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Isabella had a husband, Ferdinand, who was heir to the neighboring Kingdom of Aragon, but he had been traveling when the news of Enrique’s death arrived, and she had decided to seize the initiative. She would take the crown for herself alone.
If she failed to conceive, her husband might attempt to have the marriage annulled or have her sent away into seclusion and disgrace. Most women then were valued primarily for their ability to produce offspring, an obligation even more pronounced among royalty.
if the queen were deemed to be unchaste, she would consequently lose custody of her children.
The overt homosexual behavior in Segovia was criticized by many Spaniards and noticed even by some foreigners.
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 idea was not far-fetched. For thousands of years, toxic substances had been tools of succession in treacherous times; one early poison recipe was written on an Egyptian papyrus.
During Isabella’s time, people talking about death by poisoning often referred to the use of “herbs,” such as hemlock, but also including wolfsbane, foxglove, or wormwood.
he was already a crowned head of state: his father had recently named him king of Sicily, and marrying him would at once make Isabella a queen.
Despite her brother’s adamant opposition, the princess, who was soon to turn eighteen, believed that Ferdinand would make the best husband for her. Unbeknown to her brother, she was already secretly negotiating a marriage contract with Ferdinand.
The marriage negotiations between Isabella and Ferdinand had to be conducted clandestinely, through secret messages and undercover communications.
One early exchange already conveys the discreet flirtatiousness and clever manipulation of male psychology that would be Isabella’s hallmark.
The marriage was consummated that night, to the satisfaction of all parties. Witnesses entered the bridal chamber playing trumpets, flutes, and kettledrums, and the bloodstained bedsheet was displayed to the expectant crowd outside.
In the mid-1300s, when the Black Death that swept through Europe killed off at least 25 percent of the population, Catalonia, a trans-Mediterranean shipping center that was a hub of world trade, was even harder hit, losing up to 50 percent of its population in the decades following the first outbreak.
Very early in their relationship, Isabella had had to learn to live with Ferdinand’s nearly constant sexual infidelity. He had come into the marriage with two illegitimate children, after all, and in the beginning Isabella accepted easily and generously what had happened before their union.
Isabella, indeed, was extremely careful to protect her reputation for virtue. Having seen Queen Juana’s life unravel as a result of her sexual escapades, she took extreme measures to ensure that no one would ever question the paternity of her children.
Isabella’s four-year-old daughter was lifted up and presented to the crowd as the next heiress to the throne, underscoring the right of female succession in Castile, at present and in the future. No queen had ruled alone in Castile and León since Urraca,
centuries had passed with the crown transferred from man to man to man. Now Isabella was the monarch and her daughter was her heiress.
She needed a man by her side to help her overcome the gender stigma she was facing. “Women, even those with a clear right of succession, were rarely accepted as monarchs unless they were married,” writes historian Janna Bianchini about Queen Berenguela.
Her mother the queen had experienced seven long years of infertility, of waiting and hoping, as the conception and delivery of healthy infants was the single most important responsibility of royalty.
One letter from Ferdinand, written in May 1475, suggests that the periods of separation were now more Isabella’s choice than his,
“The queen is king, and the king is her servant,”
Isabella was careful not to repeat the mistake of giving her children a second-rate education when they would be expected to operate in the most elevated intellectual levels of society.
Isabella’s emphasis on girls’ education helped spawn an academic revolution for women across Europe, as her court set a new standard of expectations for females who would rule either on their own or in partnership with their husbands. Under Queen Isabella’s watchful and demanding eye, the children of the court received an extraordinary education.
His father frequently traveled, and so Diego and Ferdinand Columbus were essentially raised to adulthood at Isabella’s hands, first as pages in the court of her son and then as pages to the queen herself.
In time, and as wealth came his way in adulthood, Ferdinand Columbus developed into one of the most notable scholars of the Renaissance in his own right, amassing what is believed to have been the largest private collection of books in Europe, some 15,400 volumes that he acquired in his travels on behalf of the Spanish monarchs, whom he served for more than fifty years. His carefully catalogued personal library included valuable ancient manuscripts, works from the classics, mathematical and scientific treatises, religious works, and the first books produced on printing presses. His collection
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He was required to give away these garments to his household staff, for their use or resale, on a particular schedule. The queen became very angry when she learned that Prince Juan and Princess Juana hoarded their favorite items rather than passing them along to their attendants. She also required the children to distribute uneaten or excess food to the household staff so that nothing would go to waste. This could sometimes amount to a vast quantity of food because there were so many rituals surrounding mealtimes in the court.29 These gifts constituted part of the compensation received by
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Each could serve as a sort of living treaty, an ambassador in another capital.
“If your highness gives us two or three more daughters,” Hernando del Pulgar wrote to Isabella in 1478, “in 20 years time you will have the pleasure of seeing your children and grandchildren on all the thrones of Europe.”
At age three she had been be-trothed to the French dauphin, the future king Charles VIII, and was raised in the French court as his consort and the future queen of France.
The governing principle of an Inquisition is that failing to conform to religious and political norms is treason.
Threats to religious orthodoxy were seen as threats to the political establishment.
A new age of global exploration was dawning. Spain and Portugal had been rivals within the narrow confines of the Iberian peninsula, but they were now also becoming rivals
Columbus’s wife Felipa had since died, and now the widowed explorer had formulated a plan for an audacious sea exploration that he avidly wished to pursue. Columbus, a single father with his young son Diego in tow, moved to Castile and began to propose his idea to the queen. Christopher Columbus, or, as he was known in Spain, Cristóbal Colón,
Both wanted to spread the Christian faith, and both thought earthly rewards would
But Columbus also had a streak of madness, which is perhaps why he was willing to undertake a trip that almost everyone thought would lead to his death. He had a wild imagination.
Some people believe that it was his coded way of sharing his Jewish ancestry with his children. But writing in some kind of cipher was a popular fad at the time among intellectuals—a fellow Italian, Leo-nardo da Vinci, who was roughly the same age as Columbus, famously wrote in script that was readable only in a mirror.
Columbus was a fascinating, contradictory, and inscrutable character. He was evasive about his origins, though Italians were confident that he was born in Genoa. He may have had Jewish blood. Some thought he was a spy for Portugal.
The three ships landed on an island somewhere in the Caribbean, probably in the Bahamas, although no one knows which one precisely. Columbus’s changes in his logbook during the trip complicated the task for later scholars who tried to replicate his voyage.
The first interactions with the Indians were amiable. They were friendly and seemed eager to cooperate with their surprising new visitors.
The Pinta had not reappeared—perhaps it was gone forever. The remaining men were too many to fit on the Niña, the smallest of the three. So he told himself it was God’s will that the Santa María had gone aground, because he was destined to build a fortress there and make the place a European colony. He would leave a contingent of men behind on the island, and because it was Christmas, he named the new settlement La Navidad.
A small fort was built securely with the planks and timbers from the Santa María. There was bread and biscuit for a year, and wine and ammunition, in addition to the abundant food sources available on the island. Columbus told himself the men would be fine.
As the two remaining ships were continuing home, the winds died down, and they ended up in an exposed harbor. Columbus sent some men ashore to collect yams for eating, and they encountered some Indian warriors unlike any they had seen to date. They were very fierce in appearance, and their charcoal-painted faces gave them a ghoulish appearance.
Columbus was dispatched on three further voyages with varying degrees of success. But in the next decade she sent out at least six other expedition parties as well.
Hernán Cortés, who arrived in the Caribbean in 1504, became the conqueror of Mexico and later explored Baja California.
Juan Ponce de León, who first went to the New World in 1493, charted the coasts of Florida, in what would become the future United States of America.
Queen Isabella was explicit about how Columbus and his men should interact with the native Americans. She ordered them to “treat the said Indians very well and lovingly and abstain from doing them any injury, arranging that both peoples should hold much conversation and intimacy, each serving the other to the best of their ability.”
About half the Spaniards were dying of hunger, but the number of Indians who were dying was even greater. They fell ill from exposure to infectious diseases from Europe—smallpox, measles, cholera, typhoid, and bubonic plague among them—that were being introduced to the Americas for the first time. Corpses were everywhere. “The stench grew very great and pestiferous,” Oviedo was told.
It was on this second voyage that the massacres of the Indians began as well. Bartolomé de Las Casas described the first serious incident as a violent overreaction by Columbus
Columbus also quickly proved himself to be a poor administrator who had difficulty getting the men to follow his orders. He faced an almost constant sequence of mutinies among his crews.
On this second trip, the Castilians had captured sixteen hundred native Americans. They couldn’t fit them all aboard the ships, so they chose the best of the lot to transport, and some four hundred were released.
