Isabel the Queen

Life and Times

Peggy K. Liss

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780812218978
• eBook ISBN: 9780812293203
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Queen Isabel of Castile is perhaps best known for her patronage of Christopher Columbus and for the religious zeal that led to the Spanish Inquisition, the waging of holy war, and the expulsion of Jews and Muslims across the Iberian peninsula. In this sweeping biography, newly revised and annotated to coincide with the five-hundredth anniversary of Isabel's death, Peggy K. Liss draws upon a rich array of sources to untangle the facts, legends, and fiercely held opinions about this influential queen and her decisive role in the tumultuous politics of early modern Spain. Isabel the Queen reveals a monarch who was a woman of ruthless determination and strong religious beliefs, a devoted wife and mother, and a formidable leader. As Liss shows, Isabel's piety and political ambition motivated her throughout her life, from her earliest struggles to claim her crown to her secret marriage to King Fernando of Aragón, a union that brought success in civil war, consolidated Christian hegemony over the Iberian peninsula, and set the stage for Spain to become a world empire.

I

Princess

Chapter 1

Walls and Gates: Castile, 1451

On Thursday, April 22, at four and two-thirds hours after midday in the year of our Lord 1451 was born the Holy Catholic Queen, Doña Isabel, daughter of the King, Don Juan II, and of the Queen, Doña Isabel, his second wife.

—Cronicón de Valladolid¹

The Queen, Our Lady, from childhood was without a father, and we can even say a mother. …. She had work and cares, and an extreme lack of necessary things.

—Hernando del Pulgar²

end BQ

In 1451 the town council of Murcia heard from the king of Castile, Juan II, of the birth on April 22 of an infante. An infante could be male or female, but the more specific term for a princess other than the heir presumptive is infanta. Such recourse to ambiguity, while undoubtedly cleared up by the royal messenger, carried notice that the king and his queen consort, Isabel of Portugal, had had a child who could inherit the crown of Castile. This infante was indeed an infanta, and was given the name of Isabel. At birth she was second in line of royal succession after her half-brother, Enrique, King Juan’s son by his first queen, María of Aragon. And Enrique, although twenty-six years old and married for quite a while, remained childless, making Isabel’s succession a possibility.

Murcia’s councilors quickly organized a procession and a mass of thanksgiving for the arrival of the royal child and the health of the queen. They took longer to comply with the order accompanying the king’s announcement that they honor the occasion with a gift to a certain royal secretary and treasurer. Faced with what to give and how to pay for it, the town fathers found 10,000 maravedís through mortgaging the income on municipal sales taxes on meat and fish, then decided that a fitting present to the royal functionary would be an esclava mora, a female Muslim slave. When the woman selected died of plague, Murcia’s corregidor—the royal official imposed on most municipal councils to oversee and expedite their business—simply appropriated another woman. Immediately, an irate couple appeared before the council complaining that their Miriem had been seized against her will. There is no record that Miriem was ever consulted, even when at length her masters agreed to sell her for the 10,000 maravedís budgeted by the council and paid to them through Abraham de Aloxas and Mose Axarques, Jews who either managed the public funds or advanced the sum against future repayment. With so much invested in their gift, the councilmen also hired a man and a mule to deliver Miriem to the house of her new owner.³

* * *

Plague and Muslims were facts of life in this town near the western edge of the Mediterranean Sea and had long represented a twin-pronged threat to Europe. In 1451, the year of Isabel’s birth, the most dreaded Muslims were the Ottoman Turks who, under the Grand Turk Mehmet II, began moving westward in earnest, and two years later would conquer Constantinople. Bubonic plague had arrived in Europe from the eastern Mediterranean a century earlier. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people had died of it, among them the king of Castile, Alfonso XI, in 1350, while besieging Muslim Gibraltar. His death had triggered a series of events leading to the reign of a new royal dynasty, the Trastámara, which was Isabel’s. Now, in the mid-fifteenth century, at Isabel’s birth, the devastated populace and economy were recovering, but epidemics still occurred sporadically. The death of her younger brother, Alfonso, purportedly caused by bubonic plague, would open for Isabel the way to the crown. And during her reign, those metaphors for evil, terms of pestilence and defilement, would proliferate, including in diatribes against Jews similar to the one Pedro Mártir delivered to the sultan of Egypt. But that is getting ahead of the story.

Madrigal de las Altas Torres

Isabel was born far inland, behind the lofty walls of Madrigal de las Altas Torres—Madrigal of the High Towers—in the heart of the meseta, the flat tableland at the heart of Castile. The forty-eight altas torres rising along the forty-foot-high walls ringing the town spoke of safety in a world geared to war, particularly war between Christian inhabitants and Muslim raiders. But those walls also spoke of paradox: made of brick and rubble, materials typical to mudéjar construction, they revealed an origin or an inspiration unequivocably Arabic.⁴ Madrigal, like other places on Spain’s central plateau, had been alternately occupied by Christians and Muslims until well into the eleventh century, and it was home to some inhabitants of Muslim culture afterward. In Madrigal too, in the great house abutting those walls called the royal palace, Isabel toddled under intricately worked wooden ceilings, artesonados, carved by mudéjares, Muslim subjects of Castile’s king. And tradition has it that she was baptized in Madrigal’s church of San Nicolás, in its baptismal font thickly encrusted with gold from Muslim Africa.

* * *

The red-brown soil around Madrigal is fertile, in the summer a landscape of wheat, grapevines, and Mediterranean light, irrigated by the Zapardiel River to the east, and by the Trabancas to the west. In 1451, Madrigal was essentially an agricultural town, with roughly nine hundred vecinos, or householders, translatable as between three thousand and forty-five hundred inhabitants. Outside its four gates, the land had been worked in concentric circles of garden plots, vineyards, and fields of grain; beyond lay deep woods. The forests provided firewood and game—with the help of Madrigal, it was said, “the king’s table held many partridges”—as well as acorns to feed pigs and cattle and to sustain the numerous herds of sheep that wintered in the area until their annual trek northward to spring and summer pasture. The vineyards yielded Madrigal’s white wine, “renowned for its good bouquet and better taste,” famed in Castile and sought after abroad, so celebrated that the poet Jorge Manrique could have a drunk in a tavern make the irreverent toast, “O, Beata Madrigal / ora pro nobis a Dios!”—“O blessed Madrigal, pray for us to God,” in a play on the words of the Ave María.⁵

Darkness and Light

Only an occasional reference sheds light on Isabel’s childhood. At seventeen, she wrote to her half-brother, the king Enrique IV, accusing him of having treated her badly, representing herself as a semi-orphan raised in obscurity and kept in want by him. Her court chronicler, Hernando del Pulgar, was to state that her early years were spent “in extreme lack of necessary things,” and that she was without a father and “we can even say a mother.”⁶

Isabel was three when her father, Juan II of Castile, died. He had doted on her mother, Isabel of Portugal, his young second wife, and, rumor had it, come to resent the control exerted over him by his longtime mentor, Alvaro de Luna, who sought to regulate the king’s conjugal visits to his queen. What is indisputable is that shortly after Isabel’s birth, Luna was beheaded at Juan’s order. Within a year, Juan, whether through regret or because Luna’s restraining hand was gone, grew immoderate, it was said, in the pleasures of love and table, fell ill of quartanary fevers, and although believing prophecies that he would live to be ninety, died on July 21,1454, and the crown passed to his elder son, Enrique. Juan was forty-nine years old, the longest-lived king of his dynasty in five generations.

Enrique IV was then thirty. He had had no children with his first wife, Blanca of Navarre, and his second, Juana of Portugal, would have none until Isabel was ten; until then Isabel grew up seeing her younger brother, Alfonso—born in November 1453 when she was two—as heir apparent to Castile’s crown and herself as second in line, as her father’s last will had stipulated. To the childless Enrique, the two children represented family and dynastic continuity, but also a potential threat. As for Isabel, after the death of her father, her circumstances were none too secure on several other counts she did not mention in that letter.

Her mother, the young dowager queen, Isabel of Portugal, who was twenty-seven years old at her husband’s death, then took the two children to live in Arévalo, a royal town consigned to her in Juan’s will. Shortly thereafter, according to the chronicler Alonso de Palencia, Enrique called on her accompanied by a favorite of his, Pedro Girón, the master of the military order of Calatrava; Girón immediately “made some indecent suggestions” that shocked the recent widow. Palencia, who is generally vitriolic about both Enrique and Girón, went on to assert that the importuning by this overhasty, unwelcome (and, patently, not sufficiently noble) suitor threw Isabel of Portugal into a profound sadness and horror of the outside world, that she then “closed herself into a dark room, self-condemned to silence, and dominated by such depression that it degenerated into a form of madness.”⁷

Another chronicler, who was more in touch with events at the time, confirms the reclusiveness of Isabel’s mother but dates it earlier, from her daughter’s birth. Whatever the cause or date, young Isabel grew up with a deeply disturbed mother. The child may well have dreaded becoming like her, and suffered tension between affection and fear. Surely too she was aware that her own birth was among the causes mentioned for her mother’s madness. It is tempting to conjecture that qualities that Isabel displayed as an adult—love of order and the striving for it; a no-nonsense, highly rational stance; and a sharply defined personality, were honed in reaction to her mother’s condition, and even to think that her desire for light in all its forms, and especially in its religious associations—her abhorrence of the forces of darkness, her determination to cleanse the body politic of impurities—was not unrelated to the circumstances of her childhood.

Isabel grew up, then, in several sorts of obscurity, her childhood a sort of purgatory and a test of moral fiber she passed magnificently. Such was long the accepted version of her early years; it was her own version. It is neither strictly accurate nor complete.

Arévalo, fifteen miles from Madrigal and like it a market town, is remembered as the best fortified of royal towns. There, her mother’s condition notwithstanding, Isabel spent her early years in great stability and familial warmth. For when she was two and her mother again pregnant, her widowed grandmother, Isabel de Barcelos, arrived from Portugal. Tellingly, when first mentioned in the chronicles Isabel de Barcelos is in her forties and sitting, at King Juan’s request, in his privy council. Contemporaries, among them the chronicler Diego de Valera, recognized in her “a notable woman of great counsel.” Valera affirmed that after the death of the king, Isabel de Barcelos “was of great help and consolation to the widowed queen, her daughter”; and he commented that her death, in 1466, “was very harmful.”⁸ Pulgar adds that Isabel missed her grandmother sorely. Surely Isabel de Barcelos ran her daughter’s household. And she it doubtlessly was whom the child Isabel took as model. It is revealing that later, as queen, Isabel of Castile enjoyed keeping about her elderly women of good repute and good family.

From all accounts, Isabel de Barcelos was a formidable lady of formidable lineage. She came of royal Portuguese stock with a history of going for the throne and of doing it with claims far weaker than would be those of her Castilian grandchild. Daughter of the first duke of Braganza, Portugal’s most powerful noble and an illegitimate son of the king, Joāo I, she had married her uncle, Prince Joāo, one of five sons Joāo I had with Philippa, his queen consort. Philippa too came of redoubtable stock. Her father was John of Gaunt, the English king-making duke of Lancaster, and her mother, Costanza, was a Castilian infanta. This lineage meant that young Isabel carried in her veins the royal blood of Castile, Portugal, and England. Doubtlessly too, she took dynastic pride in her own name, Isabel, repeated through seven generations of royal women and originating in her ancestor Saint Isabel, the thirteenth-century Portuguese queen canonized for her good works and miracles.

Isabel’s aya, or nurse-governess, in Arévalo was also Portuguese. She was Clara Alvarnáez, married to Gonzalo Chacón, to whom Juan II had consigned his children’s education. Chacón was also the dowager queen’s camerero, the administrator of her household. Oddly enough, Chacón had earlier filled the same post for Álvaro de Luna, Juan II’s former favorite. Even so, Chacón and Clara Alvarnáez remained close to Isabel throughout their lifetimes. Yet at the same time, Chacón, who had stayed loyal to Luna while he lived, continued to venerate Luna’s memory: attributed to Gonzalo Chacón is a chronicle written during Isabel’s early years. Chacón focused on Luna, and on Luna’s own emphasis on absolute royal authority.⁹ The subsequent behavior of Chacón’s young royal charges, Isabel and Alfonso, amply demonstrated that, whatever the source, they shared those lofty views on royal power.

Between her grandmother and Chacón, Isabel was raised in an ambience conducive to generating in her a sense of self-esteem bound up with her high station in life, and also a firm belief in her own royal lineage as worthy of a crown, an ambience sustaining a vision of that crown gleaming with the luster of divinely favored monarchy. Moreover, the circumstances of her childhood were such as later to lead Isabel away from unhappy memories of death and madness into imagining her royal parents in their prime, as she would have them sculpted on their tombs in the Charterhouse at Miraflores, where they lay side by side, resplendent in full regalia amid symbols of worldly power and divine majesty. Nonetheless, over that stable household and over its affirmation of her self-worth hovered the shadow of her mother’s illness, and beyond that familial circle lay the uncertainty of how she would be received in a wider world known to be treacherous for infantes.

Visitors and Others

A child growing up in that meseta town of Arévalo would learn that many things were more complex than they appeared. The town’s size did not equal its strategic importance. He who wants to be lord of Castile, it was said, had to hold Arévalo. And Arévalo provided a number of lessons in what mattered in Spanish history. It took pride in being a scene of Castile’s glorious past and host to some biblical and classical greats. Arévalo remembered the apostle Saint James, patron saint of all Spain, as having preached there. Hercules himself, el gran Hércules, had come from the east through Africa bringing Egyptians and Chaldeans to settle Arévalo; he had founded Segovia, Avila, and Salamanca as well, and had left as memorials to his achievements the arches of the Segovian aqueduct (in fact Roman in origin), some statues of himself, and great bulls carved of stone recalling those he had bested in Libya. In 1454, Arévalo had at least two such toros, and in its churches were to be seen some ancient caskets of hewn stone, revered as “caves of Hercules.” That designation surely referred to the variant legend that Spain had been destroyed by Muslim invaders not because the Visigothic king, Rodrigo, had raped Count Julian’s daughter, but rather because Rodrigo had opened a forbidden casket hidden in a cave dug by Hercules beneath the Visigoth capital, Toledo. And just outside Arévalo’s walls stood a circle of arched boulders where, as everyone knew, Hercules, that demigod, claimed as illustrious ancestor by Castile’s kings and nobles, had revealed the secrets of the movement of the stars and their influence on the world below.¹⁰ The area around Arévalo had also attracted the noble Visigoths, as evidenced by the name, Palacio de Goda, of a nearby hamlet. Moreover, Arévalo’s device was an armed knight sallying forth from a castle, meant to commemorate its men who had followed the great king Alfonso VIII into battle at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, to achieve the victory against the Moors that had opened Andalusia to Castile. Arévalo offered two lessons that Isabel later demonstrated she had learned well: that size does not necessarily equate with strategic importance and that community rests on nothing more strongly than on pride in a shared past.

More immediately, and although Isabel did not live at court after her father’s d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface to the Revised Edition
• The Royal Relationships of Isabel of Castile
• Maps
• Prologue An Embassy to Egypt: 1502
• Part I Princess
• Part II La Reina
• Part III Toward Empire
• Epilogue “A Queen Has Disappeared …”
• Notes
• Index