TWENTY-FOUR
Just as members of her court had feared, Spain went into a tailspin at Isabella’s death. But within twenty years, building on the foundation she had laid, Spain had become the world’s first truly global superpower—envied, admired, and feared by all. A golden age of Spanish art, literature, and architecture was dawning, with masterpieces being created by geniuses in their fields—among them the writer Miguel de Cervantes, and the painters El Greco and Velázquez. And as the queen had hoped, in ways both good and bad, Isabella’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren took up her causes and committed their lives to them.
But all this began with a period of chaos.
Ferdinand’s shortcomings became apparent as soon as Isabella died. That same day he sent letters announcing her death to his peers in other kingdoms. He told England’s Henry VII, for example, that Isabella’s death was “the greatest affliction that could have befallen him.”1 His daughter Juana was the new queen, he told Henry, but promptly added that he was now in control of the realm.
He did not accompany Isabella’s body on the dreary trek to burial in Granada, something that even the most estranged of spouses would normally have felt obligated to do. Instead he went into seclusion for a week with his counselors, then emerged to begin wreaking havoc.
The first thing he did was dispose of her belongings in a most cavalier way. She had asked that her possessions be sold to benefit the poor and pay off her debts; seeing little advantage in maximizing their value, he sold them as quickly as possible, amid an unseemly display of “confusion, greed and a lack of transparency.”2 Courtiers and clerics snapped up objects at rock-bottom prices and resold them later. Objects of gold and silver were melted down for the value of the metal. Other items were allowed to deteriorate and were sold for smaller sums than they should have brought.
Within two months, Ferdinand disposed of Isabella’s carefully assembled set of paintings of Christ’s life, even those that contained portraits of her family, at fire-sale prices of two to six ducados. The pieces did not appear to have been appraised; paintings that contained gold went for the same price as those that did not.3 Books, tapestries, music scores, and books of hours were scattered to the winds. One of the greatest art collections of the Renaissance was randomly dispersed. It was, wrote the historian Tarsicio de Azcona, as though “a brilliant day had been followed by a gloomy and bitter nightfall.”4
Ferdinand then turned his focus to finding a way to elbow his daughter and her husband out of power. He quickly proposed that he remarry—initially reaching out to Juana la Beltraneja. This was the young woman, now middle-aged, who had been the child of King Enrique’s wife and had possibly been the legitimate heir to the throne, if she were indeed the child of the king. Ferdinand and Isabella, of course, had gone to war with Portugal, asserting that Isabella was the rightful heir, and thousands of people had been killed in the resulting battles.
Now, however, if Ferdinand could convince people that Juana had been the rightful heir, and that the war with Portugal had been an unfortunate mistake, he could restore himself to the same power on the peninsula that he had enjoyed while being married to Isabella. This would mean extracting Juana la Beltraneja from the convent where she had been living, but he might have reasoned that she had embraced religious life only reluctantly in the first place. The proposed marriage, of course, would have had the effect of bumping his children with Isabella out of the line of succession, indeed would question the validity of Isabella’s entire reign.
This idea drew stunned silence from all corners. Opposition began to coalesce quickly all over Spain. Ferdinand, it became apparent, was very unpopular, and the love that the people had shown for the sovereigns had been for Isabella, not for him.
In Flanders, meanwhile, Archduke Philip, who had developed what Peter Martyr called “a panting hunger for the scepter,” had been kept informed about Isabella’s declining health and sought to control the situation by further isolating Juana.5 In early November 1504, he dismissed twelve of the attendants she had brought back with her from Castile and gave her Dominican confessor forty livres to return home to Spain.6 Using bribes and threats, he made sure that the people surrounding Juana were loyal to him and not to her. The remaining Spanish attendants, said the Castilian ambassador Fuensalida, were “all relatives of Judas; none of them has stayed faithful; each one is trying to do his best for the king.”7
Even Fuensalida was intimidated by the attitude at the court. He too was informed that Isabella was dying but did not tell Juana. He was probably hedging his bets, waiting to see who would come out on top in the power struggle that was already beginning.
When Philip learned of Isabella’s death, he decided to withhold the news from his wife, the new queen of Castile, whom he maintained in a state of near-incarceration. For a period of time, perhaps a week or more, he plotted what to do but kept his wife in the dark. King Ferdinand sent an official messenger, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, who delivered the news officially to the couple on December 12.
Finally Juana learned the truth, which must have been painful to her. Her last meetings with her mother in Medina del Campo had been dreadful, and she had shown little regard for Isabella’s failing health when she had been at home in Castile. Now the word hit her hard, and she began emulating the exaggerated mourning rituals that everyone had admired in her sister, Princess Isabel, when she lost her husband Afonso. Juana asked to be left alone to mourn, spurned contact with others, and went into religious seclusion. Funerary customs were less dramatic in pleasure-seeking Flanders, and Juana’s behavior became another reason that the Flemings viewed her as odd or ridiculous.
In the meantime, Philip busily planned his own coronation as king of Castile, León, and Granada, giving Juana only a small part in the ceremonies. In mid-January, he was crowned king at the Church of St. Michael and St. Gudula in Brussels, a grand Gothic edifice, with Juana standing at his side. The sword of justice, once famously held aloft for Isabella, was handed to Philip and not to Juana.
After discussing the situation with the Spanish ambassadors at court, Juana wrote her father a letter and entrusted it to a servant to deliver. The servant, who was Aragonese and a subject of Ferdinand’s, shared it with Philip, who was unhappy with the contents. Philip ordered one of the envoys, Ferdinand’s personal secretary Lope de Conchillos, seized and thrown into jail, where he was tortured. The ferocity of Philip’s reaction suggests that Juana had told her father that he should prevent Philip from seizing the Castilian crown for himself. The envoy “was thrust into a foul dungeon as if he had committed a horrible crime,” Peter Martyr told his friend Talavera, adding that when Lope de Conchillos finally was released, stumbling into the sunlight, he was temporarily senseless and all the hair had fallen from his head.8
After this breach in the wall of secrecy with which he had surrounded Juana, Philip ordered that no one in Flanders was allowed to communicate with anyone in Spain without his knowledge.
Philip’s advisers next prepared an alternative letter ostensibly written by Juana that assigned her right to govern to Philip, saying it was because of her “love” for him. She objected to the word love and refused to sign the letter, so they forged her signature and sent it anyway, according to biographer Bethany Aram.9
Then the bribery started. Philip reached out to Spanish noblemen, offering them lucrative properties, rights, and privileges if they would support his claim to the Castilian throne and repudiate Ferdinand. He began negotiating with the French to support him in seizing power from his father-in-law. That would not have been seen as an idle threat for the Spanish, who had fought with the French over both Roussillon and Naples and who viewed the French as their mortal enemies.
Then the two men—Philip and Ferdinand—engaged in an intense propaganda war about who should rule. Both were angling for the right to the throne, but first Juana had to be shunted aside. Ferdinand and Philip separately and then together asserted that Juana was mentally ill, too mentally ill to be allowed to rule. Removing her from the picture would leave each man with only one competitor—the other man. Juana’s father and her husband both circulated rumors about her allegedly insane conduct. Stories of the scene atMedina del Campo, Juana’s seclusion, and her jealous attack on her husband’s lover, when she had cut off her hair, received wide circulation as examples of female madness. Alleging that women are insane is a time-tested way to discredit them if they contest male power or otherwise cause problems.
In early 1505, according to Aram, Ferdinand called together the Cortes to ask that he be named regent for Juana. He referred to Queen Isabella’s will and said that the queen’s “modesty and sorrow” had prevented her from disclosing the reasons why Juana might be unable to rule—that Juana’s “passions” made her incompetent to govern.10 That set the ball rolling, and soon many people came to believe that Juana was “loca.”
Back in Flanders, impartial observers said she looked and acted just fine. The Venetian ambassador Vicenzo Quirini described an evening of festivities with Juana, who was “dressed in black velvet, looking very well”; he thought her “very handsome, her bearing being that of a sensible and discreet woman.” He greeted her on behalf of the Venetian Signory, and she made a “loving reply”; then together they strolled to a joust, which took place by torchlight in a spacious hall on the ground floor of the palace.11
About six months later, in early 1506, according to Quirini, Philip sent an envoy from his court, Monsieur de la Chau, to Castile to meet with Ferdinand to make sure they had their stories straight—that Juana was “incapable and unfit to rule.” Quirini said many Flemish courtiers wanted Philip to do so because they had already begun receiving “pensions” from Castile, ranging from 500 to 3,000 ducats per year, and they feared that Juana would stop those stipends if she were to take the reins of government. They also hoped to find lucrative sinecures for their “children, grandchildren and remotest connections” through the three religious military orders that the monarch of Castile would command.12 “The ministers also seek to avoid an insurrection,” Quirini wrote.
They fear lest Spaniards, who are turbulent naturally—especially the grandees, who love change and have feuds amongst each other—might rise and make some stir on the plea of choosing to be governed by the Queen, who is their legitimate sovereign. Their object now is, that before the arrival of King Philip, his father-in-law should circulate a report that Queen Juana is unfit to govern, as is generally believed here, and they hope King Ferdinand will accede to their wishes, both as it may prove to his interest, and also because, on the death of Queen Isabella, amongst the other reasons assigned to him for not ceding the government of Castile, he alleged that his daughter was incapable and unfit to rule; an opinion which he seems he retain, according to the last letters of King Philip’s ambassadors, who are doing their utmost to arrange this business, as it affects them personally: Monsier de Verre having an annual pension in Castile of 3,000 ducats, together with a promise of the first vacant bishopric for one of his brothers and Monsieur de la Chau a pension of 1,000 ducats; and all live in hopes that King Philip may provide their children, grandchildren and remotest connections with commanderies of St. James, of Calatrava or of Alcántara; for although King Ferdinand be master of these three orders, and has all the revenues, yet the vacant commanderies are in the alternate gift of either sovereign, and when King Philip’s turn comes, King Ferdinand is bound to accept his presentations.13
The Flemish courtiers were doing their best to sow discord between Juana and her father. The Spanish ambassador, the Count of Haro, was given a short audience with Juana, although Philip’s confederates warned him to make a short stay and to do “good service” to Philip. Juana warmly received him, according to Quirini, and she
very tenderly made many inquiries of him how her father fared, six months having elapsed since she had received any news of him, and whether it was true that he wished her as much harm as she was told he did.… The ambassador replied that not one of these things were true; nay, that the King her father loved her and her husband as his very dear children.… Thereupon the ambassador took leave as quickly as he could. He told [Quirini] that he knew for certain that King Philip’s councilors had given the Queen to understand that her father bears her ill will, and would fain not see her in Spain, in order that on her going thither with this impression, she might, at their first meeting, treat him unbecomingly; whilst Ferdinand, being informed in like manner, that his daughter loved him not, and was such as they described her, would the more readily consent to deprive her of the government.14
Whatever Ferdinand knew or did not know, he responded soothingly to Philip in mid-April that he would arrange matters “so as to satisfy all parties.”15 Ferdinand unctuously urged Philip to come to Castile so everything could be handled.
Philip dragged his feet about going there. Still suspicious about how his friend, the archbishop of Besançon, had died so precipitously, he was afraid that Ferdinand would kill him if he set foot in Spain. Others shared his fear: in June 1506 a nobleman living in Rome wrote to Philip urging him to use extreme caution in dealing with Ferdinand to avoid becoming a victim of poisoning or other violence. He specifically urged Philip to avoid eating with Ferdinand at any time.16
But to win the rich prize of Spain and its dominions, Philip and Juana had to go there to assert control. They set out to Castile by sea, leaving their children back home in Flanders with Philip’s intelligent and kindly sister Margaret, the young widow of Prince Juan of Castile. She established a household with the four children remaining at home—Eleanor, Charles, Isabel, and Juana’s youngest, baby Mary—in the small and pretty town of Mechelen, some distance from the large Flemish royal palace in Ghent and its schemingcourtiers.
The sea passage was frightening for Juana and Philip. Storms along the way drove them to England, where King Henry VII met and spent time with both of them. Continuing to make their case that Juana was unstable, Philip and his attendants went out of their way to tell the English court that she was unhinged. Henry privately told his courtiers that Juana seemed perfectly sane to him. Envoys from other countries who traveled with the fleet also described Juana as pleasant and appropriate in her behavior, and stoic when others had panicked in the storm.
By the time Philip and Juana arrived in Castile, Ferdinand had remarried, although not, as he had hoped, to Juana la Beltraneja. He had done an end run around his daughter and her husband by making a speedy alliance with Spain’s old enemy France. He secured for himself a saucy eighteen-year-old French princess, his grandniece Germana de Foix, the granddaughter of his half sister, in exchange for a promise that he would leave Naples to the children he would have with Germana.17 This was appealing to King Louis XII because Germana was his niece as well, and this agreement would bring Naples back into the French sphere of influence. Ferdinand also promised to reimburse Louis for his military expenses.
King Ferdinand told his subjects that he needed to marry the young French princess to provide a male heir to the throne of Aragon. In reality, of course, he did it to spite Philip by threatening Juana’s children’s right to the throne. The justification of needing an heir was absurd: by this time in his life, Ferdinand had three young and fertile daughters, three grandsons, and four granddaughters in line to inherit the throne. (Juana eventually had six children; María already had three, and Catherine was likely to have children in the future too.) This meant that Ferdinand was attempting to produce children who would be rivals to the children he already had.
His announcement was particularly harmful to Juana, whose claim to the throne of Aragon would be jeopardized if another child were born, but also to Catherine, who was twenty years old, alone in England, widowed, and hoping to finalize her marriage with young Prince Henry. Losing her place in the line of succession in Castile would complicate that already difficult task.
Ferdinand’s speedy remarriage, though unseemly, was not too surprising, despite the unfortunate promise he had made to Isabella that he would not marry again. He had perhaps grown tired of being married to an ailing woman. By July 1505 he was the subject of leering gossip at the English court, where envoys told Henry VII that Ferdinand was “right lusty for his age,” which was fifty-three. Moreover, he still was perceived as having “a goodly personage,” despite a lisp he had developed since losing a tooth and a “little cast in the left eye.” And finally Ferdinand was “reputed to be very rich, having during his Queen’s life spent nothing of his revenues of Aragon and Sicily.”18
Maximilian, the Holy Roman emperor, who was Philip’s father and baby Charles’s grandfather, thought the situation could be handled by appealing to Ferdinand’s high libido. He tried to lure Ferdinand into making another, politically safer choice by offering to let him select “among the most noble virgin princesses… the most beautiful in body and face that can be found in Germany.”19
But Ferdinand rushed to the marital bed with Germana de Foix instead. Their marriage contract was concluded by September 1505, less than a year after Isabella’s death.20 Ferdinand explained that the reason he was taking a French bride was to win French support to his side rather than to Philip’s, but this was difficult for the families of men who had died in his many anti-French campaigns to accept.
And it proved impossible to explain his action to the people who had loved and respected Queen Isabella, who could not understand how Ferdinand had been able to replace her so hastily. The new courtship was difficult to watch, particularly because the appreciation for Isabella had only grown since she had died. “It seems hard to all to behold new nuptials so suddenly,” Peter Martyr told Talavera, particularly because the kingdom “venerates” Isabella as much in death as it “worshipped her” while she was living.21
Ferdinand spent his honeymoon with Germana in the same small town—Duenas—where he had spent the early days of his marriage with Isabella, which struck some people as disrespectful of his former wife’s memory. Soon afterward Germana, who liked to dress in the French style, took up her role as the acting queen of Castile.
Ferdinand’s popularity in Castile plummeted. Once Philip and Juana arrived in the kingdom, in April 1506, all Spain rallied to their support. Almost the entire nobility deserted Ferdinand, except for a small handful of diehards. Devoted counselors to Isabella, including Garcilasso de la Vega, whom Isabella had honored in her will, turned against her husband.
Only a handful of people, including Archbishop Cisneros and the Duke of Alba, remained loyal to Ferdinand. Within two months of his daughter’s arrival, Ferdinand announced he would go back home to Aragon and departed Castile with almost as small an entourage as he had had when he first came to marry Isabella, back in 1469. “Of his blood relations,” Peter Martyr wrote to Talavera, almost all “deserted him… partly from fear, partly from cupidity.”22
Whether Ferdinand saw Juana before he left is unclear; if he did, it was only a brief visit. This would not, in any case, have created a very happy leavetaking. Castile was unceremoniously giving Ferdinand the boot.
Ferdinand and his wife left Castile for Aragon and then went to his rich new Kingdom of Naples, where he was greeted as a conquering hero. Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, acting as viceroy of Naples since his decisive defeat of the French, honored him upon his arrival with lavish celebrations. Ferdinand was visibly irritated, however, when a number of prominent Italians and even some Frenchmen spoke effusively of their admiration for Gonzalo. Gonzalo was one of those very unusual military leaders who commanded the respect not just of the men he led into battle but also of the men he vanquished. Ferdinand’s jealousy of Gonzalo grew increasingly obvious.
Meanwhile, in Castile, Philip sought permission from the Cortes to have Juana imprisoned, but Castilian officials would not permit it. They interviewed Juana and gave her their support. Juana said she wanted Ferdinand to come back and rule, but Philip arranged for their joint coronation in July 1506, himself as king and Juana as queen.
This was the opening Philip needed. He began to do what he wished in Castile. He removed officials whom Isabella had appointed and replaced them with his friends from Flanders. He stripped the rule of the city of Segovia from Beatriz de Bobadilla, although Isabella in her will had expressly pledged it to Beatriz for life and for the life of her descendants. Philip gave the post to his new court favorite, Don Juan Manuel.
Then in September 1506, Philip unexpectedly died. He was attending a party in Burgos thrown for him by Don Juan Manuel and grew thirsty. He took a long draught of cool water—and then fell ill. He died in stomach distress, just as others who had stood in Ferdinand’s way had come to sudden ends. Philip was twenty-eight years old.
Did Ferdinand arrange for Philip to be killed? It seems more than possible. By this point, Ferdinand’s older half siblings, Charles and Blanca, and Isabella’s brother Enrique, had all died under circumstances some thought mysterious, and he had benefited in each case. But in an era without antibiotics or autopsies, it is impossible to determine if the cause of death was poison or something else.
Queen Juana stood vigil over Philip’s sickbed but did not cry at his passing. He had been cruel to her, and she most likely had mixed emotions at his death. Her ways of mourning him, and of observing the solemnities of his funeral rites, were odd, however, and added to the already rife speculations about her mental health.
She wanted to bury him in Granada, which was appropriate for his status as her husband and as the father of the future king of Spain, young Charles, who was still in Flanders. But she was conflicted about how to go about transporting his embalmed body, particularly as she simultaneously faced a growing chorus from her Castilian subjects who wanted her to begin presiding over the nation’s business, something she had never been trained to do and had never shown any desire to do. The challenges were mounting because the kingdom had endured a vacuum of leadership since Isabella’s death two years earlier, and so Queen Juana deferred the burial, moving the corpse from one monastery to another as she pondered how to handle the situation. She had no surviving close family members at hand in Castile to help her make these decisions.
Moreover, she was pregnant again and bore her final child, a little girl she named Catherine, some five months after her husband’s death. This almost certainly added to her stress.
Queen Juana tried to fend off some decisions by maintaining an exaggerated widow’s seclusion and mourning period. That behavior would not have seemed unusual for an ordinary woman, but it caused complex and thorny problems when done by a queen who had to address a number of issues of pressing national and international concern. She took one step, however: on December 18, 1506, she signed an order revoking all the rights and lands in Castile that Philip had distributed to his friends.23 She ordered everyone restored to the rights they had been given by Isabella.
But she didn’t seem to take to the responsibility placed in front of her. It requires a great deal of courage for a woman to do what is unusual in society, and makes everyone uncomfortable. Isabella had been praised, but she had also been viewed as an oddity, an aberration. Women continued to be viewed as inferior to men and less likely to play a significant role, despite Isabella’s success as a ruler. That very year Juana’s brother-in-law, King Manuel of Portugal, spelled that out very clearly when he announced to Ferdinand the birth of his fourth child and second son, Luis:
If the Queen, my best beloved and cherished wife, had brought forth a daughter, we should have announced this to you more modestly, as befitted the birth of a daughter, but because last night, between two and three hours after midnight, Our Lord delivered her and she gave birth to a son, we wished to let you know this by letter, whereby you may also know that the fear we had lest it should be a daughter like the others, which we felt would shame us both, has increased our pleasure and satisfaction!24
In that environment, it’s not all that surprising that Juana was reluctant to attempt to take control of her tumultuous kingdom. Most people want to be viewed as part of the mainstream of their culture, not as strange outliers, and so Juana decided that her manner of ruling would be not to rule at all.
It had became popular, even desirable, for widows to retreat into seclusion after the deaths of their husbands. The dowager Queen Isabel, Isabella’s mother, had done so, and the oldest sister in the family, the young Isabel, had attempted to do so after the death of her husband Afonso, the heir to the Portuguese throne. This “pious enclosure, called recogimiento,” became very popular in the sixteenth century, and Juana was at the forefront of the trend, writes the historian Bethany Aram. “Indeed many of Queen Juana’s practices after the death of her mother in 1504—fasting, frugal dress, silence, solitude, and vigils—may be associated with this type of voluntary and/or enforced confinement.”25
Juana did, however, prove to be a devoted mother to her daughter, Catherine, the only one of her six children she was allowed to keep. The other five had all been taken from her. Philip had insisted the four older children, including the heir Charles, be left behind in Flanders, where they were cared for by Juana’s sister-in-law Margaret, Philip’s sister. Juana’s other child in Spain, her son Ferdinand, who had been born during Juana’s ill-fated visit home in 1503, had been cared for by Isabella and King Ferdinand, and Ferdinand ended up keeping the boy with him.
Juana gave Catherine the same excellent education that her own mother had given her daughters, and the girl grew up well versed in Latin and Greek and a good dancer, described as gracious and well mannered. Young Catherine was another exemplar of the high standards for female education that had been set by her grandmother, Queen Isabella, and when she became queen of Portugal in adulthood, she established herself as one of the foremost art collectors of her generation, owning more non-European objects than anyone else on the continent.26
In short, Queen Juana embraced the life of a traditional upper-class woman in Castile, pious and a good mother, the kind of woman the devotedly Catholic family was inclined to embrace. When an ordinary woman chose this kind of life, it was viewed as admirable, even saintly. But when a queen did it, rather than display the rights and prerequisites of men in order to rule over them, then perhaps she might be viewed as insane. The rumors about Juana came to be seen as fact, and she did not do enough to establish herself in public life and defend herself.
Soon Juana had a sobriquet of her own. Her husband had been Philip the Fair. She would be known to history as Juana la Loca. Generations of male historians would guffaw in talking about this abused young woman. For them, crazy wasn’t a strong enough term—some even called her “demented.”
Many people, it seemed, had been uncomfortable with a woman ruler, and when Juana moved slowly to assert control, she appeared weak, perhaps too weak to govern. Lacking her mother’s fortitude and courage to step outside accepted boundaries of female behavior, she failed to act decisively when she took power, and thus soon all that power was stripped from her.
The de facto regent of the kingdom during this period was the man with the highest ecclesiastical status in Spain, Isabella’s former confessor, Cisneros, whom she had elevated to the post of archbishop of Toledo. After surveying the political landscape, he decided to call for Ferdinand to come back to Castile.
By this time, Ferdinand and Queen Germana were on an extended tour of their possessions, including his new Kingdom of Naples, but they soon began the journey back home. Upon his return, Juana slipped back into a deferential relationship with her father, perhaps in an effort to follow the stricture in her mother’s dying request that she be “very obedient” to him. Juana remained at court in pious seclusion for a while more, and then Ferdinand and his friends decided to keep her under armed guard. She was at times physically restrained and was told, untruthfully, that there were plagues and dangers afoot to make her afraid of leaving. She spent the rest of her life in confinement in the castle at Tordesillas, visited by her family but seldom interacting with the outside world.
Now at last Ferdinand was free to rule on his own. He found that he liked Cisneros better than he had at first. Cisneros was a proven ally, willing and eager to abet him in taking power from Queen Juana. Soon after Ferdinand returned from Naples, Cisneros received a red hat from Pope Julius II and became Cardinal Cisneros. Together he and Ferdinand presented the world with an image of Queen Juana as too emotionally frail to rule Spain.
But other people who had been trusted allies of Queen Isabella did not find themselves in a comfortable spot with Ferdinand in charge. When Hernán de Talavera realized that payments to support his work as archbishop of Granada were not being sent promptly, he asked Peter Martyr to inquire what was happening. Martyr found that he could not get a straight answer. It turned out that Talavera himself was falling into the hands of the Inquisition.
A fiendish new inquisitor, Diego Rodríguez Lucero, had been appointed head of the tribunal in Córdoba in 1499, after the man who had previously held the post was found guilty of fraud and extortion. He embarked on an aggressive round of prosecutions of wealthy people in the city, saying that a large nest of pro-Jewish sentiment had taken root. Many of the people he accused said he was using the allegations to seize their property fraudulently. According to the historian Henry Kamen, conversos later testified that they were detained in prison and forced to teach Jewish prayers to longtime Christians so that Lucero could accuse the wealthy Christians of having been converted into secret Judaism. People who protested found themselves targets of the Inquisition as well.
When an investigation called Lucero’s methods into question, the executions suddenly increased in number, with 147 people burned at the stake in 1504 and 1505, to silence them. This happened as Isabella was sick and dying, and it is unclear whether she knew it was occurring, although Ferdinand did.
As time wore on, even those who had been closest to Queen Isabella found themselves at risk from the Inquisition. This is what happened to Talavera, who was of converso descent. Lucero found people who were willing to testify that Talavera had been using the archbishop’s home in Granada as a secret temple; Talavera’s female relatives were alleged to be performing Jewish rituals in the kitchen. Talavera was jailed and beaten and forced to walk barefooted in the streets to prove his penitence. Many furiously protested this treatment of an eighty-year-old cleric widely seen as a great and good man, and at last Talavera was released. But his health had been broken by the ordeal, and he soon died.
Afterward there was a great clamor to bring Lucero to justice, but Ferdinand defended and shielded him. Lucero was ultimately removed from office, but Ferdinand’s role in this case makes clear that for him, the Inquisition was purely a political tool to be used to frighten people and take their money. He was willing to allow innocent people to be persecuted, even when many witnesses could testify the charges were concocted.
Talavera’s fate makes it obvious that Ferdinand was responsible for some large percentage of the deaths during the first thirty years of the Inquisition. Queen Isabella was certainly not blameless and believed that the Inquisition was needed to root out actual cases of heresy, but in the eyes of her children and grandchildren, it was Ferdinand’s initiative that caused the Inquisition to grow and flourish. Years later, when his descendants erected a statue of him to be placed in the Great Hall at the palace at Segovia, the place of their ancestors from Pelayo to their own times, they gave Ferdinand the sole credit—others would say the blame—for creating the Inquisition in Spain.
Once Ferdinand was fully in charge, he was also free to vent his jealousy on Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the soldier who had stood by the monarchs’ side when they were young and vulnerable, who had fought for them against the Turks, and who had won one of the first real victories against them in fifty years. He was the man who had secured for Spain the much-coveted realm of Naples, something the French had wanted so badly that they allowed tens of thousands of Frenchmen to die in their bid to obtain it. Gonzalo had always been loyal to Isabella, ever since their childhood together, when Isabella’s brother Prince Alfonso died after eating the trout pastry in Cardenosa. He had once said that his greatest source of pride was knowing that he had her faith and support.
He had been devastated by her death. Two chroniclers called Gonzalo grief-stricken. One noted his “extreme sadness and weeping,” while another said that every Spaniard lamented her death, “but none more than Gonzalo Fernández, who from his 14th year, when he began to serve her as a page, had been brought up at her court.”27
The Great Captain continued to be heaped with accolades from everyone with whom he came in contact. According to the chronicler Hernando del Pulgar:
Neither lack of sleep nor hunger affected him when on his fighting campaigns, and when need required he took upon himself the hardest tasks and the greatest risks. Although not a man for jesting, being always very much in earnest, in times of danger he would crack jokes with his men to cheer them and raise their spirits. He used to say that kind words from a captain won him the love of his soldiers. He was as competent in perfecting many affairs as he was diligent in bringing one to a successful end. Ability and diligence were so united in him that he not only defeated his foes by his great intelligence and vigorous efforts, but surpassed them by his intelligence and wisdom.28
Green with envy, Ferdinand probed for flaws in Gonzalo’s management of affairs in Naples and convinced himself that the Great Captain was undermining his authority and had become potentially traitorous. Ferdinand called him back to Spain, telling him he wanted to honor him by making him the Commander of the Order of Santiago. But when Gonzalo returned, that offer was forgotten, and Gonzalo was given the job of holding the reins of the horse when Queen Germana went riding. Gonzalo soon went into seclusion in Loja and was given no further military assignments. When his nephew became involved in the protest against the misconduct of the inquisitor Lucero, Ferdinand said the young man was a traitor and ordered the family homestead, the castle at Montilla, destroyed. This nephew was the son of Gonzalo’s brother Alonso de Aguilar, who had been slashed to pieces defending Castile in the uprising in the Alpujarras. The ancestral home of Alonso and Gonzalo was now destroyed so that Ferdinand could assert his dominance.
Ferdinand wasn’t all that interested in bringing Cesare Borgia to justice either. Borgia was still imprisoned in the fortress of La Mota in Medina del Campo, where Isabella had wanted him tried for murder. Queen Juana had shared her mother’s belief that Cesare Borgia was a dangerous man and had kept him imprisoned. But in 1507 Borgia managed to escape from the castle and made his way to Navarre, where he found work as a mercenary. But he didn’t last long: he was killed in a skirmish and his body was found sometime later, with multiple wounds and stripped naked for the value of his clothes and armor. And so Cesare Borgia came to a sorry end, despite the honors and accolades that had been heaped on him by his father, Pope Alexander VI.
King Ferdinand also showed himself careless and callous in his dealings with the Americas. Columbus came back from his fourth and last voyage in 1506, old before his time. He had had a terrible ordeal, having been shipwrecked and abandoned in Jamaica for months before he was rescued. He arrived in Castile right at around the time Isabella died, and he too deeply mourned her death. Columbus knew, his friends later recalled, that Ferdinand would never recognize his accomplishments the way that Isabella had.
Columbus knew his career was over when he heard the queen was dead. “In Seville, the news that Queen Isabella had died filled Columbus with intense grief,” the human rights advocate Bartolomé de Las Casas later wrote.
To him, she represented protection and hope, and no amount of pain, hardship or loss (even loss of his own life) could afflict and sadden him more that such news.… She had received his services humbly and with gratitude. As for the Catholic King Ferdinand, I do not know why he was not only ungrateful in words and deeds but actually harmed Columbus whenever possible, although his actions belied his words. It was believed that if, in good conscience and without losing face, he could have violated all the articles of the privileges that he and the Queen had justly granted him for his services, he would indeed have done so. I have never been able to ascertain the reason for this dislike and unkingly conduct toward one whose unparalleled services no other monarch ever received.29
Columbus died in Valladolid in 1506. He was more comfortable in his old age than he liked to pretend. He had relished creating a perception of some sort of martyrdom, but in fact he left his two sons very wealthy men, and his descendants, as he had hoped, became high nobility.
The New World no longer got the same attention it had received from Isabella, and things on the ground there began to go wildly awry. Ferdinand wasn’t interested in discoveries, except as they could provide him with new sources of cash. Voyages of discovery declined for most of the first part of his solo reign. They had slowed to a crawl when Isabella first grew ill. Scholars have described themselves as perplexed by the drop-off. “For six years after Columbus’s departure on his last voyage in 1502, there is a curious lull in Spain’s exploring activities,” Roger Merriman writes. “Only one or two smattering expeditions were undertaken, and with practically no results.”30
Unfortunately, abuse of the native Americans grew much worse as a result of neglect, avarice, cruelty, and poor stewardship. It was Las Casas’s belief that far fewer Indians would have died if Isabella had lived: “Queen Isabella’s holy zeal, intense care, tireless efforts and meritorious will to save the Indians are attested by the royal decrees she issued in the few years she lived after the discovery of the Indies, and these years hardly came to ten when one considers that for quite some time, information concerning the Indies was a matter of guesses and hearsay.”31
With her mother dead and unable to intervene when her father undertook self-serving and callous courses of action, Princess Catherine of Aragon, living far away in England, suffered as well. In 1509 she finally married young King Henry VIII. Her father had allowed her to dangle at the English court for years, almost penniless at times, while he dickered with Henry VII over the remainder of the dowry. On his deathbed, King Henry VII acknowledged Catherine’s merits and urged his son to marry her, which he soon did. Then, soon after Catherine and Henry were married, Ferdinand entered a pact with Henry VIII to fight together against the French, then betrayed and humiliated him to win some lands for himself in Navarre. That infuriated Henry, who was an ambitious young man trying to establish himself on the world stage, and it caused damage to the young couple’s marriage.
This additional strain imposed even greater burdens on Catherine, who endlessly worried about her inability to produce the male heir that her husband desired so ardently. The quarreling between Henry and Ferdinand caused her physical distress and contributed to the loss of a pregnancy in 1514. “The Queen of England has had a miscarriage, brought on by her distress over the discord between the kings, i.e., her husband and her father, owing to her unbearable sorrow she is said to have delivered a premature fetus,” Peter Martyr confided to Luis Hurtado de Mendoza. “The husband blamed the innocent queen for the desertion of her father and kept voicing to her his complaints.”32
The limited horizons of Ferdinand’s interests became apparent once Isabella was gone. He spent the rest of his reign bickering over territorial borders, warring with one European power after another. In another effort to remove a rival for public esteem, he did allow Cisneros to lead an expedition into North Africa, assuming the seventy-three-year-old prelate was too aged to make much of an impact. Cisneros squared his shoulders, set out, and conquered the city of Oran. In so doing, he freed about fifteen thousandChristian slaves held captive there.33
But this conquest, and a few others made around the same time in North Africa, had the effect of exacerbating tensions with Muslims in North Africa and gave renewed impetus to Muslim pirates attacking the Mediterranean coast. Raiding expeditions led by the corsair Hayreddin on unsuspecting towns, sometimes with the assistance of people who had previously lived in Spain, were so successful that Bayezid’s son, known as Selim the Grim, made Hayreddin admiral of the Turkish fleet. The Turks conquered the Mamluk empire of Egypt in 1517 and, as Isabella had feared, moved menacingly ever closer to Spain.
During the years of Ferdinand’s regency of Castile, the Christians benefited from a fortuitous outbreak of heresy in the Muslim world that distracted the Turks’ attention from further conquests in Europe as they pursued conflicts closer to home. In this case, the wrong thinking involved a mystical order led by Sheikh Safi ad-Din, who claimed descent from a son-in-law of Muhammad. It was called Safawiyya. “The Ottomans, who were sternly orthodox Muslims, abhorred the teaching of Safawiyya as heretical,” writes the historian V. J. Parry. “They rightly regarded the movement, however, as far more than a religious danger; for them it was also a grave political menace.”34
Spain had a little breathing space during this period, as it had during the infighting between Bayezid and Djem. During these years young Charles, the heir to the throne of Castile, grew to adulthood back in Mechelen in Flanders, under the careful tutelage of Margaret, Isabella’s beloved daughter-in-law, who ended up raising Isabella’s heirs, just as Isabella had hoped she would. Margaret carried the torch for Isabella’s legacy. She even bought from the hurried estate sale of Isabella’s possessions many of the paintings of Christ’s life, keeping them close at hand. It was there in Mechelen that the artist Albrecht Dürer saw them and famously praised the paintings for their “purity and excellence.”35
Margaret made sure the paintings were kept as a set and presented as a gift in adulthood, as a final bequest from her, to Isabella’s grandchildren. Today most of them remain in Madrid’s Royal Palace; the rest are part of the treasured collections of major art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Margaret’s enthusiasm for art made the family home in Mechelen one of the first great centers of Latin American art in Europe, for the golden masks, obsidian ritual objects, and feathered headdresses that Hernán Cortés collected when he conquered Mexico were sent to Prince Charles but placed in Margaret’s care. This was the first glimpse Europeans had of the rich and varied artistic traditions in the Americas.
Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba lived out the rest of his life in some seclusion and was never sent to battle again by the king. But his military leadership had transformed the Spanish armies, and his influence lasted for generations. He died after suffering a high fever in December 1515, and was greatly mourned by the kingdom. In his deathbed confession, he said he regretted only three sins—betraying the king of Naples and betraying Cesare Borgia, both of whom had come to him in faith of their safety; the third, he said, would be known only to God. He had remarried but was buried in Granada, in the Monastery of San Jerónimo, just a short walk from the final resting place of Queen Isabella. Hanging over his tomb were the one hundred battle pendants he had won in his victories for the Castilian crown.
Peter Martyr, who had managed to retain his place at court by carefully adapting to the political winds, said all Spain grieved at the news of Gonzalo’s death. “Woe to thee, All Spain!” Martyr wrote in his characteristically florid style, recounting in a letter all the great successes that Gonzalo had achieved and noting that he had rightly earned the name the Great Commander. King Ferdinand also seemed regretful at the news of Gonzalo’s death. “The news was very troublesome to the king, or so it seems to have been, God is the only searcher of hearts,” Martyr wrote. “For that man’s magnanimity was sometimes suspected: therefore he allowed him to live at leisure in a secluded place.”36
King Ferdinand died in 1516, just a few months later. His health had been undermined by the side effects of a concoction made of bull’s testicles that he had consumed at his wife’s behest to boost his sexual potency. It was puzzling that Ferdinand was never able to produce healthy children with his eager young wife. He had always previously been notably fertile. Ferdinand and Germana had only one child together, and that infant died soon after birth. Of course, given Ferdinand’s record of promiscuity, he may have been one of the earliest Europeans to contract syphilis, which was rampant in his kingdom and probably got its start in Barcelona at the time when he was living there. Recent forensic evidence has found that syphilis was widespread among members of the Aragonese royal family; and it was then incurable and caused sterility.
The disease is thought to have traveled from Barcelona to an explosive epicenter in Naples in 1494. Many members of Ferdinand’s extended Aragonese family either fell victim to it or were likely exposed, whether they became ill with it or not. His cousins frequently traveled back and forth from Spain to Barcelona and throughout Italy, often with extensive entourages of fawning and flirting courtiers in tow.
Archaeological pathologists who have studied the Neapolitan royal family have discovered that Ferdinand’s cousin King Ferrante, who was born in 1431 and died in 1494 at age sixty-three, died of colon cancer and did not appear to have contracted syphilis. But his younger family members most certainly did. Ferrante’s granddaughter, the beautiful Isabella of Aragon, born in 1470 and married to the Duke of Milan, had markers for syphilis and is believed to have tried to treat her condition with a course of mercury, which caused her teeth to become blackened. She tried to chisel away the evidence by having the enamel removed from her darkened teeth. A stepsibling of hers, María of Aragon, had deep ulcerated syphilitic lesions on her lower limbs. Sores on the legs and elsewhere on the body were a common marker for syphilis at the time.37
Ferdinand had died in a tiny house in a small village, Madrigalejo, while he was traveling. Unlike Isabella’s death, however, his passing did not cause enormous sorrow in Spain. He was buried next to her in Granada, in a spectacular mausoleum quite at odds with the simple resting place she had requested. Isabella had asked that her daughter Isabel be buried near her, but her daughter’s body was left in Toledo. Instead, it was Ferdinand who was laid to rest next to Queen Isabella, Queen Juana, and King Philip, together for eternity, in a triumph of public relations and a cynical assertion of dynastic harmony.
In the centuries ahead, Ferdinand became a famous man, credited for many of Isabella’s achievements. The fact that his name appeared first on official documents—sometimes because she requested that he be added—meant that future historians, sometimes blinded by their own sexism, would cite him as the primary architect of events, even when he played only a minor role in them.
For generations, scholars have looked at the twenty-five-year marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella and tried to deduce the contributions that each made to the success of their reign, which decisions were hers and which his. An easy test for answering those questions is to look at how Ferdinand ruled alone after Queen Isabella’s death. He lived until 1516, twelve years after she died. When he ruled with Isabella, he could rank among the great kings of Europe and be viewed as a man of consequence. Without Isabella, he produced almost nothing of significance and frittered his time away in pointless international intrigues.
In the Book of the Courtier, Baldassare Castiglione, an Italian who had spent some years in Spain after Isabella’s death, pondered the relative significance of their lives. The book recounts a long series of parlor conversations held at the palace of the Duke of Urbino. At one point Castiglione’s verbal sparring partner asks him whether Isabella really did what he claims. Wasn’t it really Ferdinand? he queries.
Castiglione answers that Ferdinand deserved to be compared with Isabella, but only because she chose to love him. “For since the Queen judged him worthy of being her husband, and loved and respected him so much, we cannot say that he does not deserve to be compared with her,” Castiglione wrote. “Yet I believe that the fame he had because of her was a dowry not inferior to the kingdom of Castile.”
Love can be inexplicable.
Isabella’s Hapsburg grandchildren, benefiting from their tutelage at Margaret’s hands, took on the heavy mantle of responsibility for their holdings, which encircled the world. Charles became king of Spain in 1516 and Holy Roman emperor in 1519, when he was nineteen years old. Under his reign, the Spaniards conquered Mexico and Peru, fabulous empires with wealth beyond reckoning.
Juana’s younger son Ferdinand, who had been born in Spain during her visit to Castile with Philip and who had been raised in Spain, was given control of the family’s Austrian lands. He took charge of watching over the frontiers with the Ottoman Turks. He halted the Turkish advance by land when he successfully withstood a siege at Vienna in 1529; he became Holy Roman emperor himself in 1558, when his brother retired to a monastery in Spain. A generation later Charles’s son Don Juan led the naval force against the Ottomans near the port of Lepanto in 1571, in one of the Christian West’s first major naval victories against the Turks. Neither of these victories was in itself decisive, as some have claimed, but both were watershed moments in world history nonetheless. They marked a crucial turning point, and made it clear that the West was going to fight, and fight effectively, and would eventually contain the Turkish expansion.
The baton had been passed to Isabella’s male grandchildren, to Charles and his brother Ferdinand, and then to Philip II and Don Juan. They remained the only formidable opposition to the Ottoman Empire, organizing their defenses against an overpowering foe by unifying themselves under a single religious banner, with a single-minded focus on religious orthodoxy. They continued to view themselves as the defenders of Christianity, bringing all their resources from the New World to bear in this struggle. They also expanded their list of enemies to include the new, and to their thinking heretical, branch of Christianity, the Protestant movement. Just as their grandparents had done against others they considered heretical, they used the mechanisms of the Inquisition against wrong-thinking people—in this case, Protestants. But the Protestant threat never materialized in Spain to the same degree as elsewhere in Europe. The religious reforms that had been undertaken in Spain under Isabella’s rule had rooted out many of the worst abuses in the Catholic Church long before the Counter-Reformation swung into action.
Fighting alongside the Hapsburgs in this new Christian army were descendants of the Indians from the New World, including the grandchildren of the Aztec leader Moctezuma and the Extremaduran explorer Hernán Cortés, who had intermingled and had children together. In the New World, in the next 120 years, the Spaniards would build seventy thousand churches, five hundred monasteries, and three thousand church-sponsored schools and hospitals; they would found at least four universities, located in Colombia, Peru, and Mexico. They also extracted some $1.5 billion in gold and silver, used for their enterprises in Europe.38
When Isabella was born, Christianity had been a dying religion, weakened from within and under withering assault from without. Today, five hundred years after her death, it is the world’s largest religion, encompassing some two billion people in hundreds of countries. One of them was a man who was born in Latin America, in Argentina, and when he became pope in 2013, he called himself Francis I. The first saints he named were the eight hundred people—whom he called the martyrs—killed at Otranto in 1480.
Isabella’s direct descendants remain in positions of power throughout Europe. The ruling families of Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Monaco all share a common ancestry from Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.