TWO
Isabella’s mother never really regained her mental health, and so the child’s older half brother, King Enrique IV, a man who has been called “possibly the single most controversial personality in the history of Medieval Spain,”1 became the dominating figure ofIsabella’s childhood, a man whose mercurial whims and moods influenced every aspect of her life. Exactly how and when Isabella first came into close contact with Enrique isn’t clear because so many of the details of her childhood have been lost to time.
In her earliest years, they saw each other only sporadically. Isabella’s father died when she was three years old and her brother Alfonso was an infant. Sometime after the king’s death in 1454, Queen Isabel took the two children and retreated to a remote rural town, Arévalo, some fifteen miles from Isabella’s birthplace of Madrigal de las Altas Torres, and far from the glitter of court life. Arévalo was another heavily fortified town, located at the confluence of the Adaja and Arevalillo Rivers and site of a powerful fortress that had once housed the imprisoned wife of a former king. Isabella’s new home was a castle with thick stone walls with tiny windows high off the ground and blank exterior walls, a residence never modified for comfort, light, or airiness, surrounded by a dry moat. It was far off the beaten track: Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, a noted scholar associated with the court, called it forlorn, “esta desierta villa de Arévalo.”2 Enrique had wanted the queen to remain at court with the children, and when she refused, the king sent two hundred men to act as guards over them, which protected them from marauding gangs of robbers and kidnappers but also kept them closely sequestered.3 Even the physical environment was fierce and brutal, alternating between bitter cold in the winter and blistering heat in the summer. The snow-capped Guadarrama Mountains were visible in the distance, many miles away, across the flat, dry countryside.
The instability of Isabella’s family life mirrored conditions in the kingdom as a whole. The vacuum of leadership under the feckless King Enrique had permitted the kingdom to descend into chaos. The kingdom’s nobles, who could have helped rule in their regions, instead became brutal and bickering warlords, terrorizing the peasantry, cornering the resources of an increasingly impoverished land. Rape, theft, and murder were rampant.
This social breakdown occurred because the Iberian peninsula of Isabella’s youth was splintered into feuding fiefdoms: the combined kingdoms of Isabella’s homeland, known as Castile and León, encompassed the north and central parts of what would becomeSpain; the Portuguese held the lands along the western edge, facing directly onto the Atlantic Ocean. The Kingdoms of Valencia, Aragon, and Catalonia, in eastern Iberia, were joined together in an uneasy and unstable confederation, yoked through marriage toNavarre, a separate kingdom on the peninsula’s far north perimeter; they were oriented toward the east, to the Mediterranean Sea. The Moorish Kingdom of Granada, which stretched across the southern part of Spain from the Rock of Gibraltar to the port ofAlmería, the area known as Andalusia, controlled the Mediterranean coastline across from Africa.
With no central authority on the peninsula, chaos reigned, and most of the residents of Spain lived, as Isabella did, near or inside heavily armed compounds. The landscape was so dotted with these stone or wood fortifications, many planted atop steep precipices, that the central kingdom was named Castile, or Land of Castles. The Spanish people lived indoors, crouched behind thick walls made of stone, peering out through tiny windows that served as arrow slits, scanning the horizon for signs of danger, existing in a state ofperpetual readiness for conflict. Isabella grew up in a land that was almost perpetually at war.
Despite all these problems, Isabella had a particular advantage. During her childhood, a coterie of competent adults stepped in to fill the parental void in the lives of Isabella and Alfonso, during the years in which they learned to walk and talk. Only one of their grandparents was still alive, Queen Isabel’s mother, Isabel of Barcelos, a Portuguese widow in her fifties who came from the wealthy and powerful Braganza clan. Grandmother Isabel came to live with her daughter’s family in Arévalo when the young Princess Isabella was still a toddler. She kept a watchful eye over the household. Isabel of Barcelos was an intelligent and competent woman, with life experience that allowed her to help shape Isabella’s worldview and prepare her for governance. “A notable woman of great counsel,” she was also a “great help and consolation to her daughter,” said chronicler Diego de Valera.4
Grandmother Isabel was part of what the Portuguese call “the Illustrious Generation,” the children of King João I of Portugal, who lived from 1358 to 1433. His oldest son, Duarte, was known as a philosopher; the next son, Pedro, was a patron of the arts; another son was Henrique, the famous Henry the Navigator; the youngest son, Fernando, martyred in Morocco during a failed invasion attempt, was named a saint. Isabel’s own husband had been João, the son best known for his sage advice and wisdom, who had held the influential position of constable of Portugal. Grandmother Isabel also had royal blood, as she was herself a granddaughter of King João I. The Portuguese ruling family believed the key to the future was maritime seafaring and international trade, and they aggressively pursued it. Such overseas expansions were enriching Portugal and giving it an outsize role in world affairs. These were lessons taught to Princess Isabella and that she took to heart.
A husband-and-wife team attached to the family would also play a significant continuing role in Isabella’s life. The wife was Clara Alvarnáez, Isabella’s governess, who had come to Castile from Portugal with Isabella’s mother and grandmother. Clara’s husband,Gonzalo Chacón, had been a courtier to Isabella’s father, King Juan II, and he was one of the people to whom the king had entrusted the education of his children. Chacón was also administrator of Queen Isabel’s household—a role he had also played for Álvaro de Luna, which meant that he, like Isabella’s mother and grandmother, had previously participated in the governing of the kingdom. They were out of the limelight now, but they had all lived in the bright, hot center where politics, family, and governance intersected. Moreover, they were ambitious to return to the focal point of power.
The governor of the castle in Arévalo was a man named Mosén Pedro de Bobadilla, married with three children who became Isabella’s playmates.5 The two families grew close. The Bobadilla family had a long history of service to the crown, with an ancestor who had served as chief of the treasury to Alfonso XI, and who had been sent as an ambassador to the pope at Avignon. Pedro’s daughter Beatriz, who was about a decade older than Isabella, assumed a sisterly role with the princess. Comely, persuasive, and piercingly intelligent, she became Isabella’s most loyal friend and confidante. From these unlikely beginnings, the two women rose together to dominate Spain. Beatriz was more than a friend. She was a brilliant ally and strategist, with a magic touch for bringing new allies to their side.
During these years, there was hardly any mention of Isabella’s existence in court documents or chronicles. A scrap or two of a phrase would suggest the princess had been moved from place to place or had been taken to visit a historic site—once she visited the historic Visigothic capital city of Toledo—but nobody was paying much attention to her. She grew up to be pretty, demure, and devout, third in line for the throne but valued mainly for her potential value as a pawn in a political marriage at some future point. Herbirth had gone almost unnoticed in Spain and foreign capitals, and her childhood passed unremarked as well. Why would she, in any case, have attracted much attention? Girl children at the time were viewed as scarcely worth mentioning, not just in Christian culture but also in the Hebrew and Arab worlds as well. It was almost inconceivable that a woman would exert any real power, much less change the world.
In Arévalo the princess was taught her letters and became an avid reader. She was curious about the world, intrigued by accounts of odd and strange animals and plants found in distant lands. She favored stories about King Arthur’s court, and heroic accounts—mythological, biblical, and legendary—of people behaving nobly in the face of adversity. A Hispanicized book about Joan of Arc’s life, called La Poncella de Francia, was presented as a model for Isabella’s life, and Joan’s militant religiosity was explicitly described as a “better example” for Isabella to follow than the lives of “any of the other ladies.”6 Isabella also liked Aesop’s fables, collections of stories about animal characters that teach moral lessons.
Her formal education was solid but perfunctory. She was taught protocol and domestic skills and was introduced to grammar, philosophy, and history. She was multilingual, reading French and Italian and speaking not just Castilian Spanish but also Portuguese, the language of her mother and grandmother. She was musically gifted, as was her mother, and she played several instruments well and also sang sweetly. She was a good dancer.
She was not, however, given the education that a man would have received, particularly to a man being prepared to govern. For example, she received no childhood instruction in Latin, the language of international diplomacy. This clear and embarrassing deficiency in her education was one of which she soon became acutely aware.
Instead she was trained in needlepoint and embroidery, then essential ingredients in the rearing of female children, and was tutored in the other skills expected of the wife of a ruler. She also developed the requisite social skills. She was strong and active, physically fearless, a good horsewoman at home in the saddle. She loved to hunt; she enjoyed parties, games, art, and architecture. Her behavior was viewed as appropriate for her age and station, attracting little additional comment.
Most important for her future, during these years she developed an iron-willed self-control, which allowed her to conceal her emotions while she pondered how to respond to the situations that presented themselves to her. This came to be an important part of her character because she learned to keep her own counsel. Soon she would realize that this skill was the key to her survival.
She became devoutly religious. Christianity was the bedrock of life in medieval Europe, and religious instruction formed a large part of Isabella’s education. There was an active Franciscan monastery in Arévalo, so religious scholars were always present, and Isabella became particularly fond of that religious order, and of Saint Francis, its founder, who had dedicated himself to a life of poverty and simplicity. She considered her own patron saints to be Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist, the only one of the twelve apostles who was not martyred in the early days of Christianity, and who had cared for Jesus’s mother in Ephesus in her old age. It was this second patron saint, John the Evangelist, who had written the Gospel according to John, one of the four canonical accounts of the life of Christ.
Many of her mother’s friends were also deeply religious. Beatriz de Silva, the Portuguese noblewoman who had attracted the king’s eye and been locked in a closet before embracing a religious vocation as a nun, participated in Isabella’s education, as did an attendant of her mother’s named Teresa Enríquez. Beatriz founded a new female religious order, Concepcionistas, which celebrated the special spiritual role played by Jesus’s mother. Enríquez was given the sobriquet loca de sacramento because of her zeal for taking communion. These one-on-one lessons in faith were supplemented in her teenage years by what was viewed as appropriate reading material, such as Friar Martín de Córdoba’s Garden of Noblewomen, which was a guidebook for character development in women, written specifically with Isabella in mind. It stressed extreme piety, even providing a specific list of acceptable activities, which included attending mass each day, reciting prayers, hearing sermons, and conversing with church elders about religious teachings. Female purity was also essential, according to Martín: “Even if a woman’s virtues might have mounted to the heavens, without chastity they are nothing but dross and ashes in the wind; because the woman who is not chaste, even if she is lovely, makes herself foul, and the more beautiful she is, the greater the filth and corruption.”7
Isabella’s childhood was not altogether austere, however. Although Arévalo and Madrigal were comparative backwaters, one nearby town became a favorite destination for the princess. Medina del Campo, twenty miles from Arévalo, a long day’s ride by horse or mule, was one of Europe’s preeminent shopping destinations. It was a market town that drew merchants from all over the known world who bought and sold rich fabrics, jewelry, foodstuffs, leather goods, tools, toys, cosmetics, medicines, rare spices, and exotic fruits. It was a beautiful town, with forty church and convent spires rising in the sky, and streets lined with splendid homes inhabited by wealthy merchants, financiers, and noblemen.8 Its international ambiance made it one of Castile’s most cosmopolitan cities. “There was no other luxury market in all Europe, not even in the courts of the Italian princes, that could compare with the one of Castile,” writes the historian Jaime Vicens Vives.9
The source of all this prosperity was the wool trade. Wool, the product of the kingdom’s great flocks of sheep and the primary source of wealth for the nation’s nobility, was the core commodity in Medina del Campo. The town’s affluence made wool seem a secure staple of life to Isabella and the nation’s nobles, and so they did not appear to pay much attention to the industrial and mercantile development that was under way elsewhere on the continent, new trends that were reshaping the economy of the rest of Europe.
Certainly Isabella must have looked on the bright array of merchandise for sale in Medina del Campo with a great deal of longing, for her family’s finances were frequently straitened. That should not have been the case. King Juan’s will had provided comfortably for the widowed queen and her children. The queen was to retain custody of the children “as long as she remained chaste.”10 She was also to receive the tax revenue from the towns of Arévalo, Madrigal, Soria, and the suburbs of Madrid. Isabella was to receive the taxes from the town of Cuéllar, and on her twelfth birthday, she was slated to receive one million maravedis from the town of Madrigal. When her mother died, the tax proceeds from that town were destined to go to her, which would ensure a comfortable inheritance. Alfonso, the next heir to the throne, was provided for even more generously. He was to become the grand master of Santiago, the rich post that Álvaro de Luna had once held, and on his fourteenth birthday, he was to step into the job as constable of Castile. He was given the tax revenues from four towns and was slated to inherit the taxes from all his mother’s holdings, except Madrigal, when she died.
But King Enrique “did not respect his father’s wishes,” chroniclers noted, and instead gave away the territories and properties that Juan had intended to provide for his second family’s support.11 He gave the mastership of Santiago to one of his favorite friends, and he made another the constable. And he later stripped the revenue from Cuéllar from Isabella and gave it away. Enrique “worked actively to deny” Isabella her inheritance, a course that caused the princess “financial hardship,” writes the scholar María Isabel del Val Valdivieso.12
This left the family in a more precarious financial situation than they should have been in. In fact, one court chronicler, Hernando del Pulgar, wrote that Isabella had faced “an extreme lack of necessary things” in her childhood—something that must have been painful to a young girl who longed for fine clothes and jewelry, and who later dressed in such splendor that foreign diplomats found her appearance startling in its grandeur.13
There were other signs as well that King Enrique did not have the best interests of Isabella and her family foremost in his mind. Shortly after Juan’s death, Enrique went to Arévalo to see Queen Isabel, his stepmother. He was accompanied by a courtier, Pedro Girón, who was ostensibly master of the order of Calatrava, a celibate religious and military order sworn to defend the faith. Girón, however, was not in fact a holy man but a degenerate roué who considered his vocation something of a joke, a tedious trade-off for the financial benefits the position conveyed. Enrique allowed Pedro, clearly the queen’s social inferior, to make some sort of a distasteful sexual advance to the pious twenty-six-year-old widow, which chronicler Alonso de Palencia said offended her deeply. The incident humiliated Queen Isabel and underscored the powerlessness of the onetime queen. She found it menacing. After that time, Palencia noted, she “closed herself into a dark room, self-condemned to silence, and dominated by such depression that it degenerated into a form of madness.”14
What were the men thinking? Pedro Girón may have just been a lout, or he may have been genuinely interested in an amorous encounter with the queen, who was still attractive. And what about King Enrique? It’s possible that the new king thought it was funny to take his young and pretty stepmother down a peg. He might have thought it was comical.
Or he might have had a more ominous motive. The sexual proposition, if it had been welcomed by the lonely young widow, could have also created an incident that would have allowed Enrique to claim that the queen had failed to remain chaste, as specified in her husband’s will. And if the queen were deemed to be unchaste, she would consequently lose custody of her children.
The incident therefore raised the troubling possibility that Enrique and his allies intended to try to gain control of the children at some point. This event was one more reason that the queen and her mother kept the children out of the limelight, sequestered in Arévalo, where they stayed for at least seven years.
The ugly scene was a good example of the contradictions at play within King Enrique’s character. For while he was in some ways a sensitive soul, he could also be a clumsy oaf. Even his physical appearance was an odd dichotomy. He was tall and blond, with large fingers and hands and “a fierce aspect, almost like a lion,” that struck fear in those who saw him.15 But his mannerisms were much at odds with his appearance, because he liked to sing, in a voice that was “sweet and well-modulated,” preferring sad and melancholy songs. Gruff and unpolished in demeanor, he was softhearted and malleable to those who had learned how to manipulate him. One of his few surviving portraits depicts him wearing a flowery hat, riding sidesaddle on the back of a horse festooned with ribbons and bells.
Enrique initially basked in popularity in Castile and was known by the sobriquet Enrique El Generoso. He built many buildings and was a great benefactor to churches and monasteries. He was known to be contemplative and thoughtful and enjoyed long and uplifting conversations with clerics in beautiful and serene settings.16
His favorite home was the majestic city of Segovia, the site of the towering Roman aqueduct and many beautiful churches, a place where he had found peace and happiness ever since his childhood. Although he moved around the kingdom a good deal because the Spanish royal court was essentially itinerant, Segovia was always his preferred destination. He fondly called it “mi Segovia,” something he did with no other place in Castile. He favored the city in many ways and financed public works and construction projects that provided many jobs, spreading affluence through the population. Residents of the city felt privileged and grateful for the royal association and the prosperity it created, and warmly welcomed him each time he arrived.
A home had been built specifically for him in Segovia when he was a boy, and it was a place he always loved. It was known as the Royal Monastery of St. Anthony, or San Antonio El Real, located on the outskirts of the city, which allowed him easy access to city life, the Alcázar fortress, and also the great outdoors, as he spent many hours riding in the countryside and communing with nature. He probably intended to be buried there one day, because a large room adjacent to the nave seemed to offer suitable space for a burial chamber or memorial. He felt secure and safe in Segovia.
Enrique was also a gentle animal-lover who kept his own menagerie, including lions, ocelots, deer, bear cubs, leopards, and his personal favorite, a large mountain goat. He spent long hours hunting in the forests surrounding Segovia and Madrid. But he employed such pursuits to avoid dealing with the unpleasant tasks of governing. Deferring troublesome decisions did not resolve them, however, and his indolence and aversion to hard work often caused small problems to worsen.
Enrique was, in short, a man of placid good will, conciliatory, who sought to make friends rather than create enemies, and in another era he might have remained a well-loved figure. He and his father had been in fierce opposition to each other for much of Enrique’s young adulthood, but when his father died, the prince had been at his side. One of his first steps upon becoming king was to permit 159 of his father’s political appointees to keep their jobs, rather than putting his own appointees in the positions. “I don’t doubt that the death of the king, my father, who has gone to glory, has left you with great pain and sadness,” he told them.17 He also pardoned political adversaries who had been exiled, shunned, or imprisoned, returning their properties and titles to them, which allowed them to begin circulating around the kingdom once again.
These were the actions of a kind and tolerant man—but they had unfortunate political ramifications. Soon Enrique was surrounded by people who had no particular sense of allegiance to him and who came to view their posts as sinecures they held as a matter of right. Moreover, it gave the enemies of his family, notably his Aragonese cousins, envious of his Castilian domains, free rein to engage in treasonous activities designed to undermine his administration. Released to do mischief, they were not grateful but worked constantly to undermine him. It was a ruthless era, and Enrique had made a fatal error.
Another aspect of Enrique’s life made him particularly vulnerable to attack. He enjoyed frequent and lengthy getaways with handsome young men, often meeting with them at his hunting lodges on the outskirts of town. He was almost certainly a homosexual. This would not have been a political problem as long as he managed to produce enough heirs to the throne to assure a smooth succession. But this he failed to do, and it happened at a time when attitudes toward homosexuality were hardening in Europe. Through much of the Middle Ages, there was tolerance and even romanticizing of same-sex relationships, but as economic times grew tougher and financial conditions more competitive, cultural attitudes began changing. The hedonism and cultural flowering of the early Renaissance was also causing a conservative backlash. Religious fanatics urged church faithful to renounce worldly ways and the pleasures of the flesh and vigorously chastised those who failed to do so. Born within one year of Isabella, for example, were two Florentine men, the painter and scientist Leonardo da Vinci, who was vividly and flamboyantly gay, and Girolamo Savonarola, a fiery, ascetic priest who preached against art as a contributing factor in the spread of vice and spiritual decay. The era’s clash of cultural values wasn’t limited to Spain.
The overt homosexual behavior in Segovia was criticized by many Spaniards and noticed even by some foreigners. The Czech pilgrim Schaseck, traveling with a nobleman who was entertained by King Enrique at the Alcázar in Segovia, was shocked by the activities he witnessed at Enrique’s court. “Indeed they live such an impure and sodomitical life that one would be reluctant and ashamed to speak of their crimes,” Schaseck wrote in a memoir of his trip that was widely circulated upon his return home.18
And sadly, as his father had done before him, Enrique developed attachments to certain men that allowed him to be easily manipulated, in ways that frequently damaged his own interests or hurt his family. The initial object of his affections was one Juan Pacheco, the brother of Pedro Girón, who had made the sexual advance to Queen Isabel.
Pacheco in turn had been a protégé of Enrique’s father’s friend Álvaro de Luna and, in fact, had been introduced to the royal household by Álvaro, who was then acting as guardian to young Enrique, with his father’s acquiescence. Soon after he assumed the throne, Enrique named Pacheco to be the Marquess of Villena, a post that brought him great riches and that allowed him to advance the interests of his brother, the distasteful Pedro Girón, including having him named master of the prestigious and lucrative order of Calatrava.
Enrique was mesmerized by Juan Pacheco and greatly influenced by him, even dominated by him, often in ways that would prove detrimental, for Pacheco did not possess the redeeming qualities or loyalty that Álvaro de Luna had displayed toward King Juan. Pacheco was cunning, duplicitous, and self-serving, willing to cause grave injury to others to obtain even a small advantage for himself. The normally mild-mannered chronicler Enríquez del Castillo described him as a “mirror of ingratitude, tyranny, insatiable disordered greed.”19
Pacheco was not the only one who took advantage of Enrique. The king was generous to a fault and frittered away his treasury on gifts and grants to boyfriends who simply became greedy for more, making them impossible to satisfy. It was in this manner, rather than through spite on Enrique’s part, that the rents and properties that should have been given to Isabella’s family migrated elsewhere.
Castillo, Enrique’s chronicler, reported that Diego Arias, Enrique’s chief accountant and treasurer, warned him that he was becoming overextended: “Certainly Your Highness has too many expenses, and without any benefit, because you are giving much to eat to many people who aren’t serving you, and who don’t deserve it, and it would be better if you changed course and paid only those who served you and not those who provide you with no benefit.” Enrique replied mournfully that he had no choice—that a spirit of magnanimity was expected of a king who wished to maintain the support of his subjects.20
King Enrique temporarily moved his court to Arévalo in 1454 and 1455, when Isabella was about four years old, which is about the time most children begin to have an awareness of the broader world around them. Intense excitement followed in his wake, because he soon declared war on the Muslims in Granada. As was family custom, Enrique raised the standard of his ancestor, the Visigothic leader Pelayo. “As faithful Christians . . . we must destroy the enemies who persecute our faith,” he told his countrymen, winning cheers and applause.21 Many were eager for a new war. Some of course were eager to embark for religious reasons, but there was also the promise of booty. Even making the announcement of an impending military campaign got money flowing: additional taxes were levied against nobles, the towns, and the clergy to pay for the expense, and the Spanish-born pope, Calixtus III, who was from Aragon, gave Enrique the power to raise additional money by granting him the right to sell indulgences to soldiers, who could use them to wash away their sins. The pope later allowed Enrique to sell indulgences for posthumously removing sins of dead people, thus allowing relatives to ensure that their deceased loved ones made it to heaven, regardless of the extent of the transgressions during their lifetimes.22
Moreover, a royal wedding was on the horizon, normally a festive and celebratory event that everyone would enjoy. Enrique was engaged in marriage negotiations with a beautiful Portuguese princess named Juana, who was much admired for her fine dancing skills. There was much excited chatter over the impending nuptials, which could affect the succession to the crown if Enrique produced an heir. And then Enrique and his courtiers were again on their way, this time to the wedding site in Córdoba, leaving Arévalo behind. His young siblings were not included in the wedding party.
Princess Juana, buxom and flirtatious, arrived for the wedding in May 1455, with a train of pretty Portuguese ladies-in-waiting dressed in gowns “cut to reveal rather than to cover.”23 Enrique, however, appeared less than enthusiastic about the wedding and maintained a dour demeanor, seemingly not in the mood for a “fiesta.”24
The courtiers soon found that extravagant gifts and costly entertainments were the most effective way to make the young queen happy. At a lavish banquet in Córdoba, a bishop who wanted to curry favor with her passed around a bowl containing jeweled rings, allowing Juana and her attendants to each pick one out as a party favor.
King Enrique was free to marry Juana because he had just succeeded in obtaining a divorce from his previous wife, his cousin Blanca, a “virtuous and beautiful” princess from Aragon.25 He had been married to Blanca for thirteen years. The union had started out on the wrong foot from the beginning when the prince, then a shy and awkward fifteen-year-old, failed to consummate the marriage on the wedding night. The nuptial night had been admittedly stressful—Blanca’s father, Juan, the ruler of Aragon, who was feuding with Enrique’s father, strode around in the hallway outside the bridal chamber, so it was not too surprising that the young couple failed to reach their goal. But thirteen more years passed, and they still failed to have a child. Finally Enrique elected to seek a divorce on the grounds of nonconsummation of the marriage, saying that he had been “bewitched” and unable to achieve an erection with the princess, most probably because of sorcery.26 He blamed all this on the unfortunate princess, arranging for two prostitutes to testify that he had performed admirably in their company. A three-priest panel approved the divorce, and Blanca was sent packing back home to Aragon.
But in a grim reminder of Enrique’s previous wedding night, the marriage with his new bride, Juana, was not consummated on this occasion either. Again, a crowd of court officials gathered in anticipation of viewing the bloodstained bedsheets, and again, they left disappointed. The wedding night “pleased nobody,” a court observer said.27
Soon after the public nuptial ceremonies, Enrique and his new bride went to the king’s home in Segovia, where the bridal couple were feted at a seemingly endless round of balls, hunting expeditions, and entertainments. They split their time between two palaces—the Alcázar and another nearby residence called the San Martín palace, both in Segovia, where Enrique embarked on a round of architectural remodeling. The Alcázar was “completely renovated,” with the addition of much rich ornamentation, under the direct supervision of the king. The court’s reputation for “magnificent opulence and splendor grew moment to moment,” writes the historian Don Eduardo de Oliver-Copóns.28
But as admiration grew in some circles, many other people came to view the king’s diversions as distracting him from the kingdom’s most pressing business. Criticism of his administration mounted. Leaders who see their power eroding frequently launch a military campaign to draw popular jingoistic support, but even this time-honored political tool backfired on King Enrique when he at last set off to reconquer Granada.
The campaign had been financed with money contributed by the church faithful. It became common knowledge that a large share of the campaign money went to Beltrán de la Cueva, a charming and handsome courtier who had found favor with both the king and the new queen, while soldiers were left unpaid.29 Once on the road with his court entourage, Enrique treated the expedition as more of a burlesque than a campaign. The giddy young queen and her attendants trailed along. At one point the ladies rode out to the battlefield, and Juana laughingly shot arrows into the air in comic participation. The king seemed to take it all as a great joke, and in fact, he accepted gifts from North African leaders while purportedly assailing their allies. The king of Fez sent him melons, lotus fruit, and specialized horse fittings and, for his wife, musk, frankincense, and vanilla-scented balsam.30 Seasoned soldiers and those deeply concerned about Islamic intentions in southern Spain were “shamed and angry” and shared their concerns with the archbishop of Toledo, Alfonso Carrillo, for whom it became one more piece of evidence that conditions in Castile were deteriorating by the day. Coming just a few years after the fall of Constantinople, Enrique’s cavalier or benign attitude toward Muslims attracted much critical comment in Castile. Some came to see it as a betrayal of Castile’s culture and religion.
Given the tenor of the times, Enrique’s methods of war-making also made him a laughingstock. Much of the practice of war in those days entailed one side doing economic damage to the other—setting fire to their crops and killing their livestock—opening the prospect that the weaker side would pay bribes to make the marauding soldiers go away. Part of the pleasure of the enterprise was permitting people to undertake activities that would never be tolerated in peaceful times. Young men in particular relished the chance to display their machismo through daring acts of vandalism that took them into contact with the enemy. But Enrique commanded that they were not to burn down olive groves, because they took too long to grow and bear fruit. He lectured his troops on the preciousness of both human and natural life, leaving his soldiers “incredulous.”31
During those years, Enrique’s younger half siblings Isabella and Alfonso remained in Arévalo with their mother, grandmother, and family friends. Alfonso had a special role as heir to the throne, but the close-knit group continued to live apart, in their own little world, hearing only distant reports from the front. The same core group of adults—grandmother Isabel, the Bobadilla family, and Gonzalo Chacón and his wife—shielded and sheltered them and gave them a sense of security and stability.
As Isabella left behind her early childhood years, she became interested in hearing stories about other girls and their lives, as girls her age often are. Fascinating news came from France when Isabella was about five. Europe was engaged in an intense reevaluation of the role of Joan of Arc, the French teenager who had organized her countrymen around a religious banner to eject a foreign invader. Joan, born in a small village, believed she had been told by visions of saints to rally the French people against the English, in defense of the heir to the French throne, the Dauphin Charles. Joan had shamed her countrymen into seeing war not as an economic enterprise or as a demonstration of valor but as a spiritual quest. Joan was caught by the English and burned at the stake for the heresy, in 1431, two decades before Isabella was born.32 The specific charge was that at war and in prison, Joan had worn men’s clothes, something that is prohibited in the book of Deuteronomy. The French government convened a second trial in 1456 that reevaluated all the evidence, cleared Joan’s name, and paved the way for her eventual elevation to sainthood. Joan’s experience and sacrifice was a story that many men and women of a spiritual bent found mesmerizing in these last days of the medieval era. People everywhere debated what role God had played in helping Joan achieve her signal victories.
This conversation had particular resonance at the palace in Arévalo. Some of the people who were educating Isabella had been much taken with Joan and her military successes. Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo, one of the clerics associated with the Castilian court, had been living in France during Joan’s meteoric career and was a fervent admirer of hers. Gonzalo Chacón, head of their household staff and the husband of Isabella’s governess, shared his recollections of how Isabella’s father had welcomed Joan’s envoys with great respect. He carried about with him a letter purportedly from Joan herself and displayed it like a holy relic. He is believed to have been the author who wrote about a character like Joan in an anonymous chronicle, saying that God alone had inspired her.33 Some versions of that chronicle, the book known as La Poncella de Francia, were explicitly dedicated to Princess Isabella. In this version of the tale, the young woman called La Poncella did not die but rode off happily into the sunset.34
Some of the people around Isabella may have been presenting Joan of Arc’s life as an ideal that Isabella could emulate, as a “heaven-sent” woman who could “save the realm” from an outside invader.35 Joan’s life was being reconceived, reengineered, as an acceptable role a woman could play in warfare. The goal of those circulating these stories may have been to influence Isabella and bring her to see herself as a second Joan of Arc. In any case, whether the idea was impressed upon her or she came up with it herself, it found fertile ground in Isabella’s imagination, because she already had a tendency to view herself as something of a martyr for a cause and she had the kind of romantic temperament that appreciated people who made great sacrifices in pursuit of a common good. Moreover, she had a deep and fervent belief in miracles and signs from God. Soon she would seek out people to work with her who viewed the world in the same way.
In this phase of her life, however, Isabella’s primary importance was still as a political pawn in the royal marriage market. In 1457, when she was six years old, Enrique negotiated a double marriage for Isabella and Alfonso. Isabella was to marry Ferdinand, the younger son of King Juan II, their Aragonese cousin, and Alfonso would marry Juana, King Juan’s youngest daughter.36 This was a solid but second-choice marriage proposition for Isabella because the boy, Ferdinand, was not the heir to a throne. He had an older brother, Carlos, who was heir to the thrones of Aragon and Navarre, two kingdoms that abutted Castile. And a marriage to Juana was good enough for Alfonso because Enrique assumed he would at some point have an heir of his own, who would someday be the king and would marry a woman of highest rank. For Isabella, marriage to Ferdinand seemed a pleasant prospect. He was about her age and was reported to be athletic, personable, and quick-witted. He was also her second cousin. The close interactions and fierce rivalries within the family would have guaranteed that reports about the boy frequently reached her ears. She came to believe Ferdinand was her intended mate and Aragon her likely destination.
Then, when Isabella was about ten years old, Enrique announced a new alliance with Ferdinand’s older half brother Carlos—and offered Isabella as wife to him instead. Carlos, eager to solidify ties to Castile, quickly agreed. Now, instead of a fiancé of her own age, Isabella learned she was pledged in marriage to a forty-year-old man. This development would certainly have been disconcerting to the princess, particularly after years of being told she would marry an attractive boy her age. But no trace of her reaction remains. In fact, she would not have been expected to have much of an opinion. It was not an issue in which she had any control. Her brother the king had complete authority over her person, to give in marriage as he saw best. For the next year, Isabella adjusted herself to this new development.
Around the same time, Isabella’s life suddenly changed in an even more immediate way. In about 1461 or early 1462, when she was ten years old and her brother was eight, King Enrique ordered the two children to join him immediately. Isabella and Alfonso were abruptly yanked from the sheltered home they shared with their mother and were moved to court permanently, under armed guard. Their relocation from a stable rural base to a series of sophisticated metropolitan hubs came at a time of rising international tensions. The marriage negotiations had been part of a shifting political strategy that was reaching a sour conclusion. King Juan II of the neighboring Kingdom of Aragon, the father of Carlos, Ferdinand, and Juana, was stirring up trouble for King Enrique with his Castilian nobles; King Enrique in return was encouraging the Aragonese to rebel against King Juan. Enrique wanted to be sure he had control of the two children, the promised marriage partners and current heirs to the throne, but other issues were also coming into play. EvenCastillo, Enrique’s most sympathetic chronicler, acknowledged that some among the court had “sinister motives” for gaining possession of the children.37 As long as Enrique remained childless, they were potential competitors to the throne. And as step-siblings to the king, the two children were vulnerable to his whims.
The two semi-orphaned children were being sent off to a court that was growing increasingly licentious and undisciplined. There was little apparent plan for caring for the children. Queen Juana was young and callow, a teenager operating in a court with minimal adult supervision. She and her ladies-in-waiting engaged in exuberant flirtations with male courtiers. Their sexual escapades offended older, more conservative, and religious court observers. “Generous damsels” is how they were described by one wit, who was not referring to their purses.38
Enrique was also a less-than-stellar parental figure. His court was dominated by his corps of all-male friends—“peasants, jugglers, entertainers, muleteers, sharp-eyed peddlers,” people at whom noble families were likely to look askance in such a class-conscious society, and with whom Enrique liked to socialize in private settings.39 He enjoyed holding forth in the Moorish style, sitting on cushions and rugs instead of upon a throne, often dressed in a turban or hooded cape, an affectation that would have seemed harmless or romantic except for the fact that Castile was at war with Granada. The charming young courtier Beltrán de la Cueva attracted considerable attention as well, particularly after he won the affections of both monarchs. “He could please the king as well as the queen,” scholar Teofilo Ruiz notes tartly.40
Isabella, aged about ten, began to act as a lady-in-waiting to Juana and observed the goings-on as part of the queen’s entourage, which kept her in constant proximity to Juana, almost around the clock. She became aware at a young age of the sexual escapades that were engulfing the court. She did not get drawn into them, however, maintaining a detachment and unusual seriousness of purpose and piety, behavior that must have made her seem oddly old for her years and certainly out of step with the crowd. During the next few years, she remained part of the queen’s household, living principally in Segovia, in its majestic Alcázar.41 Alfonso’s education was handed over to a well-trained gentleman of the court; Isabella was to be educated by the feckless young queen.
Isabella later recalled this period of her life as a frightening, isolating, and forlorn time. “When my brother Alfonso and I were children,” she would write, “we were forcibly and intentionally taken from the arms of our mother and raised under the authority of the Queen Doña Juana.… It was a dangerous guardianship for us and . . . had infamous influences.”42 She told her older brother Enrique, in a letter also written in later years, that she sought to keep herself as much in seclusion as possible for self-protection: “I remained in my palace in order to avoid your immorality, taking care for my honor and fearing for my life . . . [persevering] through the grace of God.”43
She learned to take consolation, as she did throughout her life, in religion. One of Spain’s most respected clerics happened to live in a monastery just down the hill from Segovia’s Alcázar, and his important family connections made him venerated. He was aDominican friar who dressed in simple monk garb, lived abstemiously, and retreated from time to time into a cave for quiet contemplation. His uncle was a famous cardinal living in Rome, but this nephew had not gone to live with his well-heeled uncle but instead stayed home to play a vital role in the community’s spiritual life. His name was Tomás de Torquemada, and he became, at least from time to time, confessor to both Isabella and Alfonso during these childhood years.
It was not surprising that Isabella would place her trust in a sober local prelate. Both children needed powerful allies wherever they could find them.
And now there was more news at the court. Queen Juana had at last become pregnant, surprising everyone, and in February 1462 she produced the long-desired heir. Isabella was there at the childbirth, as part of the queen’s entourage. Following specific rules of court ritual, the queen gave birth squatting, with a platoon of observers flanking her. One nobleman supported her body as the queen writhed in pain. On one side stood Juan Pacheco, the king’s favorite, observing the proceedings. On the other side stood Alfonso Carrillo, archbishop of Toledo, with two other dignitaries. It was a difficult labor, after which she gave birth to a daughter, who was named Juana, in the family pattern of naming the child after the parent. Soon afterward the baby was baptized by Carrillo. Princess Isabella served as godmother to the child.44
Given King Enrique’s previous problems with sexual performance, some whispered at the time about whether the king was truly the baby’s father. The thirteen years of impotence during his first marriage raised questions, but he may have found a medical solution to his infertility. Jerónimo Münzer, a German physician who visited Spain in those years, said he was told that Enrique’s “member was thin and weak at the base but large at the head,” making it difficult for him to sustain an erection, but that the queen had undergone artificial insemination by having a golden tube filled with Enrique’s semen inserted into her vagina.45 Some Jewish physicians who were consulted about the problem, however, believed Enrique to be hopelessly infertile.
Enrique added some grist to the rumor mill on his own. Within a week of Juana’s birth, Enrique named Beltrán de la Cueva to be the Count of Ledesma, a major new honor for a nobleman of fairly humble birth. This fact became another item of salacious gossip at the court.
Many festivities were held to celebrate the birth, including a joust. In May, Enrique brought the nobles together in Madrid to swear an oath of support to the newborn princess. In July in Toledo the Cortes, the kingdom’s governing assembly, repeated the pledge.
The Castilian nobility took the oath of loyalty to the baby girl as the heir apparent. But given his previous testimony about impotence in his divorce proceedings with Blanca, Enrique’s opponents soon raised questions about Juana’s legitimacy and right to the throne. They dubbed the child Juana la Beltraneja—or Juana the daughter of Beltrán, the bisexual courtier. On the very day that Enrique’s close friend Juan Pacheco swore the oath of obedience to the infant princess, he drafted and signed a document disputing the child’s right to the throne. In that statement, Pacheco said he swore the oath out of “fear” of the king but “did not intend . . . to harm nor cause prejudice in the succession of the said kingdom.”46
Certainly there was some reason for questioning the child’s parentage. Queen Juana’s flirtatious interactions had fueled speculations about her morals. People began recalling a particular incident, one that had been witnessed by foreign diplomats, in which De la Cueva fought a joust in which he ostentatiously bore the letter J, the initial of the woman in whose honor he was competing. Many inferred that his love object was the queen herself.47
Against this backdrop of sexual intrigue and gossipy chatter, Isabella as a person virtually disappeared into the woodwork. Her name would pop into conversations as an available bargaining chip in potential foreign alliances, and she became a pawn in one political scheme after another, particularly after 1461, when Prince Carlos of Aragon, her intended, suddenly died. Carlos’s death opened up new possibilities for Enrique because of King Juan’s unpopularity at home. A group of Catalans proposed, after Carlos’s death, that Enrique should become the next king of Aragon—an idea that Enrique found agreeable. The dispute threatened to become murderous, as Carlos’s father, King Juan of Aragon, who was still living, did not think it was a good idea at all.
In his typical double-dealing manner, Juan Pacheco suggested that King Louis XI of France, a man who was living up to his new nickname “The Universal Spider,” be permitted to mediate the succession dispute, giving the French king a valuable commission for which Pacheco would be generously rewarded. At Pacheco’s urging, Enrique foolishly agreed. Then King Louis accepted a generous bribe from Aragon as well and threw his weight to Carlos’s father rather than to Enrique, making Enrique feel both stupid and angry. That added to the strains between Pacheco and Enrique and also put Castile at loggerheads with both Aragon and France.
Now Enrique needed a new alliance, another kingdom that could give him military support. He reached out to negotiate with England, starting in 1463. Suddenly a marriage offer from that distant land opened up a new world of possibility for the young princess. Ambassadors from England came to Spain to negotiate for her possible marriage to “Europe’s most eligible bachelor,” the dashing and handsome heir to the English throne, Edward IV.48
Soon, it appeared, Isabella of Castile, the younger sister of the king, would become queen of England.