CHAPTER TWELVE

Isabella with her Prayers

She with her prayers

He with many armed men.

JUAN DEL ENCINA on Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain

It was in April 1492, at Santa Fe, an encampment outside the recently conquered Moorish town of Granada, that Christopher Columbus received the final agreement to explore the new world. He set off a few months later. Columbus was granted the vital backing by a woman as well as by a man: by Isabella of Castile as well as Ferdinand of Aragon. For the two were independent monarchs and had been so since the inception of their reigns. Their extraordinary partnership had lasted twenty-odd years so far. Instead of confirming Isabella as a typically devout and secluded Spanish princess, leaving the sphere of action to her dominant warrior husband, the passage of time had actually transformed her. To the Pope himself, Ferdinand and Isabella were jointly the ‘Catholic kings’ and in a phrase euphonious to modern ears, ‘the athletes of Christ’.¹

In the forging of this partnership, both destiny and the laws of inheritance played their role: and so did the necessity for armed conflict which preoccupied the royal pair from the earliest moment of their joint reign in Castile. A contemporary, Juan del Encina, described the relative contribution of Ferdinand and Isabella to their conquests in these conventional terms: they fought, ‘She with her prayers, He with many armed men’.² But while in no way deriding the efficacy of Isabella’s prayers (a subject about which no positive information can be garnered) one must also note that she made a public contribution to their victories which puts her in a unique category in this book: the Warrior Queen as partner. Moreover the Queen’s military fervour in the cause of right both nurtured her marriage to Ferdinand and was in turn nurtured by it. Her crusades, jointly carried out with her husband, took on some of the sacramental nature of marriage itself in the eyes of a deeply religious woman. As for her contemporary reputation, the decorous wifeliness with which she conducted herself within this partnership earned general approval. At the end of the chapter this approval will be contrasted with the disapproval shown to Caterina Sforza – a would-be Warrior Queen who was neither decorous nor wifely.

Queen Isabella was a woman of forty-one – with twelve more years to live – when Columbus was authorized to return to the Indies ‘and supervise the preserving and peopling of them, because thereby our Lord God is served, His Holy Faith extended and our own realms increased’.³ She was in fact born in the same year as Columbus himself (King Ferdinand was a year younger). With hindsight, this patronage of Columbus resulting in the European discovery of America can be seen as the Spanish ‘Kings’ ’ most resonant achievement; but the endless sound waves which would flow from this decision were hardly foreseen at the time. Ferdinand and Isabella had already presided over one dazzlingly successful crusade: to restore the Moorish kingdom to Catholic Spain after eight centuries. At the instance of their religious advisers, they would promulgate a further internal crusade, less dazzling because less practically beneficial: to expel the Jews along with the Muslims.

The relative importance – and approval – which history would give to these respective crusades would have been incomprehensible to Queen Isabella, the denizens of one age rarely comprehending the apparently weird standards of another. To modern appraisers, the protective attitude of Ferdinand and Isabella towards their new Indian subjects – ‘What does he [Columbus] think he is doing with my vassals?’ Isabella is supposed to have asked – contrasts most favourably with their chilling attitude to the Jews who had been citizens of Spain for centuries.

After 1492 the latter, if they failed to convert, were cast out. According to the priest–chronicler Bernáldez:

They [the Jews] went out from the land of their birth boys and adults, old men and children, on foot, and riding on donkeys and other beasts and in wagons … They went by the roads and fields with much labour and ill-fortune, some collapsing, others getting up, some dying, others giving birth, others falling ill, so that there was no Christian who was not sorry for them … the rabbis were encouraging them and making the women and boys sing and beat drums and tambourines, to enliven the people. And so they went out of Castile.⁴

Similarly, the Moors who were originally granted generous terms after the fall of Granada in the same year, including their own laws, their own religion and their own dress, ended by being expelled in their turn if they did not accept conversion. In 1487 during the series of campaigns known as the Reconquista Queen Isabella had given money for the Moors to be reclothed in the Castilian fashion as a propaganda exercise; in 1508, four years after her death, Moorish dress, in a final insult suggesting the total suppression of a culture, was prohibited altogether.

To Isabella herself, however, the need for religious unity in Spain put these expulsions on quite a different level from the protection a sovereign must accord to distant subjects.^f1 Furthermore the expulsions were recommended by her rigorous confessors, including the formidably bigoted Cardinal known as Ximenes (or Francisco de Cisneros). This was a woman who stepped out of the role expected of her sex in one direction – she had become a public crusader expressing such (male) sentiments as ‘Glory is not to be won without danger’. One can understand how she might compensate for this in another direction by extreme spiritual humility in private, and devotion to the will of her (male) religious advisers.

In the earlier years of her reign, such complications were not evident. Other perils had to be faced. And Isabella’s personal crusading impulse, the product of faith and determination, was not only approved by her contemporaries, but also seen as a holy destiny which might be implicit in the union of the crowns of Aragon and Castile. ‘With this conjuncture of two royal sceptres,’ wrote Bernáldez, ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ took vengeance on his enemies and destroyed him who slays and curses.’⁶ First, before that destiny could be accomplished, Ferdinand and Isabella had to destroy those who threatened to slay them – or at least rebelled vigorously against Isabella’s succession to the throne of Castile.

It was the death of Isabella’s half-brother, Henry IV, son of John II of Castile by his first marriage, in 1474 which provoked this crisis. Although he had acknowledged Isabella as his heir, Henry IV did have a daughter of his own. This girl however was reputedly illegitimate (either the King was impotent or his wife was wanton or both), her nickname Juana la Beltraneja making scornful reference to her supposed conception by Don Beltrán de la Cueva. Whatever the truth of Juana’s legitimacy,⁷ there were plenty of potentates to seize the opportunity of backing her in their own interests; particularly since she was unmarried, her hand bringing with it the possibility of the Spanish throne.

Isabella’s own husband, Ferdinand, whom she had married five years earlier, also had a claim to the throne, since he too had his place in the Castilian succession (Isabella and Ferdinand were second cousins). It is true that the royal house of Aragon was only a minor branch of that of Castile; but then he was a man. This was more relevant in Aragon where the Salic Law operated – that law originating in France in the early fourteenth century which precluded females from the royal succession – than in neighbouring Castile where it did not. Nor had Ferdinand, in his marriage treaty of 1469, pressed his public claims unduly; at that date securing marriage to the heiress Isabella, from his own lesser position, had been the prime consideration.⁸

As it happened, Isabella was in Segovia when her brother died, while Ferdinand was away campaigning for his father, the King of Aragon. It was in order to cope with the threat of Juana’s pretensions – she being temporarily captive to a Castilian noble – that Isabella immediately had herself proclaimed Reina Proprietaria (Queen Proprietress). She also had herself crowned, still in Ferdinand’s absence; and she had the unsheathed sword of justice carried before her at the ceremony, a revival of an ancient practice it is true, but one that had never been performed for a female monarch before. Ferdinand, when he heard the news, is said to have cried out publicly: ‘Tell me, you may have read so many histories, did you ever hear of carrying the symbol of life and death before queens? I have known it only of kings.’⁹

All this was however directed by Isabella rather against Juana and her supporters than against Ferdinand her husband. In addition, the proud Castilian nobility would not welcome subjection to an Aragonese. Isabella’s personal ‘proprietorship’ of the crown, regardless of her sex, also carried an important point of principle with it for the future, as she pointed out to Ferdinand. Supposing their own surviving child or children were also female? (This was the actual case during the early years of Isabella’s reign and would also incidentally be the case at her death.) If Isabella’s personal hereditary right in Castile was not acknowledged, then the ‘Princess our daughter’s’ right would be similarly endangered at her mother’s death.

In effect, Ferdinand did always act as co-ruler with Isabella. Proclamations in Castile were probably from the very first in their joint names; both their effigies were displayed on Castilian coins; whereas when Ferdinand succeeded to his father’s throne of Aragon in 1479 (where the Salic Law ran) Isabella was merely in title his Queen Consort. Gradually as the years passed and the marriage – the partnership of state – flourished, rights and titles in both countries were ignored in favour of the delights of joint rule. The deliberate impression was given of Ferdinand and Isabella’s ‘sharing a single mind’. The fact that the Castilian castles and the Castilian crown revenues were reserved in theory to Isabella personally – ‘at the Queen’s will alone’ – faded in importance compared to Ferdinand’s free exercise of power in Castile; similarly Isabella, despite her technical position as a consort, was allowed to administer justice in Aragon.¹⁰ The monarchs came to resemble two great oaks whose roots were inextricably entwined somewhere below the surface.

In 1474, however, the determination which this young woman of twenty-three displayed, far from her husband’s side, was crucial in holding on to that throne of which she judged herself to be Queen Proprietress. She showed herself from the first a remarkable character as well as a redoubtable one. It was not as if Isabella had been educated in any way to handle matters of state; she had been raised in virtual seclusion by her mother, after her father’s death when she was three years old, having another elder (full) brother who before his premature death was regarded as heir presumptive to Henry IV. The rigorous intellectual training granted to the young Elizabeth Tudor for example – whatever the constraints of her situation – was quite absent from the upbringing of the Castilian Princess. As a result, Queen Isabella set herself much later to learn Latin, the language of diplomacy and statecraft, in order to talk to foreign dignitaries – a decision which will earn the sympathy of all those deprived of necessary languages in resilient youth, and condemned to learn them in far less elastic middle age. (In urging on the production of a Castilian–Latin dictionary, she would observe that it was necessary because women too often learned their Latin from men.)¹¹ Her own daughters – including Catherine of Aragon – were notably well instructed by the great Spanish educationalist Vives; the obsessive education of daughters is often the sign of a mother who has regretted her own deprivation in that sphere.

Nor was there any sign of the Tomboy Syndrome here in childhood, no tales of a childish Isabella riding freely in the forests, no comparison to Camilla of the Volsci. Once again it was in later years that Isabella had herself instructed in those martial arts and exercises that she would have learned in childhood had she been born a prince rather than a princess. Yet in another way Isabella’s enclosed upbringing, coupled with the subsequent scandals centred round the name of Henry IV’s queen, and the disputed birth of Juana la Beltraneja, had left a deep mark upon her.

The pious austerity for which she was renowned must surely be ascribed not only to a natural inclination in that direction but also to an awareness of the dangers brought to a queen, expected to be the bearer of a royal family, by incontinent sexuality. Isabella’s nineteenth-century biographer W. H. Prescott (whose great work can never be entirely superseded, if only for the incomparable style in which it is written) suggested that like The Lady in Milton’s Comus, Isabella enjoyed divine protection at the court, thanks to her own virtue:

So dear to heaven is saintly chastity …

A thousand liveried angels lackey her

Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt.¹²

In the forging of this virtue, however, childhood influences must also have played their part.

Austerity in private even extended to her own personal adornment. Isabella understood perfectly well the need for public ceremonial, the jewels, the gorgeous brocades and richly embroidered velvets which must be draped heavily around the woman who wore the crown for Castile. Off-duty as it were, her tastes were very different: she once related to her confessor as a matter for self-congratulation how she had worn ‘only a simple dress of silk with three gold hem-bands’.¹³ (That was not a boast which would have dropped easily from the lips of Queen Elizabeth I.)

It was appropriate, given her religious temperament, that Isabella should remain devoted to her wedded husband from the moment when, according to tradition, she instinctively picked him out from among a group of other young men crying: ‘That is he! That is he!’¹⁴ With less virtue and more human feeling she also remained jealous of Ferdinand’s numerous amours. Adopting the obviously feminine role beloved of some Warrior Queens – like Matilda of Tuscany – she occupied herself in embroidering Ferdinand’s shirts, as though the flashing needle might weave him closer to her side. It was not to be. Unfortunately for Isabella, Ferdinand’s own natural inclinations were very far from lying in the same chaste direction.

Isabella’s portraits show her with a long nose and a down-turned mouth, characteristics not likely to inspire fidelity in one predisposed to philander. (Portraits of Isabella’s daughter Catherine of Aragon, in a time of youth and hope, show a certain similarity although the expression is much softer and the mouth turns upwards; Catherine’s unhappy daughter Queen Mary Tudor, on the other hand, displays quite a marked resemblance to her grandmother, including the same glum expression.) According to the evidence of their respective suits of armour, Isabella was also taller than Ferdinand by as much as an inch: a superiority not always welcome even in a royal wife.

Yet in real life, whatever her physical imperfections, Isabella must have been endowed with charm as well as authority; for goodness does radiate its own kind of charm. Her famous virtue, the key to the generally pure tone of her court (never mind the Aragonese King’s very different attitudes) was much praised. The chronicler Bernáldez called her ‘a fine example of a good wife’. Isabella, like another virtuous sovereign, Tamara of Georgia, also had her bards protesting their respectful passion. The famous chastity did not preclude such ardent literary offerings as this, probably by Alvaro Bazán, which made of the Queen the object of a cavalier’s unrequited adoration:¹⁵

When we part

Departs my heart

Glory hides

Sorrow abides.

Victory vanishes

Memory languishes

And grievous smart.

Even more significant were the comparisons literary and otherwise which made of Queen Isabella some kind of mystical figure, akin to the luminous pictures of the Blessed Virgin by Isabella’s favourite Flemish artists. The poet Montoro for example went as far as to declare the Queen worthy to have given birth to the son of God. He was not alone in the comparison. After the restoration of southern Spain to Christianity by her agency, Isabella was frequently pictured as a second Virgin Mary, repairing the ‘sin of Eve’, in the words of Fray Inigo de Mendoza. Following her death, there would be moves to canonize Isabella, moves not limited to distant times, but recurring in the twentieth century.¹⁶

This latter-day history illustrates how close the halo always hovers above the head of the Warrior Queen, who has presided over a war of avowedly religious purpose: the Holy (Armed) Figurehead. At the time, it was more relevant that with her authority threatened, her pretensions questioned, these comparisons undoubtedly stood Isabella herself in good practical stead.

Civil war between Isabella’s supporters and those of Juana la Beltraneja followed shortly after the death of the King of Castile. Juana, not lost for suitors under the circumstances, became affianced to King Alfonso V of Portugal; the conflict which ensued was thus in a sense as much a tug-of-war as a civil war, since the outcome would decide whether Castile in the future leaned west to Portugal or east towards Aragon.

It was Ferdinand, naturally, who was in charge of the prolonged military campaigning. As an Aragonese, he brought knowledge of new military techniques, as well as the possibility of northern alliances.¹⁷ But Isabella, as the official co-ruler – and the Castilian – also had to play a figurehead’s visible role as the inspiration of her party. She did more than that. She participated personally and effectively. It may be impossible to assess the precise military achievement of Queen Isabella, due to the general rule obtaining that any female presence or initiative upon the battlefield is greeted with a special enthusiasm born out of surprise at the successful upsetting of the natural order: as when the Venetian minister, Viaggio, wrote that ‘Queen Isabel by her singular genius, masculine strength of mind and other virtues, most unusual in our own sex as well as hers, was not merely of great assistance in but the chief cause of the conquest of Granada’.¹⁸ Nevertheless there is sufficient contemporary evidence to support the picture of a genuine contribution beyond those ‘prayers’ which the poet juxtaposed with Ferdinand’s ‘many armed men’. For one thing, it was in these first five years of that civil war that Isabella discovered in herself a vital capability for the organization of supplies which complemented the gifts of her husband.

Is is true that Isabella deferred to her husband publicly, almost ostentatiously, on all military matters in her official guise of Only-a-Weak-Woman: ‘May your lordship pardon me for speaking of things which I do not understand’, she began one intervention. At the same time, she was not above employing the useful Shame Syndrome when necessary to secure her own way. During the reconquest of Granada, some younger nobles were trying to persuade Ferdinand to retreat, against Isabella’s advice. Isabella succeeded in gaining the day: ‘The grandees, mortified at being suspended in zeal for the holy war by a woman, eagerly collected their forces.’¹⁹

Over the organization of supplies, and above all in the founding of the first military hospital in Europe, the Queen had less need of these tricks and ploys, since supply, possibly, and nursing, certainly, were of course traditional female concerns. Isabella had been described as ‘a great general but an even greater quartermaster-general’.²⁰ Pioneers in thousands were recruited by the Queen (as Bernáldez attests) to build roads for the passage of the guns, while it was the King who concentrated on their disposal once they arrived. It was Isabella at the beginning of the Reconquista who engaged Don Francisco Ramirez, known as El Artillero; he saw to it that the Castilian army was equipped with expert smiths and gunners. She approved the sending for seasoned troops in the shape of Swiss mercenaries, a very practical step. As for nursing, the equipment of ‘The Queen’s Hospital’, six vast tents trundling from siege to siege equipped with beds and medicines and bandages, anticipated Napoleon’s ambulances by more than two hundred years.

Not that the soul was ignored in all this concern to heal the body. One notes that chaplains were an essential part of Isabella’s hospital force, just as Mass was always celebrated in the centre of the camp with prayers for victory, the altar plate being provided by the Chapel Royal. Even where the mercenary Swiss were concerned, Isabella convinced herself that they were good people who only ‘took part in wars that they believe just’.²¹

From the first in the Civil War, the Queen did not spare herself. She rode hundreds of miles, often across the bleak Castilian mountain lands, pleading for support, invoking loyalty. Her early history of miscarriages must be attributed to these ordeals; this was especially unfortunate since the birth of a son would as ever in the case of a queen regnant have bolstered up her cause (as the birth of the future Henry II had improved the chances of the Empress Maud). In any case a daughter could not succeed in Aragon. It was not until 1476 that Isabella’s only son, Prince John, was born.

One of these miscarriages occurred in the summer of 1475 after the Queen herself had taken command at Toledo, riding among her men dressed in full armour, Ferdinand being absent. Her presence – whether or not because she was careful to end each exhortation with a prayer invoking ‘the aid of Thine arm’ – was said to inspire exceptional confidence. But the welcome respite which the Queen’s illness gave to her enemy Alfonso of Portugal illustrates all too neatly the unenviable fate of the Warrior Queen as would-be mother (a complication to which the story of Louise of Prussia will also bear testimony).

The encouraging victory by which the Castilian troops recaptured the northern castle of Burgos in January 1476 was celebrated in the presence of the Queen. The Castilians now needed to repossess Toro and Zamora, two fortresses on the River Douro which controlled the route into their country from Portugal. Ferdinand however failed to take Zamora and the Portuguese retreated to Toro, an apparently unassailable stronghold. Since Isabella’s new baby was to be born in June, she must once more have been pregnant. Nevertheless it is said that Isabella herself gave the courageous advice to pursue them, into what might well have proved a Portuguese trap. When Toro was taken, boldness paid results: Zamora itself fell shortly afterwards. Then the baby was born and it was a boy.

The child, symbol of hope, was displayed to his people in the presence of his mother, who abandoned her preferred simplicity for such an important public occasion: ‘The Queen went capering on a white palfrey in a very richly gilt saddle and a very rich harness of gold and silver and she for her dress [wore] … brocade with many pearls of different kinds.’²² Nor was the hope disappointed. The birth of the boy, named John after both his grandfathers, kings of Aragon and Castile respectively, did indeed signal the decline of the Portuguese cause; Juana, the loser, ended by being locked up in a nunnery, abandoned by the rapacious King Alfonso. When Ferdinand succeeded in his turn to the throne of Aragon in 1479, the stage was set for that momentous crusade, the reconquest of the last Moorish kingdom of Spain.

Ferdinand and Isabella gave their own version of the motives behind the Reconquista: it was not undertaken in order to ‘lay up treasure’, for they could have stayed at home ‘with far less peril, travail and expense’. But ‘the desire which we have to serve God and our zeal for the holy Catholic faith has induced us to set aside our own interests and ignore the continual hardships and dangers to which this cause commits us’.²³

It is true that at one level this explanation (given incidentally to the Pope) is evidently too simple. In the words of J. H. Elliott, ‘The Reconquista was not one but many things. It was at once a crusade against the infidel, a succession of military expeditions in search of plunder, and a popular migration.’ This southwards migration suited the Queen of Castile, whereas the King of Aragon for obvious geographical reasons remained preoccupied with his northern French neighbour. Then there was the question of the restless Castilian nobles: as Queen Tamara had discovered in Georgia, repeated conflicts against foreign neighbours constituted one good way of occupying them and maintaining perforce their loyalty to the crown.²⁴

But given the millenarian atmosphere of fifteenth-century Europe following the capture of Constantinople in 1453, and given the devout character of Isabella herself (Prescott called her ‘the soul of this war’), the statement of the ‘Catholic Kings’ should never be dismissed by a later age as in itself insincere. ‘It is very true that your war is a just one,’ wrote Isabella to Ferdinand of his French involvements, ‘but my war is not only a just one but a holy one.’²⁵ She made much of the distinction.

In 1482 the Christians captured Alhama, south-west of Granada, and from that date onwards there was a series of campaigns, as the Moors were stalked through their once proud kingdom by the predatory Spanish tigers. These were stirring days for Christians, particularly those who had long been held as prisoners of the Moors. When Ronda was recaptured, the filthy and emaciated prisoners who emerged from its dungeons were comforted by the Queen herself. The royal entry into recaptured Moclin was marked by a solemn Te Deum sung in the royal chapel; as the words were being intoned, those present heard faint underground echoes and it was gradually realized that the dungeons lay somewhere beneath the chapel. In a scene reminiscent of the prisoners’ emergence in Fidelio, the Christian captives, long incarcerated in darkness, were led forth.

It was helpful however that the Moors were disunited by this date. A feud within the family of the aged Nasrid King Mulay Hassan meant that the realm itself was split. When Mulay Hassan’s son Boabdil was captured in April 1483, he thought it worth his while to bow as a secret vassal in order to combat his father, just as Ferdinand, in those negotiations at which he was expert, thought it worth his while to accept the notion of a two-year truce. Boabdil was a faltering ally at best – at the final siege of Granada in late 1491 it was once again Boabdil who would defy the Spaniards after various changes of side in between. But his vacillations, besides giving strength to his enemies, enraged his family. His father’s brother, the champion known as El Zagal (‘the Valiant’) preferred in his turn to surrender to the Christians after the fall of Baza in 1480, rather than to Boabdil.

This is not however to denigrate the staunchness of the Spaniards. They were obliged to mountaineer as much as fight in stark and inhospitable country, at least in the early stages of the campaign. And if Boabdil was no great general, El Zagal on the contrary justified his name by inflicting a crushing defeat on the Christians in 1483.

Isabella’s own efforts divided, like those of Queen Tamara, into her private strategic contributions and her public ‘Figurehead’ appearances. The latter included the ceremonial occasions, such as that at Seville, when the militia were reviewed in full battle array, with successive battalions lowering their standards as the Queen passed. Isabella was seated in a saddle-chair embossed in gold and silver, borne by a chestnut mule whose bridle was of crimson satin covered in gold embroidery. At this review Isabella formally raised her hat to her husband (which meant that her head was still covered by her coif) and the ‘kings’ bowed to each other thrice.

But there are also numerous glimpses of her, splendidly serene and courageous before sieges: it was lucky for her, perhaps, in terms of public display of her person, that the Reconquista was predominantly a war of sieges. The latter created their own mythology by which the arrival of the Queen was said to spur on the Castilian troops, to the extent that victory, previously in doubt, became certain. Her visit to Málaga for example, in the summer of 1487, came as it turned out at the end of three months’ arduous siege: for on 18 August Málaga finally surrendered, a turning-point in the Reconquista, after which it was doubtful that the Moors could long preserve their kingdom. The arrival of the Spanish mascot – or rather Holy Figurehead – came to spell doom to the Moors. It was the arrival of Isabella before the walls of Baza late in 1488 which broke the gloomy news to the inhabitants (led by El Zagal) that the siege was to be prosecuted with renewed vigour.

We hear of the Moors craning their necks over the walls of the city in order to catch a glimpse of the legendary Queen. They must have felt shock as well as curiosity. Certainly Isabella in her mail (‘No bad personification of chivalry’ in this attire, Prescott called her) constituted a very different feminine image to that of the bewitching Sultana Soraya, Boabdil’s mother. Although originally a Christian captive, Soraya had accepted the rich opportunities for intrigue and influence – but not for overt warfare – presented by the world of the royal harem. ‘Weep for it like a woman, since you have failed to defend it like a man’, Boabdil was told by the Sultana when he finally left Granada and turned back for one last melancholy look towards the lost Paradise.²⁶ But the woman at whom the Moors gaped from the walls of Baza did not weep; on the contrary, she passed her whole army in review mounted on a spirited Andalusian horse with a flowing mane. The cry which sprang from the lips of her soldiers will come as no surprise to those who have followed the fortunes of Tamara, King of Kartli: ‘Castile, Castile, for our King Isabella!’²⁷

And so the Christian campaign moved forward inexorably to the final siege of the city of Granada late in 1491. For this siege that celebrated camp – as it was then – of Santa Fe, to which Columbus would repair, was specifically created. To the last Isabella maintained the traditionally double role of a Warrior Queen: on the one hand she continued to plot the final strategy to secure Granada with Ferdinand, and has sometimes been credited with the idea of encirclement which proved so successful. On the other hand she maintained her figurehead’s role: the chivalrous ‘Queen’s Skirmish’ took place when Isabella was spied aloft with her children, out to view the exotic palace of the Alhambra (curiosity was not all on the Moorish side). A javelin with an insulting message ‘for the Queen of Castile’ affixed to it had been hurled in the direction of her quarters; single combat between the Moorish champion Yarfe and the Christian Garcilaso de la Vega, which the Christian won, was held to settle the matter.

Boabdil formally surrendered on 2 January 1492. Four days later, on the feast of the Epiphany, Ferdinand and Isabella entered the city of Granada in triumph. By this time – in a gesture which was both symbolic and practical – the principal mosque had been reconsecrated as a church; here Mass could be celebrated and thanks for the great victory could be given. After that the two ‘kings’ processed to the Alhambra and in the Mexuar or presence chamber in another symbolic gesture possessed themselves of the seats of the Moorish rulers of Granada. Soon the flag of St James, Christian patron of the crusade, would fly above the town: and the traditional cry of ‘Santiago! Santiago!’ would join the universal acclamation: ‘Granada, Granada, for the illustrious kings of Castile!’ An eye-witness termed it ‘the most distinguished and blessed day there has ever been in Spain’.²⁸

The imperialist energies of the ‘Catholic kings’ (the Pope gave them the title following the Reconquista) were naturally released by the end of the military engagements which had preoccupied them for the last eighteen years. On the one hand Columbus was sponsored in his western venture. On the other hand Ferdinand began to look elsewhere in Europe; not only towards neighbouring Navarre, but to the south of Italy. Here he desired to establish the kingdom of Naples as an appurtenance to that of Aragon, much as Isabella had added Granada to Castile. In so doing, he introduced the influence of Spain into that mess of duchies, despotisms, cardinals and condottieri which constituted late-fifteenth-century Italy. One of the duchies was the Sforza duchy of Milan. When Ludovico Sforza invoked the aid of the French King to bolster up his doubtful claim to rule it, he did more than merely add to that general central Italian turmoil. For France – the House of Anjou – as well as Spain, had its pretensions towards the debatable kingdom of Naples.

The story of Ludovico’s niece, Caterina Sforza, bold and tragic, both virago and victim, provides a melancholy footnote to these Spanish endeavours, which were ultimately successful and went towards establishing the vast Habsburg Empire, including Spain, Spanish America and Naples, which was ruled over by Isabella’s grandson Charles v.^f2 In a sense the fortunes of Isabella the Catholic and Caterina Sforza are as much a counterpoint to each other as were those of Matilda of Tuscany and the Empress Maud. Unlike the latter pair, Isabella and Caterina were in effect contemporaries. But Caterina, subject throughout her life to convenient scorn on the ground of her sex by her political enemies, ended by being violated at the hands of her conqueror. Isabella, as has been noted, was not only a possible early candidate for canonization soon after her death but remained one.

As with Matilda and the Empress Maud, it was religious purpose which was the apparent difference. To Isabella in August 1492 the Borgia Pope Alexander VI could write: ‘Your serenity, as greatly befits a monarch, from whom others must copy the example of virtuous living, desires to protect and defend the Catholic faith …’³⁰ This was not the language which the Pope felt inclined to use towards Caterina Sforza, who ruled Forli and Imola, part of the territory stretching from Ravenna through the Romagna over which the Pope claimed overlordship. Caterina was on the contrary in one papal bull ‘the daughter of iniquity’ and in another communication ‘the daughter of perdition’. But it was not in fact the relative morality of the two ladies (far apart as that might be) which was at issue. The truth was more cynical, or perhaps one should say more political.

Alexander VI (by birth from Valencia and thus a subject of Ferdinand) passionately needed the support of the ‘Catholic kings’ in his papal campaigns and intrigues: Spain was finally part of the Holy League including the Pope and the Emperor which would drive the French out of Naples and establish Ferdinand’s claim to southern Italy. On the other hand Alexander’s son, Cesare Borgia, needed those lands ruled over by Caterina on behalf of her young son in order to form a powerful central Italian bloc. The sexual freedom of choice which Caterina Sforza determinedly exercised gave useful ammunition to those opposed to her for quite different reasons; here was a Warrior Queen whose lustfulness could be denounced to good effect. For Isabella there was the Warrior Queen’s other potential reward of the halo.

Caterina Sforza was born in 1462, the illegitimate daughter of Galeazza Maria Sforza, later Duke of Milan, and his mistress.³¹ She was brought up by her grandmother Bianca Visconti-Sforza. Her father was assassinated by the Viscontis in 1474, the year in which Isabella ascended the throne of Castile. Three years later, Caterina was married off by proxy to Girolamo Riario, nephew of the then Pope Sixtus IV.

Caterina was well educated according to the humanist tradition, and even in youth was said to have been fascinated by the deeds of famous men and women. The Tomboy Syndrome is here seen at work. Unlike Isabella, Caterina is said to have excelled at boisterous athletic sports: she was obsessed by hunting and dogs – big dogs such as bloodhounds, setters and greyhounds. (And unlike Isabella, Caterina was beautiful.) Her earliest soldiering was in 1483 when she defended her husband’s territory of Forlì from the Venetian threat. From the first Caterina relished such martial activity as she had once relished hunting; she maintained an iron discipline, not always without the aid of cruel punishments. The death of the Pope, her husband’s uncle (and the fear of the decline in the Riario cause), found Caterina, riding at the gallop with a cry of ‘Duca, duca, Girolamo! Girolamo!’, to hold the fortress of Sant’ Angelo until it could be handed over to the legal successor of Sixtus. Significantly, Caterina, once inside the fortress, invoked the name of Galeazza Maria Sforza – the nearest strong male figure – to illustrate her defiance. She had as much brains as her father, she shouted to those who wished her to admit a plenipotentiary to negotiate.

Caterina was seven months pregnant at the time and in her gold satin gown with a vast train, a huge velvet hat with long plumes, a contemporary wrote that ‘only her belt with the curved sword and bag of gold ducats hanging down from it was masculine’. He might have added: that and the free cursing towards the soldiers in which Caterina on that occasion and many others indulged.

The illness of Girolamo Riario meant that Caterina effectively ruled Forli; his death in 1488, slaughtered by the Orsi, meant that she ruled it entirely, if nominally for their son. For the next twelve years, she led a life of extreme turbulence as she attempted to maintain her independence in the light of neighbourly oppression, papal claims and finally the arrival of the French forces. Her refusal to surrender the fortress of Ravaldino stands in general for her attitude towards her own rights – theoretically those of her family, but in fact one detects in her a more personal stubborn refusal to be consigned to the female world of submission. (Not that she was above invoking the image of Only-a-Weak-Woman like many other Warrior Queens when it was to her advantage: ‘nobody believes me … being just a lady and timid too’, she wrote to her uncle Ludovico Sforza concerning the Venetian threat to Marradi which she had persistently predicted.)

When Caterina’s large family of children were held hostages for the surrender, she is supposed to have shouted – in a famous story related in a series of versions of increasing coarseness: ‘Do you think, you fools, that I haven’t the stuff to make others?’ And so saying, she scornfully lifted up her skirt. (In the version which Caterina Sforza’s biographer, Ernst Breisach, thinks the most likely, Caterina pointed out that she was already pregnant with another child when her existing children were threatened, adding that even if she wasn’t she could always remarry and have another family.)³²

As for her bloodthirstiness, Caterina’s treatment of the Orsi family who were the assassins of her husband recalls the vengeance of Boadicea against the wreckers of her daughters: in both cases the details justify that primitive fear concerning the virago unloosed as being deadlier than the male. There were public executions and secret stranglings, followed by the frightful death of the eighty-year-old Andrea Orsi. Dressed in a vest, shirt and one sock, with his hands tied, the patriarch was first of all condemned to watch his house being pillaged and demolished. Then he was dragged round a square tied to a board at a horse’s tail; finally his heart was cut out and his aged body dismembered, the pieces thrown to the crowd.

‘Oh glorious Madonna, be merciful with a miserable sinner’, pleaded Simone Fionni, another potential victim. But Caterina replied: ‘Let vengeance rule, not pity. I shall let the dogs tear you to pieces.’ (In the event he was spared and managed to escape.)

Then there were the lovers, increasingly young, continuously virile: placing Caterina within the Voracity Syndrome may have been politically expedient for her enemies, but it was not exactly unjust. The vengeance which Caterina would take in 1495 upon another family responsible for the death of her beloved castellan Giacomo Feo (he who transported her into ‘the heaven of Venus and Mars’) would rival that exacted upon the Orsi. The assassin was killed, his wife and sons flung down a well and left to die. But on the other hand Giacomo himself, probably with the connivance of Caterina’s legitimate sons, had been speared and then horribly mutilated before he was killed.

The sufferings of the Jews, Muslims and suspect Christians at the hands of the Inquisition in distant Spain were inflicted on the orders of Isabella’s religious confessors, not her own; Isabella herself disliked the shedding of blood (including, incidentally, bullfighting). Once again it was easier to be the pious Isabella at her prayers than Caterina, who on certain occasions could hear the sound of the tortures she had ordered in her own chamber. Yet the Orsi and the murderers of Giacomo had personally bereaved and insulted Caterina; the victims of Isabella the Catholic died for a principle – a principle of religious unity. But in the judgement of history where a Warrior Queen is concerned, it seems to be better to be associated with religious principle than with personal vengeance.

First of the lovers was Mario Ordelaffi, with whom Caterina was probably in love, in an idyll which lasted through the summer of 1489. Then the Pope took the opportunity to announce that because of ‘Caterina’s disorderly life’ he intended to award Forlì to his own son, Francescolotto Gibo, whose life was quite as dissolute. The trap lying in wait for a Warrior Queen (who could not be compared to ‘the new Eve’, like Isabella the Catholic) becomes apparent.

Caterina’s recipe book shows herself obsessed by the preservation of her beauty, in the most traditionally feminine manner: Queen Elizabeth I could not have done more, and in fact where teeth were concerned did less. Lotions of nettle-seed, cinnabar, ivy leaves, saffron and sulphur were applied to maintain the fairness of her celebrated blonde locks. Other lotions removed unwanted hair from her wonderfully white skin. Pearly teeth were guaranteed by daily applications of charcoaled rosemary stems, pulverized marble and coral cuttlebone. There was rose-water to bathe famously blue eyes, and cream for her white breasts. These appurtenances and practices of a Renaissance beauty were all very well; but when Caterina fought a long battle – masculine by the standards of the time – to hang on to her beloved territories of Forlì against the Pope’s desire to grant them elsewhere, she found that her very femininity was gleefully turned against her.

In 1497, for example, Venice expressed itself shocked by her ‘boundless sensual appetite’, when the real problem was that of Florentine aggression, which it was believed that Forlì might encourage. It hardly needs saying that a ‘boundless sensual appetite’ was if anything the mark of a Renaissance prince. But Caterina was not born a ‘prince’ – nor had she established herself as such in the minds of her people, once again unlike Queen Isabella.

The accession of Louis XII to the throne of France in 1498 brought with it new turmoil for central Italy. Cesare Borgia went secretly to France, where a deal was struck that Louis would help Cesare to drive the ruling families out of the Romagna in his own interest, while Louis’ own claims to Milan and the southern Italian kingdoms of Naples (also claimed by Ferdinand) would be respected. The Treaty of Blois of February 1499 was an especial blow to Caterina by which Venice, her traditional predatory enemy, allied with France. Finally on 9 March Alexander VI promulgated that papal bull which designated Caterina as the ‘daughter of iniquity’ – and formally invested Cesare Borgia with Imola and Forlì.

By the autumn of 1499 Milan had fallen to the French and Ludovico Sforza had fled. Beset in Forlì, Caterina wrote to Ludovico: ‘should I have to perish, I want to perish like a man’. That bold wish was not however to be granted to her.

Imola proved finally impossible to defend against Cesare Borgia. Caterina however clung on to Ravaldino fortress and refused to flee. Some of her plans for defiance were perhaps over-optimistic, such as sending the Borgia Pope Alexander VI letters which had been impregnated with poison or left in a plague chest (it needs a long spoon to poison a Borgia and the plan was bungled). On 12 December she said that she would ‘show the Borgia that a woman too can handle artillery’. The town itself capitulated by the end of 1499. Still Caterina maintained her defiance within the stronghold even after the inhabitants of the town had been given short shrift – rape as well as pillage described by Caterina robustly as ‘just punishment for a city which had surrendered like a whore’. Caterina continued to refuse such inducements as a safe conduct and a pension (showing herself in this respect more of a Boadicea than a Zenobia).

The final assault took place in January 1500. Cesare asked for ‘la bellicosa signora di Imola e Forlì’ dead or alive, and on receiving her alive – despite the fact that she had been captured by a French officer and was thus officially the captive of the French King – held her incommunicado for forty-eight hours while he treated her as his soldiers had treated the women of Forlì. Bernardi wrote of the ‘injustices committed to our unfortunate Madonna Caterina Sforza who had such a beautiful body’. But Cesare quipped to his officers that Caterina had defended her fortress better than she had defended her virtue.

Still Caterina would not sign away her rights to Imola and Forlì. She was not released until June 1501 by which time her beauty, that carefully tended asset, had vanished. She still tried to negotiate the return of some of her rights, but in vain. Her last years were happier, however; she began to train up her young son by Giovanni de’ Medici, Giovanni della Banda Nera, born in 1498, to be a solider, a worthy member of the house of Sforza. She died in May 1509.

It could be argued that at least as a mother Caterina died with more hope than had Isabella the Catholic five years earlier. The Castilian Queen’s only son, Prince John, whose birth had been attended by such rejoicings, had died in 1497. Of her three surviving daughters, Juana was mad: but she inherited the crown officially since her husband Philip the Fair of Flanders refused to allow Ferdinand more than the regency after his wife’s death. (Isabella’s defence of female inheritance had born fruit.) Another daughter Maria, who had been married to the King of Portugal, was already dead, as was her son Miguel, who might have united in his person the crowns of Portugal and Spain, as once his grandparents had united those of Aragon and Castile. Isabella’s third daughter Catherine of Aragon was already a widow following the death of her first husband Prince Arthur of England; she lingered in that country with a view to marrying – perhaps – his younger brother Henry.

Ferdinand expressed his own reaction to his wife’s death: ‘there is therefore hope that Our Lord has her in His Glory, which for her is a better and more lasting realm than those she ruled here’. Peter Martyr of Anghiera, on the other hand, the humanist historian, did not forget her martial achievements: the world – not only Spain – had lost its noblest ornament, he wrote, since Isabella had been the mirror of every virtue, the shield of the innocent ‘and an avenging sword to the wicked’.³³

Isabella’s own will, however, expressed the matters which had preoccupied her on earth, including the unity of Spain for which she had fought, and just rule for the Indians in the New World.³⁴ But her instinct for simplicity prevailed at the last: she requested that there should not be an extravagant funeral; instead money should be spent on providing dowries for poor girls (otherwise unable to get married) and ransoms for the Christian captives in the hands of the Moors in Africa. And Isabella, still with her prayers fighting the fight for the Faith, prayed that Ferdinand should continue to expand Spain into Muslim Africa, as he had once expanded Castile into Granada with Isabella at his side: she with her prayers (but in full armour), he with many armed men.

¹ ‘Religious unity cannot easily be criticized as an objective by those who live in a world of mutually repellent secular orthodoxies, quite as compelling and all-inclusive in their claims’, wrote J. N. Hillgarth in 1978.⁵ It is an apt comment. Nevertheless many manage to do so.

² Although if, as has been suggested, Caterina Sforza was the ‘cultural model’ for the queen in the game of chess, which attained its present power as a piece in the late fifteenth century, then she has achieved another kind of immortality.²⁹