiation. For her, Isabella was eyeing James, the promising young heir to the throne of Scotland. Isabella believed that if her two daughters were married to the kings of England and Scotland, they could bring peace to the British Isles, and the two countries could be converted into more reliable supporters of Christendom.

The pièce de résistance, however, involved her second and third children, the male heir Juan and his younger sister Juana. A double marriage was arranged, between Juan and Juana and two grandchildren of the Holy Roman emperor, Philip and Margaret, designed to forge iron bonds of codefense and cooperation between Spain and the German and Austrian confederation of states. These matches would mean that the largest single state in central Europe would act with Spain as a bulwark against the inroads of the Ottoman Turks. The Holy Roman Empire, moreover, had a historic role as protector of the Catholic Church, an aspiration shared by Isabella. As an added bonus, Philip and Margaret were also the heirs to the rich Duchy of Burgundy and the Low Countries.

Isabella wasn’t just coldly pragmatic, however. She sought to find her children marriages that had a better-than-average chance of happiness. This was a time when older men with money in their pockets cast covetous eyes on fair young maidens, and families who offered their most beautiful daughters to aging kings often got advantageous benefits from them in terms of cash, lands, or paid court positions for relatives. Isabella was certainly looking for beneficial marriages for her girls; there would be no love matches in this family. But still she hoped to find suitors for all of them who were attractive, approximately the right age, and had attributes that would promote marital happiness, or at least a measure of contentment. No doubt she remembered her own maiden years when one man after another was proposed as a potential bridegroom. There were no weepy eyes or spindly legs among the suitors considered for Isabella’s brood.

Still, these transactions had much in common with buying a piece of livestock. A surviving account in the British Archives details the negotiations that served as the backdrop for the marriage of Catherine to Arthur, the Prince of Wales. Ambassadors from Spain and England met to hammer out the terms of the deal, which involved determining how much dowry should be paid by Catherine’s parents and how much by the Tudor king Henry VII of England, the father of the prospective bridegroom. Henry VII wanted the marriage to happen quickly so that Catherine’s blue blood would bolster his family’s wobbly claim to the English throne, but he was also notoriously penurious. This account of the meeting was sent back to Spain:

The English commissioners declared that with regard to the alliance there was not much to confer about, and began directly to speak of the marriage. They were exceedingly civil, and said a great many things in praise of Ferdinand and Isabella. That being done, they asked the Spaniards to name the sum for the marriage portion.

The Spanish Ambassadors replied that it would be more becoming for the English to name the marriage portion, because they had first solicited this [marriage] and their party is a [son].

The English Commissioners asked five times as much as they had asked in Spain.

The Spanish Ambassadors proposed to refer this matter to [Ferdinand] and [Isabella], who would act liberally in proportion to the confidence shown them.

The English Commissioners said that such a proceeding would be inconvenient for both parties, and that Ferdinand and Isabella would not agree to it.

The Spanish Ambassadors complained that the English were unreasonable in their demands. Bearing in mind what happens every day to the King of England, it is surprising that Ferdinand and Isabella should dare to give their [daughter] at all. This was said with great courtesy, in order that they might not feel displeasure or be enraged.

The English Commissioners abated one third.

The Spaniards proposed that, as there was sufficient time for it, two or four persons should be selected as umpires.

The English Commissioners declined it, and gave their reasons.

The Spaniards desired the English to name the lowest price.

The English abated one half.

The Spaniards said this marriage would be so advantageous to the King of England that he ought to content himself with what is generally given with Princesses of Spain.

The English desired to have everything defined in order to avoid disputes after the conclusion of the marriage. They asked twice as much as they had asked in Spain.

The Spanish Ambassadors offered one fourth.

The English asked why, as the money was not to come out of the strong boxes of the King and the Queen, but out of the pockets of their subjects, they should not be more liberal? They referred to old treaties with France, Burgundy, and Scotland, proving by them that even higher marriage portions were given.

They also urged that England is a very dear place, the smallest coin being worth eight Spanish maravedis, and that the great men spend large sums. The English aristocracy is rich and prosperous in the Dukedoms of Clarence, Lancaster, Buckingham, Somerset, Norfolk, York, the counties of Warwick, Salisbury and Lincoln, and the Marquisate of Dorset. Such being the case, and there not being a “drop of blood” in existence from which any danger might arise, the English saw no reason to lessen their demands.¹³

And so it went. For the next twenty years. For while both families wanted the match, both were ferociously angling for advantage. Henry VII was always watching his pennies, which eventually made his son and heir a very rich man, and Isabella had four daughters to dower. The families dickered over the prices each should pay and the terms of the arrangement from 1488 to 1509, from the time Catherine was three years old until she was twenty-four.

Isabella dictated many terms of the dowry negotiations, specifying the details of the dowry and deciding which Castilian officials would accompany Catherine to England, according to correspondence and documents in the British Archives.

This set of records demonstrates that Isabella was the driving force in handling international affairs, including organizing military alliances, negotiating trade pacts, and arranging marriages. In the 1850s a German scholar living in England, Gustav Bergenroth, would spend years investigating correspondence between Spain and England. To do so, he had to break the ciphers and code language that Isabella had used to communicate with her envoys in England. Her hand is visible in many places, while Ferdinand’s is seldom to be found, except on the boilerplate introductions to the letters. These introductions typically presented the correspondence as coming from both the king and queen, but inside some of the lengthy letters, Isabella forgot the fiction she was creating and referred to herself in the singular as “Yo, la Reyna,” or “I, the Queen.” These references slipped through in letters ostensibly from both regents at least twice, once in January 1497 and again in December 1502.¹⁴

Isabella used the same mixture of flattery and manipulation in her international negotiations as she did in domestic affairs. In September 1496, for example, in a letter to her ambassador in England, she referred to King Henry as a “prince of great virtue, firmness and constancy,” praise that she clearly assumed would be repeated to the English king, who was insecurely perched upon a throne he had usurped.¹⁵ She promised in the letter that she expected the relationship between England and Spain to become much closer once their children married—knowing that Henry was eager to form an alliance with an old and respected blue bloodline.

She was simultaneously angling to improve relations between England and Scotland, something that would have thrown France off balance and bolstered northern European support for the problems of southern Europe, particularly the threat posed by the Turks. Dangling the prospect of the marriage between Arthur and Catherine, Queen Isabella pressured Henry to improve his own relations with King James. “Henry must marry one of his daughters to the King of Scots,” she told González de Puebla after all Isabella’s own daughters were wed, and indeed, Princess Margaret of England was married to King James in 1503.¹⁶

Despite the complexities of the negotiations, however, all the marriages seemed very promising, both from the standpoint of Spain’s position in Europe and for the young people being betrothed. All, however, also ended up presenting challenges, as marriages, even the happiest, always do.

Isabel, the oldest, was the first to marry, in 1490. At twenty, she married Prince Afonso, King João’s son, who was fifteen. She knew him well. For the three years when Portugal and Castile had exchanged children as a peace guarantee, the two youngsters had lived in Moura under the care of Isabella’s Portuguese aunt Beatriz, her mother’s sister. The children, Afonso and Isabel, had spent time together during those years beginning when she was eight and he was three, and became fond of each other. To ensure Doña Beatriz’s commitment to caring properly for the children, Don Manuel, who was Beatriz’s son, had gone to live in Castile, where he had met Queen Isabella and come to trust her.¹⁷ He was a pleasant and affable boy, something that Isabella probably saw as an insurance policy for the future. It was always good to have an ally in a foreign court. And if anything happened to Prince Afonso of Portugal, the king’s heir, Manuel, could one day become king.

The two Iberian families had had their differences. They had even gone to war. But King João had come to the conclusion that a marriage between Portugal and Castile would be ideal. Afonso was more than amenable, and soon so was young Isabel. Portugal’s new possessions were bringing the kingdom unprecedented wealth, and the reports about Afonso, though no doubt exaggerated by slavish courtiers, described the young prince as “the handsomest and best looking known to the world.”¹⁸

In August 1488 the Portuguese nobleman and chronicler Ruy de Sande traveled to Castile bearing a letter discussing the marriage of Afonso and Isabel. Isabella and Ferdinand received him warmly, despite the fact that the queen had grave reservations about the character of the boy’s father. The plans led to happy celebration. There was revelry in Seville. The court stayed up late dancing; Isabella and her daughters were known for their graceful movements on the floor. At last Isabel said, “It is now late,” to the Portuguese ambassador to signal the party was over. “Not late, but very early, Lady!” he responded, for the first daylight was coming through the windows.¹⁹

According to the French courtier Philippe de Commynes, Isabella and Ferdinand agreed to the match to improve the security of the Iberian peninsula: “They had married their eldest daughter to the King of Portugal, that all Spain might be in peace, for they were entirely possessed of all the provinces, except the kingdom of Navarre.”²⁰ It was the first royal wedding of a generation for both families. An exciting schedule of festivities was planned and coordinated in both kingdoms. First there were several weeks of celebrations in Seville, which were attended by young Isabel’s parents and sisters. Then a procession of Spanish and Portuguese grandees conducted the bride from Castile to the city of Évora in Portugal. Princess Isabel’s entourage was led by the archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Pedro Mendoza, who had been an important ally of her mother’s ever since King Enrique died and Isabella had taken the throne of Castile.

To meet her new family, Princess Isabel was accompanied by her Portuguese cousin Don Manuel, who had lived in Castile during the hostage swap. He was now Duke of Viseu and also Duke of Beja, having been granted the titles by João II after the king had killed Manuel’s older brother Diego, who had originally been the heir. Manuel was the same age as Isabel, and in the course of traveling across the two kingdoms, he came to particularly admire her.

The young Isabel was greeted with immense enthusiasm when she arrived in Portugal. As she passed through the streets, such a happy clamor of trumpeting and cheers greeted her that, according to a Portuguese chronicler, “truly it seemed the earth trembled.”²¹The living accommodations for the young couple were prepared with “rich brocades and fine tapestries,” and the princess was given many gifts.²²

Isabel and Afonso were married on November 25, 1490, in the town of Évora. Many “great festivals,” banquets, balls, and other celebrations were scheduled for the weeks ahead.²³ At one event, called a mummery, King João initiated a joust, “ornamented artfully as the Knight of the Swan, with a great deal of wealth, charm and graciousness,” the chronicler recalled.

He entered through the doors of the hall with a large fleet of great ships, set on bolts of cloth painted as stormy and natural waves of the ocean, with great thunder of ordnance being fired, and trumpets and horns and minstrels playing instruments, with wild shouts and the turmoil of whistles by make-believe masters, pilots and mariners who were dressed in brocades and silks.… The king sallied forth in his very luxurious masquerade dress and danced with the Princess, and in like manner the others with their ladies .… And they danced that night, and there were many farces and festivities.²⁴

It was a spectacular send-off for these two beloved children of increasingly wealthy nations. Afonso was only fifteen years old and Isabel was twenty, but despite the difference in their ages, their childhood friendship kindled into intense love. Things got off to a very promising start, and when the events were concluded, the chronicler noted, “all left very happy and content.”²⁵

This was a vital marriage for Spain because the war with Portugal was still a recent memory and the peace treaty between Portugal and Castile had left lingering resentments. João’s father had done in Portugal what King Enrique had carelessly done in Castile: given lands, properties, and benefices to top-ranking noblemen to win their support and loyalty, weakening himself in the process. During his grandfather’s reign, there had been only two dukes and six counts; but at the death of King Afonso V, this tally had grown to four dukes, three marquesses, twenty-five counts, one viscount, and one baron, according to the historian Antonio Henrique de Oliveira Marques, who notes that all had been given valuable lands and revenues. By the time King João II finally inherited the throne, he noted with disgust that the only property his father had left him by right was the land under the roads.²⁶

When his father died and João became king in 1481, he embarked on the same program of centralized royal administration that other successful European countries, including Spain, France, and England, were employing to stabilize themselves and place a check on nobles who had grown arrogant and lawless during times of disorganized governments and civil chaos. He set out to bring the nobles to heel—but in this respect he clashed again with his relative Queen Isabella. Isabella’s mother’s family included the Dukes ofBraganza and Viseu, and they were Portugal’s wealthiest and most powerful family—similar to the Mendoza clan of Castile. King João learned that they had been corresponding with Isabella in ways that he believed to be traitorous. After finding some suspicious documents, he imprisoned the Duke of Braganza, put him on trial and, after he was convicted, ordered him to be executed. Later, in a fit of anger, he killed Don Manuel’s older brother, who may have involved himself in a plot against the king. Nobody was clear on the details of how the duke was stabbed to death—some said the king had done it himself, others that he had had the help of courtiers—but the action horrified people across western Europe. The French courtier Commynes, for example, called João “barbarous”—he was one of many who believed João had murdered his cousin with his own hand.²⁷

Queen Isabella had been greatly disturbed by the killings and had offered refuge in Castile, giving land and property to many of the grandees whom João had persecuted. She did not utter João’s name much after that. From then on she called him, in tones of withering contempt, El Hombre, or “The Man.”

Young Isabel, although greatly beloved by her parents, had clearly pulled the short straw in taking on the challenge of restoring international harmony. This, obviously, was going to be no easy task for a young woman. Isabel had some things working for her, however. Her childhood years in Portugal meant that she already spoke Portuguese and was familiar with the kingdom’s customs; she performed its dances so elegantly that her movements were a source of pride to her family and she was asked to perform at court events and diplomatic banquets. But she bore her mother’s stamp and made her marriage a splendid success. She even managed to win the affection of her father-in-law, the tough and cold-blooded King João.

The first few months of the young people’s marriage was idyllic. On one lovely day, the couple sailed on a river in a flag-festooned barge, picnicking joyfully in the countryside. Then one day in July 1491, King João proposed a late-afternoon horseback ride, and the prince decided at the last minute to gallop off to join his father. Sometime on the ride, his horse stumbled and fell, and the prince landed on the ground, crushed by the horse’s weight. His mother got word that the prince had been injured, and she and Isabel rushed to his side. They begged and pleaded with God to save him, but he never spoke again, and within three hours he was dead.²⁸

Prince Afonso had been greatly loved by the Portuguese people, and the whole kingdom grieved at his death. Men tore out the hair from their heads and beards; the women ripped at their faces, leaving large bloody gashes from their nails. “Very sorrowful cries and exceedingly loud lamentations” were heard everywhere.²⁹

Afonso’s parents were bereft. But no one suffered more overtly than his wife, Isabel. She grieved so ferociously that it attracted favorable comment in the family for generations. Sobbing, she cut off her golden hair, put a veil over her head so no one could see her face, changed into mourning clothes, and refused to change her outfit for forty days to chasten her body. She stopped eating almost entirely and grew very thin, finally consenting to sip a small amount of broth. She took ill with fevers. She spent her days in a darkened room with only a single candle for illumination, reading religious and devotional texts. She attended mass daily and received communion over and over. She became preoccupied with dark imaginings about what had caused this disaster to befall her and Portugal. She engaged in intense self-examination about ways she might have displeased God.

This level of grieving was not unusual at the time. It was customary for people in Portugal to cut off their hair, neglect their hygiene, wear dirty clothes for extended periods, and do other things to express their sorrow. During this period King João and his wife, for example, stopped sitting at a table to eat and instead ate “seated on the ground and off of vessels of pottery, deprived in every respect of all magnificence.”³⁰

The grief that his widow demonstrated helped to distract the young man’s parents. Worried about her well-being, even her survival, they moved her bed into their own bedchamber, where she consented to accept only minimal comforts, including merely a very thin Indian bedspread for warmth.

Isabella and Ferdinand were both saddened by the news of Afonso’s death as well. Isabella wrote her daughter letters of tender, heartfelt consolation, as did Archbishop Talavera, according to an account of the events that was preserved in a book about proper conduct for Christian women that was commissioned by Queen Isabella’s granddaughter fifty years later. The letters, according to the account, were themselves heart-rending: “There is no one who, unless they had a heart of stone, could hear it without shedding many tears!”³¹

As Princess Isabel mourned Afonso’s death, she became preoccupied with what sins they may have committed to cause God to take the young man from them. She became convinced that Afonso had died because Portugal had allowed heresy to fester.³² No one knows who came up with this idea, but the growing suspicion that God was punishing Portugal for harboring nonbelievers would have far-reaching consequences in the years to come.

Isabel’s parents sent for the princess to come home, eager to have her back and to help her recover. She returned devoutly religious and continued to starve and scourge herself. She said she would never again marry. Instead she stepped back into her comfortable role as companion and assistant to her mother, Queen Isabella, who was forty by now and juggling problems both at home and abroad.

Afonso’s death had led to political turmoil in Portugal. The succession was thrown into dispute—João hoped to name his illegitimate son Jorge his heir, but many would clearly view Jorge’s succession as invalid. In Portugal, where Juana la Beltraneja, the child that King Enrique had believed to be his daughter, was still living in a convent, even the suspicion of illegitimacy was enough to destroy a monarchy. But this was no longer Princess Isabel’s problem, and she left her life in Portugal behind.

In late 1495, however, King João II died. He had reluctantly decided to leave the throne to his cousin, Manuel, who had received the title Duke of Viseu after his older brother had been killed. It was a stroke of almost unbelievable good luck. Manuel had been the eighth of nine children and, for most of his life, a most unlikely inheritor of the throne. But his older brothers had all died, one by one. Manuel’s placid disposition and tact had helped him survive the king’s tumultuous reign. Portugal’s new prosperity, moreover, meant that the nation, even though small, was developing a valuable global trading empire. Soon the young man was being called, appropriately enough, Manuel the Fortunate.

Manuel had one particular further stroke of luck in mind. He wanted to marry Afonso’s widow Princess Isabel. He had first been attracted to her when he escorted her to Portugal. Maybe it was her charm, or maybe it was her enchanting way of dancing. It probably didn’t hurt that she was second in line for the crown of Castile and Aragon, after her brother Juan. Some were whispering that Prince Juan did not seem altogether healthy. There was a chance that Manuel could end up as king of Portugal, Spain, and all their combined dominions.

Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand offered King Manuel the younger daughter, María, but he could not be swayed. It would be Isabel, or he would look outside Iberia for a bride. So Isabella and Ferdinand began pressuring the young widow to renounce mourning and her exaggerated religious rituals and marry Manuel. Isabel refused, with complete resolution. A determined young woman, she adamantly insisted that she would never again “know another man,” Peter Martyr wrote, and “up to this day she can by no means be conquered.”³³

There the matter rested. A lot was going on in Castile already—wars and voyages of discovery were under way—and the issue was temporarily set aside as less pressing than other matters.

The family spotlight shifted to Juan, his mother’s beloved “angel,” who continued to receive the favored treatment enjoyed by the firstborn male of all families at that time. By 1496, when he was eighteen, he had a large household of his own, with a minutely structured schedule of activities each day. Dozens of attendants waited on him, making sure that each garment he placed on his body, with the assistance of the proper official assigned to that role, was perfectly prepared so that his appearance was impeccable. His wardrobe was extraordinary, consisting of numerous garments made of brocaded satin, cloth of gold, and velvet. One man’s primary task was to keep the prince’s silver chamber pot close at hand for convenient use.

Juan kept his own court of advisers and associates as well. They were primarily the sons of wealthy and noble families, but a few others, such as the two sons of Christopher Columbus, were also fit into the mix.

The boys of the court continued to be tutored in the latest humanistic learning by the Italian scholar Peter Martyr, who took enormous pride in preparing the future king of Spain. He playfully described himself as operating a palaestra, the ancient Greek term for a wrestling school for youths. “I have a house crowded all day with the petulant youths of the Nobles,” he wrote with a boastful swagger to the archbishop of Braga, a top Portuguese cleric.

They are now beginning by degrees to turn themselves from the empty loves, to which as you know very well they have been badly accustomed from tender years, to letters. They now begin to learn that letters are not a hindrance to warfare as they had falsely imbibed from their ancestors, may they also confess that they are a great help. I strive to persuade them that no one can otherwise become famous in peace or war. This our palaestra so pleases the Queen, a living example of all the virtues in the royal scepter, that she has ordered… her cousin to frequent my house, and has also ordered the Duke of Villahermosa, nephew of the king by his brother, [to do the same] and that they are never to leave it unless as urgent cause presses. All the young heirs of potentates, as many as either Spain possesses, follow there. They bring with them two tutors to listen that they may go over with them at home the rules of grammar according to my plan, and what they hear they repeat together.³⁴

Martyr and others described the prince as a sensitive and scholarly young man, who had great potential but was not terribly strong. Martyr commented on the young man’s “tender palate,” noting that the prince’s diet was carefully monitored to help him maintain his strength. There was a bit of foreboding in one letter: if only the young man should live, “you will see the world happy with Spain.”³⁵

Many good things seemed to be in store with Prince Juan, and also for his younger sister Juana. As a result of the family’s dynastic planning, Juan was to marry the lovely Margaret, the granddaughter of the Holy Roman emperor and the heiress, with her brotherPhilip, to the vastly wealthy realms of Burgundy and Flanders. Juan’s younger sister Juana was to marry Philip.

It would be a truly thrilling match, particularly for aficionados of early Renaissance art and culture such as Isabella and her children. Margaret and Philip came from a world that was socially and artistically avant-garde and sophisticated. The land over which they reigned was the most affluent in Europe and the home of many masterpieces of the early northern European Renaissance. The Ghent Altarpiece, with its haunting pictures of Adam and Eve, painted by the master Jan van Eyck, had created an international sensation and helped launch a new era in painting. It had been commissioned by Philip the Good, the great-grandfather of the two young prospective spouses. This kind of art was greatly admired in Spain as well, for Isabella’s father had commissioned the Miraflores Altarpiece from a contemporary of Jan van Eyck’s named Rogier van der Weyden.

The brother and sister, Philip and Margaret, were attractive and highly eligible marriage prospects in their own right. Numerous portraits of them were painted for the family, for public purposes, or for delivery to prospective spouses around Europe. A set of double panels called a diptych, dating from about 1495, contained portraits of both, with their coats of arms hovering around their heads to advertise the vast territories they were slated to inherit. Both teenagers—Philip was about sixteen and Margaret about fourteen—had eighteen separate shields ringing their torsos.

Both appear in their portraits to have been fair-skinned and russet-haired, with delicate features and full red lips, physical characteristics that were much admired at the time. The portraits also communicated their extreme wealth: Philip is shown with a wide gold necklace, more precisely a golden collar, and an ermine-trimmed robe; Margaret wears a longer gold chain and a pendant with a large red stone at her throat; her dress is made of richly embroidered cloth. Their heads are covered—Philip with what appears to be a black velvet hat and Margaret with a red cap covering her hair and black veil cascading down the back onto her shoulders.³⁶

Margaret was universally praised, but it was Philip who drew the deepest admiration. In fact, he was so good-looking that he had become commonly known as “Philip the Fair” or “Philip the Handsome.” But the praise lavished on him didn’t seem to go to his head, as he was uniformly described as having courtly good manners and great personal charm.

Despite their wealth and position, their childhoods had been tragic and difficult. Their mother, Mary, heiress to the rich Duchy of Burgundy and the grandchild of Philip the Good, had been married to Maximilian, the son of the Holy Roman emperor, and they produced the two children in quick succession. In 1482 Mary and Maximilian went hunting in the meadows near Bruges, and while jumping a waterway, Mary’s horse swerved, the twenty-five-year-old woman fell off, and the horse fell on top of her. She suffered internal injuries, and three weeks later she was dead. Her death raised the usual succession complications, and while their grieving father tried to deal with them, Philip and Margaret were placed in the care of their grandmother. They spent the next years with her in the northern European territory of Flanders. Philip was four years old; Margaret was only a toddler.

Margaret was soon betrothed to the future king of France, Charles VIII, and at age three was transferred for proper instruction to the French court at the palace of Amboise. But Charles VIII jilted her when a richer heiress, Anne of Brittany, became available on the marriage market, and Margaret, at the vulnerable age of eleven, was sent home to await a different future. This was a double humiliation for Margaret and her father, because the widower Maximilian had intended to marry Anne of Brittany himself. Philip, meanwhile, the child heir to the Duchy of Burgundy, passed into the hands of a variety of self-serving courtiers, not unlike what had happened to Isabella’s father and brothers. When they were betrothed to Juan and Juana, this history should have set off some alarm bells for Queen Isabella.

The marriage processions took a good bit of logistical planning. Juana, seventeen in 1496, would wed Philip first. A fleet would accompany her north to Flanders and would then return, bringing Margaret to Castile for her own marriage to Juan.

As the day approached for Juana’s departure, the queen indicated that she had misgivings about the trip and perhaps also about Juana’s ability to handle her new responsibilities. A long and risky sea route was necessary because hostilities had erupted across Europe as a result of France’s invasion of Italy to seize Naples. But the journey from Castile to Flanders would take them along the coast of France. Isabella worried about what might happen to Juana if she were captured by the French and became a prisoner of war. The queen organized a fleet of 110 ships, with about ten thousand sailors and soldiers, to accompany her daughter. If bad weather hit, they would be unable to seek shelter in France and would be forced to sail west, farther out into the Atlantic Ocean, to try to reach England. Fearing the worst, Isabella accompanied Juana to her place of departure, the port city of Laredo, on the northern coast, and spent two nights aboard the ship with her daughter. She was very sad to see her go. When Juana finally left, Isabella remained behind watching from land and “bewailed her daughter a little,”³⁷ Peter Martyr wrote, before returning home to Burgos.

Queen Isabella sent at least four letters to the English court and King Henry VII, begging them to take care of Juana if by chance her ship should be driven onto English shores. In one letter she asked her ambassador to ensure that Juana would be given a “cordial reception” if she landed there. In another she asked King Henry VII to treat Juana as lovingly as he would treat his own daughter if she arrived in his lands.

Queen Isabella was “greatly distressed about her daughter,” wrote Peter Martyr,

because it was uncertain what mad winds, what the huge rocks of the stormy sea, what in fine the various dangers of the sea may have brought to her child, a weak girl . . . She turned over in her mind not only those things which are wont to happen to those sailing through this Spanish sea, but agitated with sighs she feared whatever might happen. She had with her day and night sailors skilled in this immense ocean and constantly inquired what winds blew, what they thought was the cause of the delay, lamenting her lot that she had been forced to send her daughter to the farthest Beglee [Belgium] at this season when the sea is almost impassable on account of the approaching winter and the land on account of the French enmity is precluded from having plenty of messengers.³⁸

Juana was Isabella’s first child to go so far away, but her mother’s level of concern seemed out of the ordinary for her. Juana seemed ready to make the transition from home and was described as eager and happy to go. She wasn’t going to be a king or ruler herself, and so she hadn’t received quite the same education as her brother, but she was prepared well enough. Juana and her sisters and their mother had studied Latin with a young woman who had been a scholar at the University of Salamanca, Beatriz Galindo. Beatriz had an excellent command of Latin, and people were impressed with Juana’s adept facility with the language of diplomacy. Juana was even able to compose verse in Latin, which drew some favorable comment.

Nor had Juana received quite the same coaching in statecraft as her brother Juan and older sister Isabel. For while the older children frequently accompanied their parents at state events, learning from early ages how to handle the necessary protocol and court etiquette, Juana, Catherine, and María were frequently left behind. Now, however, Queen Isabella seemed reluctant to let Juana out of her sight. She seemed to detect some sort of vulnerability in this girl, her middle child.

Queen Isabella was also off her stride because of other sad news she had received. Her mother, who had been living all these years in Arévalo, had finally died, in mid-August. This news hit the queen hard. Her mother had lived in seclusion, “worn out and enfeebled by age,”³⁹ in Martyr’s words; but Isabella had visited her once or twice a year, traveling on horseback across the kingdom to do so, and spending time with her. She had customarily waited on her mother personally during these visits. The death was a shock to her, for her mother was the last remaining member of Isabella’s own original family. When Isabella at last left the coast for Burgos, she was also going to take charge of her mother’s interment.

Just days after Juana departed, and while Isabella was still dealing with the melancholy of watching her daughter leave, she turned to the duties of arranging for her mother’s funeral procession and burial. She wanted to make sure that her mother, so long forgotten in public life, was nevertheless “carried honorably as became a Queen,” wrote Martyr. Queen Isabella ordered her mother’s body transported to a Carthusian monastery near Burgos, “where she laid her to rest near her father King Juan and her brother Alfonso, who had died so young himself.”⁴⁰

They were placed together in death in a Gothic monastery at Miraflores, located on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage trail, close to the burial places of several other kings and queens of Castile. The abbey had been founded by her father, and it was there that he had placed his prized altarpiece painted by Rogier van der Weyden. A Flemish-born sculptor, Gil de Siloé, designed their alabaster sepulchre. Its base is an eight-pointed star, a sacred symbol to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It is extremely elaborate, densely textured and exuberantly three-dimensional, with a plethora of free-standing figures of saints and apostles guarding them in death. Isabella had wanted to make sure her parents were laid to rest together in a place they loved, near art objects they admired.

Meanwhile Juana arrived safely in Flanders on September 8, 1496, after a terrible seventeen-day voyage. As her mother had suspected, the ship had briefly landed in England before continuing on its way. Juana had lost many attendants and the bulk of her wedding presents when one of the ships accompanying her sank in a storm. And in the end, Philip was not there to greet her; he was in Austria’s Tyrol with his father. He did not arrive to meet Juana for more than a month. Instead his sister Margaret, age sixteen, greeted Juana as the representative of the family.

Juana was temporarily lodging at a monastery, where “sixteen noble ladies and a matron clothed in cloth of gold” formed her entourage.⁴¹ She and Margaret traveled together to Lille, to await Philip’s arrival. Philip finally reached her on October 12. The long and embarrassing delay no doubt filled Juana with dismay. She had had five weeks to wonder whether she was being left at the altar, something that had in fact happened to her new sister-in-law Margaret.

But once in Philip’s presence, all doubt disappeared. Juana and Philip had an immediate attraction to each other. All the reports about his looks and charm turned out to be accurate, and she was soon deeply smitten by her new husband. Six days later they received the blessing of Juana’s chaplain for their marriage, and they consummated it immediately. They had their official wedding ceremony on October 20. Together they made a splendid appearance. “God turned out to be a good matchmaker when he gave that wife to that husband, and that husband to that wife,” said Philip’s father, Maximilian, basking in paternal pride.⁴²

With the nuptial ceremonies concluded, Juana became Archduchess of Burgundy through her marriage to Philip, who was the Archduke of Burgundy. He ruled the land essentially as king, but his title was archduke because of an historical anomaly in how the confederation of states it represented had come together—as a duchy designated by a French king for rule by his son, a duke. This realm was composed of a crescent-shaped set of provinces that included Holland, Belgium, and areas of northern France, particularly the Burgundy region. To the east was the Holy Roman Empire, which was ruled by Philip’s father and grandfather, but to the west and south was France, which was a powerful and dangerous ally. France cast envious eyes at Burgundy’s wealth and its cultural flowering, which actually preceded similar Renaissance developments in Italy.

Together Philip and Juana toured their domains with a large entourage, in what became a sort of grand tour of Burgundy and its important cities of Brussels, Ghent, Lille, Antwerp, and Bruges. They were enthusiastically greeted along the way as the duchy’s new ruling family. Not a lot of news came back from Flanders, but of course it was a long trip, and the weather had been stormy. But eventually word arrived in Castile that Juana had been warmly received by her subjects, and Queen Isabella’s concerns were laid to rest.

One chronicler was giddy with enthusiasm, describing Juana’s triumphal entry into Antwerp, with trumpeters and other musicians celebrating her arrival:

This very illustrious and virtuous lady… of handsome bearing and gracious manner, the most richly adorned ever seen before in the lands of monsignor the archduke, rode a mule in the Spanish fashion with her head uncovered, accompanied by sixteen young noble ladies and one matron who followed her, dressed in golden cloth and mounted in the same manner, having pages with rich adornments.⁴³

The archduchess was feted with great pageantry, in city after city, in an event known as a “joyous entry.” Local officials would present the keys to the city. Feasts, balls, and tournaments were held everyplace, and each city sought to outdo the other with innovative and entertaining new kinds of revelries.

In the Great Square of Brussels, for example, a series of living tableaux, with actors representing fictitious, mythological, and historical figures, were presented for Juana’s education and entertainment. One tableau depicted Juana in the guise of the biblical Judith, killing Holofernes to free her people. Similar scenes also showed women as heroines defying male authority. The exploits of Queen Isabella, Juana’s mother, seemed to have attracted attention everywhere as representing a new model of woman as warrior, and clearly Juana’s new subjects expected her to do more of the same in Flanders.

These scenes, tableaux, and amusements were considered so remarkable that an effort was made to preserve their memory. They were re-created in a special illuminated manuscript, called The Joyous Entry of Joanna of Aragon-Castile, which became a model forartworks of its kind. The extravagance of the court is unmistakable.

The illuminated manuscript makes it clear that the naïve and reserved young princess, who had been raised in a modest and chaste atmosphere, was seriously over her head in a sensuous and pleasure-loving court, where regular bribes from the French king had made the Flemish courtiers more loyal to the flamboyant French royal family than to Philip and Juana. Some of the living tableau scenes, for example, were subtly or overtly hostile to Juana and to her family.

In one scene, a richly dressed princess, portrayed as a dark-skinned Ethiopian, is depicted astride a horse, surrounded by strangely garbed companions, who are wearing hairy body suits and carrying clubs.⁴⁴ Racist northern Europeans commonly described Spaniards as being closely related to Africans, and this outlandish scene was insulting. In another tableau, Juana’s mother Isabella is depicted taking the crown of Boabdil of Granada, who kneels before her. This presentation has a double edge: it acknowledges Isabella as having led the battle of reconquest against Granada, but a woman with a man kneeling before her, not in courtship but in subjugation, raises uncomfortable questions about gender dynamics.

Other scenes added a risqué twist. In a scene labeled “The Judgment of Paris,” the three goddesses are depicted dancing nude, something that was not commonly portrayed in conservative Spanish art. A picture of the Flemish court, meanwhile, shows what appear to be many open displays of sexual activity between men and women while a male figure, perhaps the archduke, appears to be passed out in a drunken stupor on the edge of the revelry.

Meanwhile, in Castile, there seemed to be some trouble getting correspondence back and forth from Flanders. Juana didn’t write home much and gave excuses for not responding to letters. Isabella and Ferdinand learned she was expecting a child, which was happy news for the grandparents-to-be. In August 1498 a Spanish cleric sent as an envoy said he had seen her in July and gave an encouraging account. “She is very handsome and stout,” the cleric wrote. “Her pregnancy is much advanced.”⁴⁵

A few months after Juana’s arrival, Margaret, Juan’s bride, was sent on her way to Spain. The weather was again stormy, and the loss of the ship from Juana’s fleet had made everyone a bit fearful about stepping on board, but eventually Margaret set out for Spain. She experienced the same kind of harrowing journey Juana had had; at one point, conditions aboard the ship seemed so perilous that the spunky princess put pen to paper and composed a poem in French about her plight: Cy gist Margot la gentil Damoiselle, Qu’ ha deuz marys et encore pucelle. (Here lies Margaret, a gentle mademoiselle, two times married and a virgin still.)

But the fleet made it safely to the port of Santander, and Prince Juan and his father dashed out to meet her. She tried to kiss their hands to show respect in the traditional manner, but they instead welcomed her warmly and lovingly and conducted her to Burgos. There she met the queen, who was splendidly attired and embraced the girl upon meeting her.

Margaret charmed everyone and gathered crowds everywhere she went: “If you were to see her you would think that you beheld Venus herself,” Peter Martyr gushed to a Spanish cardinal in Rome.”⁴⁶ The apparent future queen of Spain and its possessions was welcomed with joy; the wedding ceremony took place on Palm Sunday, April 3, 1497. She was given a huge array of valuable gifts.

The marriage turned out to be one of those fortuitous situations where everyone in the family was instantly compatible. Even if they had not been related by marriage, it seemed they all would have been friends. Ferdinand praised the girl’s “genteel, happy,” and “benign” temperament.⁴⁷ Margaret turned out to share many of Isabella’s interests. She was devout, like Isabella, and spent much time doing spiritual exercises from her Book of Hours, but she was also very active intellectually and was fascinated by art, as Isabella was.

Both women loved fine tapestries, which were expensive luxury items at the time. Particularly valuable ones, woven from silk or wool, sometimes with golden or silver thread, could cost as much as a warship and took teams of weavers up to a year to complete. Isabella had one of the finest tapestry collections in Europe, eventually numbering some 370; Margaret showed up in Spain with seventeen in her possession, and soon Isabella gave her more.⁴⁸

They also liked paintings that featured women as the focal points. Scenes of women from the Bible were favorite subjects of Isabella’s, and in time they proved to be a key part of Margaret’s collection practices as well. One such painting, owned by Isabella and commissioned around the time Margaret arrived, somewhere between 1496 and 1499, shows Salome coolly displaying the severed head of John the Baptist to King Herod and her mother, Herodias. It was painted by one of Isabella’s favorite artists, Juan de Flandes, or John of Flanders, whom Margaret also admired.⁴⁹ Isabella had wooed him to Castile from Flanders, and he was one of her court painters, paid a regular salary.

In these years, Isabella was also putting together the set of paintings illustrating Christ’s life, which were painted by Juan de Flandes while Margaret was at court. One scene is believed to depict Margaret as the bride in the Wedding at Cana. As it turned out, Margaret particularly appreciated these paintings and recognized their merit.

Isabella took joy in giving Margaret presents. The young woman loved flowers and was given many pieces of jewelry that featured botanical designs. Some included daisies, a play on the French version of her name, Marguerite, or Daisy. Isabella kept to this theme in a gift of a piece of jewelry for Margaret designed to look like a white rose. It was made of gold covered with white enamel.⁵⁰

The only problem was that there was a little awkwardness between the Flemings and the Spaniards. The Flemings were put off by the stiff formality of the Spanish and their elaborate and courtly rituals and customs. They thought the Spanish were priggish and inhibited. The Spanish felt the Flemings were lax, sloppy, and undisciplined. But the happy couple seemed to get along just fine.

Prince Juan frankly adored and idolized his wife. In fact, court doctors became concerned that he was so in love that he was wearing himself out and cutting into his sleep with his ardent lovemaking. According to Peter Martyr, physicians urged the queen to separate Juan and Margaret to give the prince some rest from his apparent new obsession with “frequent copulation,” but Isabella was happy to see her son in love and chose not to intervene, adding that she believed that “it does not become men to separate those whom God has joined in the nuptial marriage bond.”⁵¹

Juan and his bride took up residence in the university city of Salamanca, where the professors and students rejoiced at the prospect of increased patronage for their intellectual and artistic endeavors. The University of Salamanca was one of the greatest and oldest universities in Europe, and Queen Isabella supported scholarship there. She was encouraging higher education by employing scores of the school’s students, or letrados, as bureaucrats to staff the growing governmental apparatus. She was also commissioning other new buildings similar to her parents’ tomb that featured her signature architecture style, called Isabelline, which was ornately Gothic but with Flemish and Islamic influences and a great deal of surface decoration. The facade of the main building of the University of Salamanca was soon constructed in such a style, garnished with floral designs, fantastic creatures, and heraldic devices, all emphasizing the grandeur of the empire that Spain was becoming. The fact that the crown prince was establishing his home in Salamanca further burnished the civic luster. Adding to everyone’s joy, Margaret learned she was pregnant.

This period—the spring and summer of 1497—was the high point of Isabella’s personal life. She had defeated the Muslims at Granada and restored peace in Castile. Columbus had brought back exciting news of the lands he had reached on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and future prosperity for Spain seemed increasingly assured. Juan was happily, even blissfully, married; the reports from Flanders were more mixed, but Juana had unquestionably made a very good match. Princess Isabel was back at home, which was a comfort to the queen, and María and Catherine were growing into lovely and respected young ladies who were a pleasure to their parents. Catherine was preparing for her eventual departure to England.

Everything was going so well. Now all that remained was securing the Castilian border with Portugal with another marriage between the Castilian and Portuguese royal families. Queen Isabella continued to negotiate with King Manuel of Portugal, urging him again to accept María, but he remained insistent that Princess Isabel, and only Princess Isabel, would do. He rejected María again. Princess Isabel continued to say no. Manuel persisted in asking for Isabel’s hand. It became a test of wills between Isabel and hermother.

Of course the outcome was predetermined. There was no test of wills that Queen Isabella did not win. Finally Princess Isabel agreed, to King Manuel’s delight. Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand spent the summer together in Medina del Campo and visited Juan and Margaret in Salamanca, then headed west to Valencia de Alcántara, where the marriage between Princess Isabel and King Manuel was going to occur. The reluctant bride had asked that the wedding be celebrated with as little festivity as possible, so the events that had been planned were subdued in nature.

As the wedding day of Manuel and Princess Isabel approached, however, word came by fast horsemen that Prince Juan had suddenly fallen seriously ill. Friar Diego de Deza, bishop of Salamanca, wrote that Juan, who had been so happy just days before, was weakening and had lost his appetite. “All of us here are begging Your Highnesses to come here, that there can be an improvement in his health; it is of such a necessity that we did not wait for your command to call the queen’s doctor and other physicians,” he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella.⁵²

Ferdinand rushed to Juan’s side; Isabella could not come because she was deep into the preparations for Princess Isabel’s wedding. In the next few days, the king sent his wife conflicting messages designed to hide the fatal prognosis. Crazy with grief, he even sent a vague report implying that he himself had died, thinking that it would lessen the queen’s pain if she eventually discovered her husband had been spared even as her son was taken.

King Manuel also wanted to fend off the news. When he heard that Juan was dying, he asked that the information be withheld until he and Princess Isabel were wed, to prevent her from experiencing that pain at her wedding. He probably also feared the princess would attempt to delay their nuptials during the period of mourning.

Prince Juan, for his part, meanwhile, had accepted his fate with serenity, trying to comfort his father, who pleaded with him to make a greater effort to live. He said he was content with going to God. His placid acceptance of his precipitous death suggests he had been ill or weak in the past. He was known to be sickly, with a weak stomach, and he may have finally succumbed to tuberculosis.

Juan’s final act, besides asking his parents to care for his young wife, who was now pregnant with their child, was to request that money from his estate be used to buy freedom for Christian slaves held captive in Muslim hands. That bequest dwarfed all the other bequests in his will, even that of providing for his unborn child. He died on October 4, 1497. When Queen Isabella received the terrible news, she accepted it with sorrowful resignation: “God gave him to me and He has taken him away.”⁵³

Prince Juan was buried in Salamanca and later transferred to Ávila, where he had wished to be buried. Margaret, grief-stricken, fell desperately ill herself. Isabella rushed to her side and nursed her back to health lovingly. Margaret later told her father that she thought Isabella’s ministrations had saved her life. Her baby, however, was born prematurely and died. Margaret’s father Maximilian privately harbored suspicions about what had caused the healthy young woman to lose the baby. He speculated that the French might have found a way to place abortion-inducing herbs into Margaret’s food so that she would miscarry. It’s not impossible: certainly the French would have viewed the infant—who would have been heir to Castile and Aragon and linked to Burgundy and the German confederation, but under Spanish domination—as an enormous geopolitical threat.

Regardless of what caused the miscarriage, however, the fact of the matter was that Juan’s child was gone as well. “This new loss” dashed the hopes of Isabella and Ferdinand, Zurita wrote, and “their woes deepened.”⁵⁴

This tragic news—the death first of Juan and then of his heir—spread across Europe. The kingdom descended into a pit of mourning. “The only light of all Spain is extinguished,” Peter Martyr wrote to Hernán de Talavera, now archbishop of Granada. “… The sovereigns endeavor to dissemble [their] so great grief, but we discern their mind prostrate within them. They often cast eyes at the face of each other sitting in the open when what is hid comes out.”⁵⁵

Even their enemies felt compassion for the family. The French ambassador Philippe de Commynes said that Juan’s death caused “unspeakable grief of the king and queen, but especially the queen, who was more like to die than to live, and certainly I never heard of so solemn and universal a mourning for any prince in Europe.”⁵⁶ Commynes said he was told that all the tradesmen donned coarse black garments and shut up their shops for forty days. Even the animals were dressed in mourning. The nobility and the gentry covered their mules with black cloth down to their very knees, and all over their body and heads, so that there was nothing to be seen but their ears. Black banners were hung on all the gates of the cities.⁵⁷

What a terrible blow must this be to a family, which had known nothing before but felicity and renown, and had a larger territory (I mean by succession) than any other family in Christendom!… What a sad and surprising turn must this accident be, at a time when they had reduced their kingdom to obedience, regulated the laws, settled the administration of justice, were so well and happy in their own persons, as if God and man had conspired to advance their power and honor above all the rest of the princes in Europe.⁵⁸

But this turn of events, tragic for Castile and his family, was another piece of extraordinary good fortune for King Manuel the Fortunate of Portugal. In one fell swoop, he had attained the wife he wanted and also became heir to a truly huge empire. He and the young Princess Isabel, now the heir apparent in Castile and Aragon, would dominate the entire Iberian peninsula, as well as all overseas holdings of Portugal and Spain. By 1497, it had become apparent that those overseas territories might be immense.

Conceivably Queen Isabella had anticipated this series of events when she negotiated the division of the New World with Portugal at the Treaty of Tordesillas. Is it possible that when she gave half the world to King João, she had known then that the other half would likely devolve to her daughter Isabel as queen and heiress to Castile? Had she sat at the table knowing that Manuel would likely inherit the throne, that he would cast his eyes on Isabel, and that Isabel would likely become the queen’s heiress as well? When she split the world in half, in other words, did she know she was keeping half of it for herself and giving half to her beloved daughter as the queen of Portugal, and that the two halves were likely to come together in the next generation?

All that is of course unknowable, but given Isabella’s keen perception about politics and family dynamics in Portugal and Spain, it seems more than probable. When the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed in June 1494, King João had no legitimate male heir to his throne, and he was attempting to have his out-of-wedlock son, Jorge, legitimized by Pope Alexander VI so that he could inherit the throne. But the pope refused, and so in that last year of João’s life, it had become obvious that Manuel would one day be king of Portugal.

Prince Juan’s death meant that Isabel and Manuel had to return to Spain to be sworn in as the heirs to the kingdom. The succession was complicated by the fact that Princess Isabel was a woman. That was not an issue in Castile, where Queen Isabella’s success in governing had made the issue a moot point, but the Cortes of Aragon balked at the idea of a female succession. For that reason, there was great excitement when it was discovered that Princess Isabel was pregnant. If she had a son, the boy would inherit everything. In this matter, Princess Isabel had once more done everything expected of her. She became pregnant within months of her marriage to Manuel, and she produced a male child on August 23, 1498, in Zaragoza.

But Princess Isabel’s fasting and self-denial at last took its toll. She was very thin when she gave birth, and she died within an hour of the baby’s arrival. She had asked to be buried dressed as a nun and to be interred at the Convent of Santa Isabel in Toledo, in Castile. In death she wanted to remain at home. Queen Isabella held her daughter in her arms as she expired.⁵⁹

This new and terrible tragedy befell Isabella and Ferdinand just one year after Prince Juan’s death, when they were still grieving the loss of their son. This time, however, they were able to take consolation in the birth of a son, the new heir to the thrones of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon, as well as all the overseas dominions held by both countries. Aragon quickly granted him the right of succession. They named the infant boy Miguel de la Paz, but it soon became apparent he was weakly and would need careful tending to survive. King Manuel, now a widower, was needed back in Portugal, and so he went home, trustingly leaving the child in his mother-in-law’s care. Queen Isabella gave the child her full attention, but observers saw that the boy had only a small chance of growing to adulthood.

As these sad events unfolded, Princess Margaret had been staying with her in-laws, lovingly and supportively. She was close to her mother-in-law and had learned much from her about governing. But now she needed to decide what to do with her own life. Her Flemish attendants had never really taken to Spain, and it seemed to her that it was time to go home. Her departure was painful for Queen Isabella, because she had had such high hopes for Margaret’s marriage with Juan and had hoped that her intelligent and thoughtful daughter-in-law would be the mother of her grandchild and heir. Juan’s death made that dream go up in smoke, or so it seemed at the time.

Margaret returned to Flanders and took up residence at her brother Philip’s court, where she had friendly relations with Juana, whom she had met three years earlier when Juana arrived as a bride-to-be. Margaret remained loyal to Spain, wearing Spanish costume to underscore her allegiance. Almost immediately, however, the men in her family began pondering other marriage alliances for her, and soon she was shipped away to the Duke of Savoy, who ruled an area of southeastern France adjoining Italy and Switzerland. She made the best of it, as she always did, and within a few years her new husband died, and she was home again for good.

But she was in Ghent for a very happy event in early 1500. It was the birth of Charles, the firstborn male child of Philip and Juana. He was born on February 24, which was, under the Roman Catholic calendar, the Day of Saint Matthias, a point that Isabella considered particularly significant. It was a day freighted with fortune and obligation, because according to Christian belief, after Jesus died and ascended to heaven, the eleven remaining apostles discussed among themselves how to replace the turncoat Judas, who had killed himself, as the twelfth member of their group. Two men were considered, and after praying, the apostles cast lots to decide who would be named. Matthias won the honor but also the obligation, as many of the disciples knew they faced the possibility of martyrdom. “Believe me, Sire,” Isabella told the king when she learned of Charles’s birth, “that as the lot fell on Matthias, so the lot has fallen on this one to be the heir to these our realms.”⁶⁰

Again Queen Isabella had been prescient. In the summer of 1500, just a few months after Charles was born, little Miguel de la Paz, Manuel and Isabel’s son, died in his grandmother’s arms. Charles, living in faraway Flanders, was now the heir to the kingdom but was being raised far from the land that Isabella had spent her life so fiercely defending. This final blow, the death of Miguel, was like a wound to Isabella’s chest, and from this time, she began a downhill slide in energy, health, and drive.

The widowed Margaret was there for the baptism of little Charles, however. She was named the godmother and was selected to hold the infant over the baptismal font before the Ghent Altarpiece, also known as The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. Again loyally wearing Spanish clothing and still grieving over her husband’s death, Margaret cradled Juan’s little nephew in her arms. She had asked that the boy be named Juan, both for herself and as something his mother, Juana, might have appreciated as well, because of the name’s long history in their family. But Archduke Philip, Juana’s husband, insisted on naming the boy Charles after his own father.⁶¹

Just the same, Margaret was there now to watch over things, just as she would have done with her own child.