Authors: James Michener
One must note, however, that much of what is popularly taught
about Isabel is not true. She did not unify Spain, for when she
died the nation once more divided. Fernando kept for himself
the Kingdom of Aragón, but the Kingdom of Castilla went to
Isabel’s daughter Juana. Fernando, treated miserably by the nobles
of Castilla, sought revenge by marrying, within a few months of
Isabel’s death, nineteen-year-old Germaine de Foix, niece of the
French king. He did this for two reasons, to spite the Castilians
and to sire an heir who would inherit his half of Spain.
Promptly, Germaine gave him a son, and in this way Fernando,
in an act of revenge, threatened to destroy all that Isabel had
accomplished, but the boy died shortly after birth, whereupon
Fernando and his child bride tried desperately to have another,
but the old man was not equal to the task, so Germaine instructed
her apothecaries to concoct a brew of blood, herbs, magic elements
and bull testicles, which she fed Fernando in such quantities that
she undermined his health. He died without further issue and it
was due solely to this lucky accident that Spain had another chance
to unite.
Isabel’s life with Fernando had never been easy, for while living
with the queen he had fathered four bastard children, each by a
different mother. The two girls we have met, tucked away at
Isabel’s command in the convent at Madrigal de las Altas Torres.
One of the boys became a soldier, the other, at the age of six,
Archbishop of Zaragoza. When Cardinal Mendoza died Fernando
insisted that this youth, then only twenty-four, be made
Archbishop of Toledo and thus primate of all Spain, but here
Isabel put her foot down. She preferred naming an archbishop
of her own choice and it was the best decision she ever made, for
her candidate was Cisneros, and had he not taken charge when
Fernando finally died, twelve years after Isabel, the breach between
Castilla and Aragón would probably have become irreparable.
I left Medina del Campo and drove a few miles north to another
cliff on the Río Duero, where in the town of Tordesillas the tragedy
of Isabel came to an end, years after her own death. I had known
of Tordesillas in other contexts without realizing that it was one
of the principal theaters of the Isabel story. In 1493 Pope
Alexander VI, seeking to obviate colonial quarrels between
Catholic countries, had established a Line of Demarcation between
Spanish and Portuguese claims. It ran one hundred leagues west
of the Azores but was not entirely satisfactory, so in 1494 envoys
of Portugal and Spain, supervised by representatives of the Papacy,
convened here in Tordesillas to sign the treaty defining a new line
two hundred and seventy leagues farther west. It was as a result
of this treaty that a country like Peru became Spanish, whereas
Brazil was Portuguese. But for the student of Spanish internal
history, events of much greater significance occurred in Tordesillas
and it was these that I wished to track down.
As the genealogical chart shows, Fernando and Isabel were
blessed with numerous progeny, and one of the queen’s notable
accomplishments was her manipulation of their marriages. She
married her oldest daughter, Isabel, to Alfonso, heir to the throne
of Portugal, but he died suddenly, so the young widow was passed
along to Manoel, the next in line; but the young Isabel said she
would not marry him unless he agreed to expel all Jews from
Portugal the way her mother had from Spain. This curious
wedding present was granted and the marriage took place to the
wailing of many Jews. Then it was Isabel who died, so her mother
quickly arranged for her third daughter, young María, to marry
the widower Manoel (when María died in 1517, Manoel took a
third wife from the family, Queen Isabel’s granddaughter
Leonor!). When Isabel’s youngest child, Catalina, reached the age
of four she was promised in marriage to Arthur, Prince of Wales
to the English throne, who was three, and when the girl was eleven
the betrothal was formalized. At sixteen the marriage took place
but Arthur was sickly and soon died, whereupon shrewd Isabel,
in defiance of the Church’s decree against such incestuous
marriages, passed Catalina along to the dead man’s brother, the
new Prince of Wales, who was to become Henry VIII. Life with
him was hell, but Catalina did escape the ax which ended the
reigns of two of her successors, and she did give birth to Mary,
who succeeded in restoring England to Catholicism, as her
grandmother would have wished, even though the restoration
was reversed by her successor, the Protestant Queen Elizabeth. It
was with her son Juan and second daughter Juana that Isabel had
her outstanding success, because for them she arranged a double
wedding with the daughter and son of Maximilian, ruler of all
Germany, Holy Roman Emperor and head of the house of
Habsburg.
In Spain, Margaret of Austria, Maximilian’s daughter, married
Juan, heir to the Spanish throne, while in Flanders, Archduke
Philip of Austria, son of Maximilian and heir to vast estates in
the Low Countries and elsewhere, known in Spain as Felipe I,
married Juana. It was in this manner that Spain became involved
not only with the Habsburgs, who ultimately inherited the throne,
but also with the Low Countries, which were to be a permanent
thorn in Spanish flesh. Young Felipe was probably the most
attractive prince of the century, a lustful, vain and somewhat
stupid young man who set out to humiliate his dowdy Spanish
wife and who with his infidelities drove her mad. (John
Langdon-Davies, in his study of Carlos the Bewitched previously
cited, argues that it was the other way around and that it was
Juana’s encroaching madness that almost drove Felipe out of his
mind; but one must remember that the thesis of his book is that
Juana was genetically insane, because of her inheritance from the
demented Isabel of Portugal.) When this happened it was of no
great consequence, because Juana, like her mother a generation
earlier, was originally well removed from the throne. First in line
was her brother Juan, who had married Felipe’s sister. Second
was her own sister Isabel, now Queen of Portugal; if her brother
died she stood to be queen of two countries. And third was Isabel’s
son, heir to the Portuguese throne and putative heir to that of
Spain as well, in which case the Iberian peninsula would again be
united as it had sometimes been in the past. So for the present
no one bothered much about Juana’s trouble with her handsome
husband; it was no worse than what Catalina had to put up with
from Henry VIII. But once again, as in the case of the famous
Isabel, miracles began to happen. Juan died suddenly. Isabel did
the same. And to the horror of Portugal and Spain alike, young
Miguel died at the age of two. Suddenly Juana la Loca, as she was
being called behind her back, found herself heiress to the throne
of Spain. If she could somehow control her husband and her mind
she might look forward to a reign equaling her mother’s in
brilliance. With these prospects Juana and Felipe came to Spain
to claim their inheritance, and we shall see them next wandering
about the open countryside north of Tordesillas under conditions
so gruesome as to form one of the weirdest chapters of history.
Before I started to trace the story of Juana I wanted to see what
modern Tordesillas was like, so early one morning I perched
myself in the Plaza del Generalísimo Franco, where grass grew in
the corners. Forty-four awkward stone pillars supported an arcade
which in places threatened to collapse, while many of the houses
fronting on the plaza showed walls that had to be propped up
with poles. Several had been patched with a cheap stucco painted
to simulate concrete block, and all needed painting. Such women
as appeared tended to be dressed in black; they worked while their
men in patched pants lounged in the shade. I noticed especially
six brightly painted heraldic shields of Tordesillas being used as
decorations around the plaza; they bore a set of flashy symbols
consisting of keys, mountains, a river and three saddles. The last,
I was to discover, were debatable additions, for there was much
confusion as to what they signified. A bartender said, ‘There was
a big battle over there. Very crucial. Everything depended on what
the volunteers from this town did. But like always they messed
things up. They were late in their saddles [tarde en sillas] and
after the battle was lost we were stuck with the name.’
A customer said, ‘Wrong again. One of the old kings was
hunting here and he had a fine afternoon, so he named the town
Tarde en sillas, which means Afternoon in the saddles.’ Another
said, ‘The name of the town comes from a word. Tardecillo, a
little late. Has nothing to do with saddles.’ I said that must be
wrong because three saddles appeared on the town shield, and
he laughed. ‘A friend of mine painted those shields last year. To
please tourists’; whereupon a fourth man growled, ‘They all don’t
know anything. This town was named by the Romans before
Spanish was a language. The name has no meaning.’
The only things in the plaza that reminded me I was in this
century were two signs splashed in dripping letters: ‘Viva Franco’
and ‘Gibraltar Is Spanish.’ The latter brought me back to Queen
Isabel, for on her deathbed she had added a codicil to her will
instructing her people never to surrender Gibraltar; with much
effort she had won it back from a noble family that had usurped
it for private use, and she foresaw its importance.
I doubt that she could have foreseen the important role that
Tordesillas was to play in the history of her family. It began
ominously. On September 25, 1506, Felipe I, who ruled jointly
with Juana, died at Burgos in the north. The queen was
understandably distraught over losing the man who had bewitched
her, and unluckily at this moment she fell under the control of a
Carthusian monk, who consoled her: ‘With sufficient prayers
your husband the king will revive. I know a case in which a king
who had been dead for fourteen years rose to rule again.’
These words helped launch Juana on a course without parallel.
Keeping her husband’s casket beside her, she moved to various
towns and monasteries in northern Spain, seeking some area
which might inspire Felipe to return. On the night of November
1 in the monastery at Miraflores she commanded the casket to
be opened to assure herself that the king was with her. Either on
Christmas night or a few days prior, having moved to a new area,
she opened the casket again, and one of her companions reported,
‘All had calcified into a solid mass and it did not have the odor
or perfume.’
In April, under the stars of an open sky, she inspected the
remains once more, and this incident has formed the subject for
several fine historical paintings. In July she was settled at
Hornillos, where she gave birth to a posthumous child, and in
the church she again tried to communicate with the sadly
decomposed body, and for a fifth time in her room nearby. Finally,
in February of 1509, after nearly three years of such wandering,
she came to rest at Tordesillas, where she reluctantly consented
to have her husband buried in the local monastery. Then, so as
not to be parted from him lest he should, as the Carthusian
promised, rise from the dead to resume his reign, she immured
herself in a nearby palace, where she was to spend the next
forty-six years of her life.
How did the body of Felipe find its way ultimately to the
grandiose tomb in Granada? After Juana had been locked up for
two years her mind wandered so badly that she forgot the casket
which had haunted her, she forgot the handsome young husband
who had treated her so poorly, whereupon officials quietly
disinterred the body for the last time and shipped it off to the
royal pantheon in Granada, which had been Felipe’s choice in the
first place.
She posed quite a problem for the Spanish government. She
was clearly the Queen of Castilla with claims to Aragón as well,
and if sane should be ruling in Madrid; but if she was, as seemed
likely, insane, she should be kept locked up and her son Carlos
V should rule on her behalf. When Carlos arrived to assume the
crown he visited his mother; he could speak Flemish, French,
German and Italian but no Spanish, and in his brief conversation
with her satisfied himself that she was indeed insane. It was under
his instructions, therefore, that she was kept locked up, to become
a constant source of scandal in the other courts of Europe.
Ambassadors paid large sums for rumors of the queen. One
reported that she urinated almost constantly, another that she
was more animal than human, another that he understood she
was quite sane. When a revolution broke out against Carlos, the
revolutionists naturally sped for Tordesillas, where after an
interview with Juana they pronounced her sane. To this day debate
continues. All we know is that for nearly half a century she was
kept imprisoned in a ratty old building which no longer stands.
From its windows she could look below to see the Río Duero
idling past the cliffs as if it were a lake. Trees filled the distance,
and flat fields on which wheat and grapes had grown as long as
men could remember. She could also see the road to Medina del
Campo and must often have watched with vacant eyes as various
messengers rode up that road with instructions from the king.
When the sky was cloudless she could see the battlements of the
castle at Medina, and on moonlit nights the scene must have been
beautiful. In winter her palace was bitter cold, in summer stifling.
We know what life was like in the prison at Tordesillas because
Carlos V kept close tabs on his mother lest she escape and
embarrass him; a wealth of documents exists, none more
interesting than the list of persons in attendance on the queen
which Amarie Dennis found in the archives of the National
Library when doing research for her biography of Isabel:
The governing staff within the palace was composed of the
Marqués of Denia and his wife; the Count of Lerma, Francisco de
Rojas, and his wife; Fernando de Tovar and his wife; Luis de
Cepeda, majordomo; Doctor Santa Cara; Ana Enríquez de Rojas,
a nun; Magdalena de Rojas, Countess of Castro; Francisca de
Rojas, Countess of Paredes; Margarita de Rojas; and Beatriz de
Bobadilla, an elderly servant who had accompanied Juana to
Flanders in 1946. The rest of the staff, whose names are all listed,
was comprised of seven yeomen, two overseers, a food provisioner
and seven assistants, a librarian, a bailiff, three cooks, three
assistant cooks, a tailor and his helper, a cupbearer and his aide,
an apothecary, a shoemaker, a furrier, a man to attend the braziers,
a watercarrier, a carpenter, a poulterer, a sweeper, a hunter of
partridges, six servants to take care of the silverware, fourteen
lackeys, six butlers, twelve chambermaids, one seamstress, four
laundresses, five serving maids, one wardrobe keeper, one carver,
two gate-keepers, three footmen, twenty-four