A Widow in Need of Consolation

As seen in chapter 2, the genre of consolation literature intended to relieve readers of their worldly afflictions by emphasizing the transitory nature of materiality, fame, and wealth, and focusing on the higher, eternal beneficence of religion, spirituality, and God. While some texts, such as those written by Alonso Ortiz and Andrés de Li for Princess Isabel, were tailored to specific readers, they were nevertheless read by a broader public who were increasingly interested in devotional texts and had access to them thanks to the proliferation of the printing press. To some extent the works of Ortiz and Li are formulaic and rely on topoi; because later audiences did not necessarily appreciate the original context of these compositions, such readers imbued these texts with new meanings reflecting their own needs and their own understanding of contemplative piety. Meanwhile, however, the dowager princess was definitely in need of comfort, and Ortiz and Li were ready to provide it.

Both Ortiz and Li composed texts of consolation and “transition,” with the aim of helping Isabel move from grief to recovery and from a state of bereavement back to the world of the living. In her case, this meant charting a path from widowhood back to marriage, and reconstructing her public persona. This was all the more urgent given that in this era no real distinction was made between public and private life for royalty, and not only the monarch but also their children were expected to serve as examples for their subjects. Consequently, the reputation of royal children contributed to and was informed by that of their parents, and its maintenance was crucial to the prestige of the dynasty as a whole. Ortiz and Li understood that monarchy was a family affair in which the ruler depended on the collaboration of the queen (or in Isabel the Catholic’s case, her king consort) and their children, particularly those who were first and second in the line of succession.

When authors of this era composed their texts, they engaged both consciously and intuitively with a culture of literary production that was shaped by the importance of patronage, the need to secure financial support, and to appeal to both the specific target of the text and a broader audience.⁸ Ortiz and Li were no exceptions. The dynamics of patronage contributed to the shaping of recovery strategies in the context of both the court and Christian society as a whole. In the present case, one must consider the role of books in the materiality of grieving, the expectations placed on royal women, and how these related to the articulation of power, the evolution of humanist discourse, the cultivation of patronage, and the construction of reputation—all within a genre of consolation and patience literature that reflects what Laura Delbrugge calls “the tradition of religious self-improvement.”⁹

Alfonso Ortiz Consoles the Princess of Portugal

The Consolatory Treatise for the Princess of Portugal (Tratado consolatorio a la princesa de Portugal; 1493) of Alonso Ortiz (d. 1507) exemplifies the dynamics of grief, gift exchange, and patronage that characterized consolatory works targeting a particular patron. Ortiz was a humanist, clergyman, and intellectual in the entourage of the Catholic Kings, who used his literary production to establish a relationship of patronage with the royal family. He was a well-respected scholar who was awarded a doctorate in civil and canonical law by the University of Salamanca, and served as a royal chaplain at the court of Isabel and Fernando.¹⁰ Alfonso and his brothers, Francisco and Nicolás, were canons of the Cathedral of Toledo, where the latter two found themselves accused of unspecified “vices” and of disobeying the archbishop—a turn of events that likely inspired Ortiz to dedicate several of his treatises to the archbishops in an effort to curry their favor and rehabilitate his brothers.¹¹ Ortiz himself resided in Rome from 1473 to 1478, and by the time he died had amassed a magnificent library of over 600 volumes that he bequeathed to his alma mater.¹² Despite (or perhaps because of) his converso family background, he participated actively in the intellectual disputes of his time regarding the forced conversion of Jews and Muslims, for example, defending the Catholic Kings’ establishment of the Inquisition in 1478, as expressed in his Treaty of the Letter against the Protonotary Lucena (Tratado contra la carta del protonotario Lucena; 1493).¹³

Ortiz dedicated most of his literary output to the royal family. Seeking to establish a relationship of patronage and obligation with them, he eulogized and justified monarchical policies and provided guidance. Those individuals who had such access to the powerful gained the opportunity to influence politics and shape the events of the day. Conscious of this, Ortiz cast his net wide, dedicating works also to leading clergy including Archbishops Carrillo, Mendoza, and Cisneros. As Roger Chartier has emphasized, “The practice [of dedications] was central to the economy of patronage, which obligated the dedicatee to accord protection, employment, or remuneration in exchange for the book dedicated, offered, and accepted.”¹⁴

Indeed, Ortiz not only dedicated his books to powerful individuals, but also at times cast them as literary characters. In his Book of the Education of John, the Most Serene Prince and First-Born of the Most Powerful and Famous Fernando of Castile, Aragon, and Sicily and of Isabel of Glorious Lineage (Liber de educatione Johannis Serenissimi Principis et primogeniti regum potentissimorum Castelle Aragonum et Siciliae Ferdinandi et Helisabet inclyta prosapia coniugum clarissimorum)—the mirror of princes he composed in Latin for Prince Juan, the son and heir of the Catholic Kings—Isabel the Catholic herself appears as a character in dialogue with the influential cardinal and prelate of Spain Pedro González Mendoza (1428–95).¹⁵ Paradoxically, because the work reflects an idealized and disempowered humanist vision of women (including those of the elite), the queen is presented here not as a monarch commanding her cleric, but as the passive and docile recipient of the wise cardinal’s counsel. Ortiz probably thought that he was flattering them both, queen and cardinal.

In addition, Ortiz composed five more treatises for the royal family, all in either Castilian or Latin, some of which he himself translated into the vernacular with the goal of finding a broader readership. These each circulated in manuscript form before being gathered into a single volume printed in Seville in 1493. The five treatises were The Treaty of the Wound of the King (Tratado de la herida del rey), The Treaty of Consolation for the Princess of Portugal (Tratado consolatorio a la princesa de Portugal), A Prayer to the Kings in the Latin and Romance Language (Oración a los reyes en latín y en romance), Two Missive Letters to the Monarchs (Dos cartas mensajeras a los reyes), and The Treatise of the Letter against the Protonotary Lucena.¹⁶ The first of these texts was intended for Fernando, and the second for his daughter, Isabel, while the remaining works were for both monarchs.¹⁷ In addition, Ortiz composed a book after the passing of the Catholic Monarch’s son, Juan of Asturias, in 1497, The Treatise on the Death of the Very Renown Lord Juan (Tratado del fallesçimiento del muy inclito Señor Don Juan), as well as other treatises in Latin and unrelated projects, including corrections and editions of important religious texts like the Mozarab Missal and Breviary and translations of devotional works.¹⁸ That Ortiz was interested in providing counsel not only to the ruling couple, but also to other members of the royal family, shows that he understood that webs of power and influence in his time extended beyond the monarchs themselves, and that the royal family functioned as a larger unit. Therefore, when he perceived that anyone of them was in need, he set out to offer consolation that took the material form of a gift—in his case, a book. As the anthropologist Marcel Mauss has stated, a gift represents a commitment to reciprocity, to give is also to receive, and hopefully the one who receives the gift understands the need to respond—thus creating and solidifying social relationships.¹⁹

Ortiz wrote his treatise for the widowed princess around 1492 (about a year after the prince’s passing); it was printed in 1493, and the incunabulum remains the single extant edition.²⁰ Ortiz and Isabel must have gotten to know each other when she moved back home as a widow, a period in which he was serving as a royal chaplain. The treatise itself opens with a letter addressed to Isabel the Catholic, apologizing for the delay in its composition and asking her to pass the text on to her daughter for whom it was written—“because I can vouchsafe that her sadness and uncontrollable sobbing continue.”²¹ As in the treatise dedicated to the education of Prince Juan, Ortiz seems to double the impact of the work by explicitly implicating both mother and daughter as its inspiration.

In the introduction, Ortiz says his goal is to relieve the immense pain of Princess Isabel, describing her as “a heart so wounded that it was drawn more to sadness and lamentations than to any remedy.”²² He reminds her of the good things she still has in her life: the love of her parents, her brother Juan, and her sisters Juana, María, Catalina, and, of course, first and foremost, the love of God. He reviews the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance) and the theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity) and, as a Christian humanist, weaves in many examples from the Bible, the Fathers of the Church, and other figures from the classical and philosophical traditions. Among the most quoted are Seneca, Aristotle, and Boethius.

As was customary in didactic books, Ortiz employs many illustrative examples, but there is one figure in particular who is repeatedly held forth as an inspiration. Throughout the text Isabel is reminded of the sufferings of Job, a character who came to epitomize constancy of faith, patience, and fortitude in the face of undeserved misfortune.²³The biblical Job, a devout and prosperous head of family—“the greatest man among all the people of the East”—owned “seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she-asses and had a large number of servants” (Job 1:1). As the story goes, Satan challenged God to a bet, alleging that Job’s devotion was only due to the favor God had shown him. In response God allows the devil to strike Job with a series of tribulations, depriving him of his wife and children, his wealth, his servants, and his health. Nevertheless, Job persists in his forbearance, patiently enduring the undeserved torments that have been inflicted on him, and thus proving Satan wrong. Having won the wager, God then restores Job to health, provides him with a new family, and endows him with even greater prosperity than he had previously enjoyed.²⁴

Job would have seemed like an obvious example for Ortiz to deploy in order to inspire forbearance in the young widow Isabel. As he explains, the princess’s life before the death of Afonso was like Job’s before his faith was tested. She had enjoyed all the wealth and privilege that came with being a member of the royal family, and all the benefits of an excellent education and a good and virtuous Christian upbringing.²⁵ In this light, the death of Prince Afonso was not to be seen as a tragic tribulation, nor as punishment for sinful conduct, but as a test of faith given to her by God. Therefore, it should not be an occasion for sorrow, but rather a welcome opportunity for her to demonstrate her virtue, grace, and love of God.

Other contemporary moralists did not necessarily take such a conciliatory approach toward grieving royals. As we have seen, Jorge da Costa, Cardinal of Alpedrinha, all but accused João II of precipitating his son Afonso’s death as a consequence of his excessive love for him, while Ambrosio de Montesino attributed the misfortune of Isabel the Catholic’s children to her sins and those of her forebears.²⁶ For Ortiz, whatever the cause, everything in this life, whether tragic or beneficial, is fleeting and of ultimately little consequence. As he tells the princess, “Our life is a walk towards death; and you ought to well understand its brevity compared to the eternity of God.”²⁷ Returning to Job, Ortiz continues:

Although these punishments are the consequence of our nature—weakened by sin, but not by personal sin—because God did not permit Job to be deprived of his riches and afflicted in his body as a punishment to him, but only to test his virtue—and this was what was unjust in his friends, who were loathe to console him because they believed that those afflictions were the punishment for his sins, which was wrong, because Job had not sinned.²⁸

Next, Ortiz exhorts Isabel to be patient and to trust in God, and proposes three paths toward consolation: the sensible, the intellectual, and the spiritual. The first consists of the help one gets from family and friends, as when Job’s friends tried to support him. Intellectual consolation is found on the path of knowledge and philosophy that is undertaken by so many wise men, like Aristotle, Seneca, the Stoics, and Boethius. The third path, that of spiritual consolation, is, of course, the superior. It is “the sweetest and most profound that surpasses all the strengths of the soul with its vigor, because it is the true, divine consolation … it is more healthful than that medicine made for earthly wounds.”²⁹ Together, the three paths provide the means of controlling one’s emotions—a crucial exercise in the particular emotional community of the royal court.

At one point in the Tratado consolatorio, Ortiz invokes the example of the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos (d. 468 BCE), who was asked by a queen whether it would be better to be wise or to be rich, to which the poet replied, “I always see wise men at the doorsteps of the wealthy.”³⁰ This is an episode that resonates with Ortiz, who certainly considered himself wise and was indeed ever at the doorstep of the royal family, eager to proffer a solution to what they saw as problems, but were for him, opportunities. Consequently, his literature is as much a response to the problems that the royal family had, or that he thought they had, as a justification for their policies. His consolatory works therefore reflect the complex interrelation of writing, humanism, political power, and courtly culture in the fifteenth century, while his advice to Isabel shows how notions of consolation, sin, and pain were framed, and how recovery and acceptance were expected in this era.

Andrés de Li, the Princess, and the Virtue of Patience

While Ortiz’s book emphasized consolation, Andrés de Li’s Compendium on Patience (Summa de paciencia; 1493) focused on the nature, uses, and rewards of patience and the importance of humility. Using an array of sources, including biblical verses, works of the early Church Fathers (including Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine), and classical texts (notably the philosophy of the Stoics), as well as works by contemporary thinkers, Li enjoined the patient endurance of adversity rooted in a Christian model of suffering characterized by charity, forgiveness, and serenity. His intent was to provide spiritual and moral consolation by encouraging those in distress to take solace in God’s promises and resign themselves to a divine plan that transcended their own priorities and understanding. The Summa was published in 1493 in Zaragoza at the presses of Pablo Hurus, Li’s usual printer, and reprinted in 1505 by Jorge Coci. The short interval between the first and second editions attests to the popularity and perceived importance of the work.³¹ This was an era in which the printing press was taking the peninsula by storm. Movable type had arrived in Aragon with the support of Fernando’s father, Joan II of Aragon, but it was during the Catholic Monarchs’ reign that production multiplied in Zaragoza, with the establishment of publishers including Hurus, Juan Planck, and Enrique Botel.³²

Central to Li’s argument was the fact that as mortals we all suffer, and that, therefore, patience is required if we are to confront the difficulties and tribulations we face without falling into temptation and sin. Reflecting this, Coci’s edition placed an image of Christ as a “man of sorrows” (Christus dolens) on the verso of the first folio. Isidro Rivera argues that this paratextual element was expected to trigger the readers into meditating on Christ’s suffering as an example of the virtue of patience.³³ This passion imaginary became popular in Castile toward the last decade of the fifteenth century, particularly among the entourage of Isabel the Catholic.³⁴ In his Catholic Impugnation (Catholica Impugnación; ca. 1480), Isabel’s confessor, Hernando de Talavera, advocated for the deployment of such images to increase devotion among the faithful.³⁵ This use of images, along with the generalization of contemplative texts, and the silent reading and silent prayer advocated since the late Middle Ages, was seen as a way of intensifying devotion.³⁶ Unfortunately, we do not know what image adorned the 1499 first edition that Princess Isabel would have read, because there is only one complete extant copy, and the image in question is missing.³⁷

Nor do we know much about the book’s author, Andrés de Li, who is even more obscure than Ortiz. In his Summa, he presents himself as a citizen of Zaragoza, and we know he was a converso. Whereas Ortiz had championed the Inquisition, Li was investigated by the Holy Office in 1490, only two years before the expulsion of the Jews.³⁸ The type of works that he authored show that he was interested in mathematics and astrology as much as in religion, the passion of Christ, and virtues like patience. Before he died around 1521, he had written three books in Spanish, all published by Hurus: Repertory of Time (Repertorio de los tiempos; 1492), Treatise on Patience (Summa de paciencia; 1493), and Treasury of the Passion (Thesoro de la passión; 1494).³⁹ The Repertory is a sort of expansion of Bernat de Granollach’s Lunari (Barcelona, 1485)—an almanac that included a calendar, a history of time, and an astrological treatise with accompanying tables, whereas the Treatise and the Treasury are devotional texts. The Treatise, as noted above, was dedicated to the dowager princess Isabel, while the Treasury—a meditation on Christ’s suffering—was dedicated to her parents; in other words, both of these works, which focused on suffering, were addressed to the royal family.

Yet, unlike Ortiz, Li was an outsider, with no apparent connection to the royal court. This fact prompted his modern scholarly editor, Laura Delbrugge, to propose that Li wrote the Summa at the suggestion of his friend, the ex-pat German publisher Pablo Hurus, who proposed dedicating the book to the queen as a way of securing royal patronage.⁴⁰ Were he to gain the (favorable) attention of the royal family, this might initiate a relationship that would not only benefit him financially and socially, but help him put his troubles with the Inquisition in the past. Whatever his motives, it is clear that Li was hoping at least to endow his books with the tacit endorsement of the royal family, if only by virtue of his dedication. Thus, in his dedication to the “most serene and very illustrious lady, the Lady Isabel of Castile and of Aragon, Princess of Portugal,” he deployed a common strategy of captatio benevolentiae and prefatory etiquette—modestly qualifying his book as of little significance and asking for her endorsement: “I beg you to grant the present little work your approval.”⁴¹ The implication was that if his books were good enough for a king, a queen, or a princess, they had to be good enough for commoners too. What is particularly remarkable about Li composing a treatise for Princess Isabel is that someone so far removed from the royal court—which was touring the Crown of Castile and Granada during those years—had heard of the dowager Isabel’s crisis of grief.⁴² Reports of her distress, sung by bards in ballads, seems to have reached all manner of people across the Iberian kingdoms.

In the twenty-eight chapters of the Treatise, Li defines three types of patience—natural, vicious, and virtuous—and how to employ patience, particularly in its most benevolent and virtuous form, to counter grief. According to the treatise, virtuous grief is particularly effective because it fortifies the good Christian against the temptation of sin, bringing them closer to the Lord and distancing them from damnation. Tellingly, Li’s dedication also holds that death is not the only equalizer; suffering also makes everyone equal regardless of wealth or station.

Because of these God-sent afflictions, “We cry when we are born, we strive while we live, and we sigh with relief when we die.”⁴³ “Patience,” he says, “assuages the wrath that God holds for the sinner, and reconciles much with Him [just as] humility and forbearance mollify a ruler.”⁴⁴ Reading, prayer, and meditation are presented as gateways to patience in order of importance. Whether out of conviction or self-promotion the author praised reading, “since through reading we understand, and by understanding we enjoy the secrets of Holy Scripture, which is the repose and consolation of those who suffer.”⁴⁵ Finally, he reminds the reader that “God does not let those who call out to him fall.”⁴⁶

While the text goes on to offer general advice on patience, at times it touches upon specific topics that clearly had the princess in mind. In chapter 10, Li invokes the prophet Ezequiel, who suffered because he loved his wife too much—just as Isabel loved Afonso. The passage recalls how Jorge da Costa reprimanded João II for his love of his deceased son:

This beneficence was felt by the Prophet Ezequiel from God, who since he had loved his wife excessively said: “I will deprive you of your desire before your eyes.” And then at the evening hour his wife died, and God commanded him not to cry, in order to show us that when God takes something that we love in this world from us, we ought not cry because of this, but give thanks with patience and humility for that which we have received.⁴⁷

Were this not enough to shame Princess Isabel out of her grief, Li continues: “Thus, our Redeemer and Master, to wean us from the milk of the vain pleasures of this transitory and fallen world, places the bitterness and bad taste of tribulations and pain in our hearts and thoughts.”⁴⁸ In this sense, Isabel’s persistence in her grief would be tantamount to rejecting God’s will, when, on the contrary, “God ought to be loved, purely and for Himself, with a true and most ardent love, the flames of which, as is sung in the Psalms, no tribulation, not even death, can extinguish.”⁴⁹ Following this logic, it was as if Afonso were doomed to die because his father and his wife loved him too much. It is a sin to love anyone more than God, and therefore, the prince’s death constitutes an opportunity for the bereaved survivors to reassess their priorities and return to the rightful devotion to the Lord.

In chapter 15, Li advises how to prepare for the loss of a loved one, decrying “the mad and pitiful fantasy, not to mention the impossibility, of wanting to stand against the will of God.”⁵⁰ Here, Job is once again held up as a model for accepting the will of God with patience. The author conjures the prophet, saying, “And just as God willed, so has it come to pass.”⁵¹ Li then hammers the lesson home: “It is an unjust thing, then, to show impatience at having lost the things that we love much, and this impatience proceeds from injustice and a love not granted to God.”⁵² Next, citing the advice of Saint Gregory the Great, Li proposes that loving God is the only way to move beyond grief: “It is vain and mad to suffer because of death, and through the uselessness of this state we harm our souls and our bodies.”⁵³ Concluding the treatise, he exhorts Isabel to suffering with patience in anticipation of the rewards of the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment; for this, our future in God, is the only future that matters. With that, he closes, commending to the princess his “little work” (pequeño trabajo), which he acknowledges is somewhat “intemperate” (desenfrenado).⁵⁴

In other words, both Ortiz and Li’s treatises enjoin Isabel to become a “Christian Princess” who duly accepts the destiny given to her by God and her parents alike. Whether she read either of these treatises we cannot be sure, but it is likely she did, given that both books could be found in the library of her mother with whom she was living at the time.⁵⁵ She would certainly have read some consolation literature, and as both books were rather short (for instance, Ortiz’s is only sixty-five pages in the print version), they would have been easy to complete, if not pleasant to digest. Moreover, Ortiz was well connected to the royal family and would have been in a position to see that his book got into the princess’s hands. This was only one of many works he wrote for different members of the dynasty. And for Isabel, this book was one more material element that, along with her modest clothes, boyish haircut, and new ascetic habits, completed her personification of grief. We see, thus, how consolation literature and ceremonial could be understood to some extent as what William Reddy called an “emotional refuge.”⁵⁶ And here we see contemporary faith and science diverge. While devotional treatises like those of Ortiz and Li may have gained the approval of the pious, their recommendations conflicted with current medical approaches to suffering. For example, Naama Cohen-Hanegbi reports how the Italian physician Taddeo Alderotti used the figure of Job to exemplify not virtuous suffering, but excessive sorrow, implying that such a level of distress was harmful to one’s health and ultimately to one’s salvation. In Alderotti’s view, when a patient “grieves excessively, he may fall into a sin of the soul and to an illness of the body.”⁵⁷ He described his charge as worried, fearful, and losing weight—all symptoms linked to melancholy, and all of which were manifested by Princess Isabel. Cohen-Hanegbi identifies two basic medical approaches to grief in this type of medical literature: one that sees grief as a dangerous condition for an individual’s health (particularly for those with choleric and melancholic temperaments) that must be treated with diet and medication, and another that combines medical and humanistic discourses to provide guidance to the patient.⁵⁸ Medical and religious attitudes converged; thus what physicians qualified as excessive grief came to be seen as an offense against both order and God. Regrettably, we do not know what the court doctors advised Princess Isabel to do.

The Butterfly Effect: The Princess and the “Heretics”

Job proved to be an ideal example for Isabel because she too would be given a “second chance” in the form of a new marriage into the Portuguese royal family that could reestablish the alliance that Afonso’s early death had sundered. In the Middle Ages marriage was a means of transforming rivals into allies, and Portugal was a historical competitor of Castile. This rivalry had flared into open conflict in the time of the Catholic Monarchs in the form of the war of succession between Isabel and her niece, Juana “la Beltraneja,” the daughter of her half brother, Enrique IV, who since the death of João II found herself freed from the convent, but not from surveillance.⁵⁹ As for the dowager princess Isabel, she was second in line to the thrones of Aragon and Castile. As such, she presented a most desirable marriage prospect for the new Portuguese king, Manuel I (1495–1521), who knew her well from her previous sojourns in the Portuguese court and likely held some affection for her. As a consequence of the Tercerias de Moura, the marriage contract between Isabel and Afonso that was part of 1479 Treaty of Alcáçovas, Isabel had lived as a child in Portugal, while Manuel had spent time as a hostage in the court of the Catholic Kings (see chapter 5). When Isabel eventually arrived in Portugal as Afonso’s wife, she also reencountered Manuel, a young prince only a year older than she (as opposed to her betrothed, who was five years her junior).

However, Isabel’s years of widowhood had transformed her. It is difficult to assess how her recovery evolved, or if she fully recuperated from her sadness or abandoned her pious practices. Consequently, in view of Isabel’s uncertain state, her parents proposed that Manuel marry their daughter María, who was only thirteen years old and was fourth in line to the thrones of Aragon and Castile. But the Portuguese king wanted Isabel, who was twenty-six years old and in a better position to inherit the kingdoms.

Isabel and Fernando had a long history with Manuel. They had been his guardians during his time as a hostage in Castile, and they supported his ascension to the throne over the ambitions of João II himself, who had intended to make his illegitimate son, Jorge, his heir.⁶⁰ João’s relationship with Manuel was somewhat ambivalent. In 1484, when the future king was a youth, João had stabbed to death his own cousin and brother-in-law, Manuel’s older brother Diogo, Duke of Viseu (1450–84), under suspicion of treason.⁶¹ This came a year after João had pardoned Diogo, who, together with Duke Fernando de Bragança (executed in 1483), had been working to undermine the authority of the monarchy.⁶² At this time, João had assured the young Manuel of his protection and passed on to him his brother’s extensive estates, but there had been little love lost between the young nobleman and his royal brother-in-law. It was an unexpected turn of fate that brought Manuel to the throne against the wishes of the reigning king, but with the support of the new heir’s sister, Queen Leonor, and of the Catholic Kings. All João II could do in an attempt to preserve his line was to stipulate in his will that should Manuel die without legitimate heirs, the Portuguese crown would go to Jorge.⁶³ Hence, the Viseu branch of the Avis dynasty made an unforeseen and remarkable comeback, dashing João’s hopes that his own line would succeed.

In the end, a marriage contract between Isabel and Manuel was signed in Burgos on November 30, 1496.⁶⁴ Her dowry would be the same as it had been for her previous marriage: 53,333 Castilian doblas, plus the 17,000 that she had received as a pledge (arras), to be paid in three installments beginning June 1, 1497. It was specified that a marriage by proxy was to be held within nine days, and the bride was to arrive in Portugal no more than six months later. Nevertheless, the arrangement was almost scuttled when Isabel wrote to Manuel in her own hand and apparently without the knowledge or consent of her parents, demanding as a precondition to the nuptials that he immediately expel all the “heretics” from Portugal. We know of this letter thanks to other correspondence that refers to it, but the original is either lost or has yet to be found. Undoubtedly, this was a demand that would likely be seen as an audacious and inappropriate meddling in the affairs of his kingdom, nor are her motivations clear. It could have been a symptom of her newfound piety, or a gambit to sabotage the betrothal so she could attain her goal of renouncing the world and perhaps joining a religious institution or even taking the vows of a nun.⁶⁵

As noted in the previous chapter, Isabel may have been looking toward the example of “Santa Joana,” the sister of João II, who died in 1490 just before her own arrival in Portugal. Second in the line of succession to the throne, Joana established a middle ground between convent and court in order to live according to her own terms. By living in a house adjacent to the Dominican convent of Aveiro she was able to fend off any attempts to marry her, and by not taking formal vows she escaped the authority of the Church and was able to remain active politically.⁶⁶ But Isabel was not as fortunate as Joana, and this option was not open to her—she was too important a political asset for her family. Her courtiers knew as much, and this is reflected in the advice they gave her. Ortiz advocated for Isabel to pursue a spiritual life but within the secular world, whereas Li simply advised her to suffer her fate with resolve.

Nevertheless, Isabel dragged her feet as much as she could, if not to avoid marrying a second time, then at least to do so on her own terms. The chronicler Alonso de Santa Cruz recalled how Isabel did not want to marry Manuel: “And the princess undertook this marriage fed up and against her will (harto contra su voluntad), because she did not want to marry a second time, were it not that her parents commanded and entreated her so much.”⁶⁷ This is confirmed in Martire d’Anghiera’s letter to Jorge da Costa cited at the beginning of this chapter, which was written only five days after the signing of the marriage contract. Instead of considering the marriage a fait accompli at that point, Martire d’Anghiera is merely optimistic that it would most likely happen. As it was, the princess’s discourtesies and Manuel’s corresponding anger notwithstanding, the king of Portugal remained determined to marry her, and the negotiations, and eventually the wedding, went forward.

However, next, Isabel made a puzzling request to Manuel to expel all of the “heretics” from Portugal as a precondition to her entering the kingdom. Historians have argued about both the authenticity and the impact of this request, and over whom she was referring to. Although, strictly speaking, the term referred only to Christians, Isabel may have been referring to Jews and Muslims and/or those Castilian conversos who had been accused of Judaizing and had settled in Portugal in order to escape the Inquisition. Indeed, early modern chroniclers struggled to identify who Isabel’s “heretics” were, even though they were not far removed from the events. For instance, Damião de Góis (1502–74), who wrote a chronicle of Manuel’s reign during the tenure of his son, João III (1521–57)—the ruler who formally brought the Inquisition to Portugal in 1536—and the chronicler Bishop Amador Arrais de Mendoza (ca. 1530–1600) both claimed that the princess was referring to Jews. For his part, the Aragonese chronicler Jerónimo Zurita (1512–80) stated that the princess meant to expel the conversos who had been condemned by the Inquisition. He also noted that Manuel was very suspicious about the whole request, and sought confirmation from the princess that she would indeed cross into Portugal once they were gone.⁶⁸

Given that no edict of expulsion for Muslims survives, some modern historians, like António Costa Lobo (d. 1913), went so far as to claim that Muslims were never expelled from Portugal, although the practice of Islam ended, and their properties were confiscated. On the other hand, Isabel dos Guimarães Sá maintained that Isabel’s “heretics” included Jews, Muslims, and heretical Christians, a position echoed by João Paulo Oliveira e Costa, who claimed that Isabel was determined to rule over a homogenously Christian kingdom.⁶⁹ For his part, David Nogales Rincón tied Isabel’s agreement to marry Manuel to an unwritten request to expel the Jews and Muslims.⁷⁰

The issue is that the documentation relating to expulsions from Portugal—be they Jews, Muslims, or heretics—is very patchy. Unlike in Castile, royal declarations of expulsion do not survive. And the relation of Isabel’s request to the expulsion of Portugal’s Muslims, which seems to have taken place in 1496, seems all the more dubious, given that at that time there were no firm plans to order the conversion or exile of Castile’s Muslim population, whether the many who inhabited recently conquered Granada, or the centuries-old mudéjar communities of Castile itself. In Aragon, there had been little will to convert or expel the Crown’s Jews, and no royal impetus to purge its numerous Muslim communities.

The task of determining who Isabel was referring to, and what effect her demands had, is made even more difficult given that so many negotiations were carried out verbally over the course of many meetings by courtiers and envoys who may themselves have been thinking of different groups. Still, it bears considering that Isabel and Manuel’s marital agreement dates from November 30, 1496, and does not mention any expulsions.⁷¹ All this notwithstanding, five days later, on December 5, Manuel promulgated an edict requiring the conversion or expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Portugal, giving them until October of the following year to comply. Those who did not convert or meet the deadline were to be enslaved.

The conditions imposed as a consequence of Isabel’s intransigence were extremely harsh and were undoubtedly intended to induce Jews and Muslims to convert. For example, Jewish children under fourteen years of age were to be left behind to be raised by Christians.⁷² Unable to cross into Castile, Jews left by ship from Lisbon. The Muslims, many of whom crossed over by land to Castile, were free (unlike the Jews) to take their children with them. In Castile, the Catholic Kings had authorized Muslims not only to enter, but to settle—motivated, so they claimed, by “piety and mercy” (piedad e clemencia).⁷³ According to Damião de Góis, the reason the two groups were treated differently was because there were many powerful Muslim kingdoms that were in a position to retaliate for the mistreatment of their coreligionists, while the Jews had no such advocates or allies.⁷⁴

That said, François Soyer minimizes the role Princess Isabel played in the expulsion of Jews in favor of her parents.⁷⁵ “There can be no doubt,” he writes, “that Manuel was pressured by Queen Isabel and King Fernando to put an end to the toleration of Jews in Portugal in 1497 as a pre-condition to his marriage to their eldest daughter Isabel.”⁷⁶ Likewise, Jonathan Ray blames the Catholic Kings, while Ruth Martínez Alcorlo also contends that Isabel did not instigate the expulsions.⁷⁷ Nevertheless, all of this is either speculation or historical intuition. There is an entrenched historical narrative that assumes this was the case, but no documentary evidence to confirm it. This contention is built on the unsubstantiated notion that Isabel and Fernando were pursuing a general policy of religious uniformity that included Portugal, and on the apparent assumption that Isabel the Catholic was the only woman in her family with agency. Historians may be tempted to rationalize phenomena such as the expulsion of religious minorities, communal violence, or bigotry by only attributing them to concrete religious, political, or economic agendas without considering that they might at times constitute responses to perceived problems that were, at bottom, emotional.

There is no evidence that the Catholic Monarchs lobbied for the expulsions independent of their daughter, who was at this point a mature woman, was deeply conflicted, was still considering a pious renunciation of the world, and was very clearly still suffering from severe grief. The princess was also looking for any excuse not to marry a man she knew well enough to contact personally and directly. She may have felt this requirement would be read as a deal-breaker; but in the event she was forced to marry against her will, making such a demand would establish her protagonism and agency in the marriage negotiations and in their future relationship. The message might have been that she was no mere pawn of her parents, nor would she be for her husband.

Nor was she uninformed regarding the affairs of the kingdom. As a widowed princess of Portugal, she still had rents and properties there, and was sending agents to attend her affairs in the kingdom, so it would not have been difficult for her to contact Manuel on her own. At least this is what her parents seem to convey regarding the “heretics” in a letter they sent from Medina del Campo on June 21, 1497. The addressee was their cousin, Álvaro de Bragança, a student of Martire d’Anghiera, who had been living in Castile and was serving as an intermediary in these negotiations because he was trusted by both parties. The aim of the dispatch was to ease an angry Manuel, who was suspecting that, now that he had already expelled his Jews and Muslims, the princess was making a new demand in order to escape the upcoming marriage. Manuel was already twenty-seven years old and had no heirs; he had invested considerable time, energy, and personal prestige in this operation, so he was rather anxious. He wanted Isabel in Portugal without further delay. The document is long and convoluted, and its lack of clarity and cohesion seems to indicate that the clearly upset Catholic Monarchs were extemporizing to their secretary—stumbling and repeating themselves as they dictated ideas they had either not fully thought through or that they did not have to spell out clearly because Álvaro was so familiar with the context.

It is obvious, however, that Isabel and Fernando wanted to make it clear that they had not been a party to whatever their daughter had communicated to Manuel—in secret and in her own hand—when she requested the expulsion of the heretics. It was only after the princess had sent it, they claimed, that “she advised us that she had sent the king a letter in her hand, which she had written; and this, as you know is the truth, and you may make whatever inquiries on our behalf that you wish, that since We did not know anything about the said letter, nor did We speak to her nor hear of what was in this letter said, until the moment of the betrothal.” Clearly frustrated, they continued, “She said that she sent it without advising us, so that we could not stop her.”⁷⁸

So, six years after Afonso’s untimely demise, Isabel, still haunted by her dead husband’s memory, saw her pious chastity as a refuge from the wrath of God. This was certainly a moment of heightened religious consciousness in the political environment of the dynasty. Since Isabel’s return from Portugal, she had witnessed the conquest of Muslim Granada, the expulsion of the Jews from Castile and Aragon, and the beginnings of the evangelization of the “New World” as a consequence of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Indies thanks to the sponsorship of her parents.⁷⁹ Within this atmosphere of transformational fervor and given her station as a future queen, Isabel may have imagined her personal suffering in terms of the destiny of her new kingdom.

Isabel and Fernando emphasized to Manuel that their daughter saw Afonso’s death as divine punishment (as some consolatory texts claimed), meted out by a God who hated heretics. Princess Isabel was determined to make amends to avoid further retribution: “It is clear that God is offended by [the heretics’] presence, and she believes that what befell the prince [Afonso] by God’s will, was because of this, and that it should be resolved, lest all manner of misfortune befall the king, herself, and the kingdom.”⁸⁰ Isabel and Fernando continued to excuse their daughter’s presumptuousness, going so far as to admit that “we have pressured her and have brought such force on her” to marry Manuel that they felt it would be impossible to change her mind regarding her rather irregular request.⁸¹

At one point in the letter the Catholic Monarchs seem to indicate that the princess’s “heretics” included Jews, Muslims, and refugee conversos, and that she was a driving force in the marital agreement. Thus, they asked Álvaro to warn Manuel that he should not be surprised at having to expel his remaining heretics, because this point had been on the table since the marital negotiations had begun:

And as is well-known, at the time this marriage was first discussed, the princess demanded as a pre-condition that the king throw out all of the heretics from his realms and lordships before she would set foot in them, and the king himself asked to be able to do so when she arrived, and she did not want to come until they had left, up to the point that we all told her not to delay because of this, since before she had gone to Portugal the said heretics would have been cast out, and it was on this condition that she concluded the betrothal.⁸²

And indeed, there are indications—thanks to the back-and-forth between the ambassadors—that Manuel had anticipated her demand, and that in response he had promulgated a decree of expulsion addressed to his Muslim and Jewish subjects. In this communiqué the Catholic Monarchs marvel that this intuition could have been nothing less than an act of God:

And it happened that two or three days after this, at a moment before either the betrothal had been concluded or anyone was aware of this condition she had demanded, news came that the king had ordered all of the said heretics to leave his realms, such that to us it appeared as an act of God that at this very time the will of the king and the princess coincided, the one not knowing of the other or of this his command, and thus we had already understood the matter as concluded.⁸³

However, Manuel had not ordered the expulsion of Christian heretics or conversos, as the princess evidently was now requesting as well. For their part, the Catholic Monarchs reiterated that, whereas their daughter might show some flexibility as regarded the other conditions she had placed on the marriage (and we do not know what these were), she would be inflexible in this regard. “She would first suffer death,” they wrote, “before entering if the heretics had not yet departed.”⁸⁴

Isabel and Fernando clearly wanted Álvaro to convey to Manuel that it was not them behind the request for the expulsion, but their daughter, and that they were surprised he thought they were maneuvering behind the scenes, given that it was not their style. “Furthermore, tell him, that we are shocked that he would think that anything of this had come from Us, because, if it had, obviously we would have said it openly; nor should he imagine that we have come to him with new conditions or demands.”⁸⁵ To prove their sincerity and commitment to making the marriage happen, they went so far as to offer one of themselves to serve as a “hostage of peace” until their daughter moved to Portugal. Then, in order to end their letter on a more positive note, they acknowledged how much they valued their alliance with Portugal and how they saw Manuel as a son: “because we want nothing for him that we would not want for our own children, and he should expect nothing less from us than what he would expect from his actual parents.”⁸⁶

Fifty-one days later a follow-up letter was sent from Medina del Campo, dated August 11, 1497, signed by Fernando, Isabel, and their heir, Juan, on the one hand, and João Manuel, chief steward (camarero major), confidant, and legal agent (procurador) of Manuel, on the other. This dispatch addressed the same themes but was better rehearsed. It clarified the Portuguese king’s obligation to “cast out of all of his realms and lordships those who have been condemned as heretics and who remain in the said realms and lordships.”⁸⁷ The document was also endorsed by Princess Isabel, who already signed as “La Reyna” (“The Queen” of Portugal), and promised to fulfill her obligations and enter Portugal as soon as the “heretics” were gone:

And We, Lady Ysabel, by the Grace of God, Queen of Portugal … promise by Our good faith and royal word and swear to Our Lord Jesus Christ and by the sign of the Cross and the four Holy Gospels, on which We are physically laying Our hands, that once they have been cast out from all of the realms and lordships of the said king, My lord, all of those who have been condemned here for heresy and who remain in those his aforesaid realms and lordships, and the king, My lord, has written to Me and sworn to Me in his letter that they have gone and that if any remain He will visit on them such penalties as heretics deserve.⁸⁸

This is reported also by Jerónimo Zurita, who states how the princess wanted Manuel to “exile from his lordship those who had been disgraced and condemned as heretics.”⁸⁹ The Aragonese chronicler adds that after this letter was sent and the ambassadors met, it was established that in September Manuel would force the heretics to leave, at which point toward the end of that month Isabel and Fernando would deliver their daughter to him so that the marriage could be consummated.⁹⁰

It seems there are several plausible scenarios. Either the princess alone, or her parents, or both in agreement requested the expulsion (or conversion) of the religious minorities (either Jews and Muslims, or just Jews) as a precondition for accepting a new marriage, and then, after Manuel agreed, she alone added a last subsequent condition that puzzled them all: the expulsion of the remaining heretics. Because the Inquisition was created in 1478 and was fully functioning two years later, by 1497 many alleged Judaizing conversos had been prosecuted in Castile and Aragon.

In this light, Manuel’s anger would be understandable, given that he seems to have received the petition to expel the heretics after he had already agreed on the conversion or expulsion of the Jews and Muslims of his realms—a condition Isabel and Fernando characterized in a letter to Álvaro de Bragança, as the princess’s “final” request. From the Portuguese king’s perspective, it might have appeared that the Castilian-Aragonese royal family was acting in bad faith. He may have feared further demands, such as to hand over “La Excelente Señora”—Juana “la Beltraneja”—but this did not come about.⁹¹ In any event, it is clear that Princess Isabel was no mere spectator in the negotiations surrounding her second marriage, but a crucial contributor to the policy of converting or expelling the Jews and Muslims of Portugal.

In the end, Fernando, Isabel, and Manuel all got the marriage they had wished for, while Isabel got the “Christian kingdom” she desired. Historians, however, have been reluctant to recognize the princess’s agency in this affair. Góis, for example, wrote, “Forced, as one suspects, by her parents, the monarchs, the queen wrote a letter to the king requesting him that she delay her arrival until the Jews had been completely cast out from his realms.”⁹² In Góis’s mind it may have been Isabel who wrote the request, but it was her parents who put her up to it.

That said, the Catholic Monarchs were not necessarily dedicated to a policy of religious uniformity. In fact, Jews were instrumental to royal policy. It was the exiled Portuguese Jew Isaac Abravanel and the Castilian Chief Rabbi Abraham Senior who put together the finances for the Granada campaign of 1492. Moreover, Senior had been instrumental in the Catholic Kings’ marriage and was a confidant of the queen. But Isabel’s frustration with the converso problem—particularly the danger Judaizing converts continued to pose to the converted Jews and their descendants despite the energetic activities of the Inquisition—led the monarchs to promulgate the Alhambra Decree, which mandated the conversion or exile of the Jews of her realms by March 31, 1492. Fernando committed to the policy, even though he ruled over the Crown of Aragon, which had a larger and better-integrated Jewish community. It was a consequence of their dynastic union that Castilian and Aragonese Jews suffered a common fate.⁹³ Tellingly, Fernando did not institute such a policy when he seized the Kingdom of Naples in 1510, although he unsuccessfully tried to establish the Inquisition there.⁹⁴

Nor was the Portuguese Jewish policy clear or consistent. The expulsion of the Jews from Castile and Aragon in 1492 sparked a Mediterranean and European diaspora, and many settled in Portugal, where João II allowed 600 households to install themselves on payment of an entry tax. But conditions for these newcomers were often harsh, and those who could not afford to pay the royal tax were enslaved.⁹⁵ Soon after, some 2,000 Jewish children were deported to the uninhabited island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea with the expedition of Álvaro de Caminha, while others were pressured to convert or forced to embark on ships chartered by the Crown and sent into exile.⁹⁶ Ironically, João’s brutality toward the newly arrived Jews prompted near-contemporary Jewish chroniclers, like Eliyahu Capsali and Yosef ha-Kohen, to venture that the death of the heir Afonso had indeed been God’s punishment, but for João’s repression of, rather than his leniency toward, these “heretics” (although, in fact, Afonso had died prior to these events).⁹⁷ Góis claims that Manuel I granted the enslaved Jews a pardon in February 1496, but unfortunately does not provide further details.⁹⁸

As for conversos, prior to the institution of the Inquisition in Castile and Aragon, there had been no significant community of converts in Portugal. Soon after the persecutions began in the Catholic Monarchs’ realms and these New Christians began to arrive in the kingdom, João instituted his own inquisitorial tribunal and on October 2, 1488, promulgated an order of expulsion directed specifically at them.⁹⁹ The German traveler Hieronymus Münzer, who toured the peninsula in 1494, stated that the Jews of Lisbon feared expulsion because Isabel and Fernando were pressuring João II, but it is not clear on what he based this information, and no other sources corroborate it.¹⁰⁰ Soyer suggests that João took a distinctly aggressive approach to Castilian and Aragonese Jews and converts because he mistrusted them as foreigners; he had no such concerns regarding native Jews, whom he saw as cousa nosa (our property) because they were fully subordinated to the Crown.¹⁰¹

Nor did the Catholic Monarchs have any intention of expelling or forcibly converting their own Muslim subjects in 1496. After the conquest of Granada in 1492, the erstwhile king, “Boabdil” (Abu ‘Abd Allah), was not sent into exile but installed in a new puppet kingdom in the Alpujarras, south of Granada, while many of the Granadan elite simply converted to Christianity.¹⁰² The Muslim populace of the new Kingdom of Granada were offered the same general terms that subject Muslims had been offered in Aragon and Castile for the previous four centuries. The following year, Isabel and Fernando stated explicitly that it was neither their will nor their desire to expel their Muslims subjects.¹⁰³ It was not until the mudéjares (Muslims living under Christian rule) of the capital revolted in 1499 that they came under pressure to convert, on the initiative of the hard-liner archbishop Cardinal Cisneros.¹⁰⁴ Even after this, in 1500 Isabel assured her Castilian Muslim subjects that they would not be forced to convert, although in 1502 she did indeed promulgate such a decree.¹⁰⁵ But Fernando had little interest in such a policy. Even more than the Jews, Muslims had long been regarded as an asset to the rulers of the Crown of Aragon—a “royal treasure,” in the words of the fourteenth-century king Pere the Ceremonious.¹⁰⁶ Mudéjares here comprised a crucial economic demographic, and as direct dependents of the monarchy benefited from royal protection. Thus, the Crown of Aragon’s Muslims remained at liberty until 1526, when Carlos V ordered their conversion. These Moriscos—many of whom continued to openly practice Islam—would not be expelled until 1609–14.

According to Brian Catlos, the status and survival of religious minorities in the medieval Spains was related to a dynamic of conveniencia, rooted in “the self-interest of Christians and of Muslims, and the mutual interest generated by an interdependence that emerged as a consequence of the broad range of economic and political relationships that they engaged in, whether by circumstance, by choice, or by force, and that benefited either the constituent members and collectives of one group or both.”¹⁰⁷ Whereas in the Crown of Aragon this equilibrium had for the most part held through the fifteenth century, in Castile and Portugal mudéjares were declining in both numbers and importance. Hence, for Manuel the expulsion of the kingdom’s Muslims together with any attendant loss of revenue was a reasonable trade-off to acquire Isabel as wife and to burnish his moral reputation.

Thus, on December 5, 1496, Manuel I decreed the expulsion of the Jews—an order that was apparently applied either right away or soon after to the Muslims of his kingdom. However, the first edition of Manuel’s royal legal code, the Ordenações manuelinas of 1513, makes no mention of Muslims, while the 1521 edition does, a fact that for Maria Filomena Lopes de Barros confirms that the edict originally applied only to Jews.¹⁰⁸ Whatever the case, it is clear that Portugal’s Muslims and Jews were expelled on Manuel’s orders in the closing years of the fifteenth century. This watershed event in the history of the kingdom was directly related to the efforts of Princess Isabel and was likely a consequence of her particular manifestations of grief over the death of her first husband, Afonso—a “butterfly effect,” in which a bereaved princess’s determination to pursue a path of “holy widowhood” had a dramatic nonlinear impact on a complex system: majority-minority relations in Portugal. The princess’s grieving was contagious; the sorrow of Isabel, her parents, and Manuel I provoked a monumental sorrow among many, who, as a consequence, were forced to abandon their faith or leave their family members, friends, homes, and kingdom behind.

The Patience of Job, without Its Rewards

Whether she had wanted it or not, Isabel, like Job, was given a second opportunity; and if she did not necessarily move on, she certainly moved forward by marrying Manuel. As for the king of Portugal, his game of thrones appeared to have paid off. Isabel’s brother, Juan, the successor to the thrones of Castile and Aragon, died on October 4, 1497, only four days after his sister’s wedding: leaving his new bride as the presumptive heir. Zurita mentioned how the unhappy coincidence made her second wedding a very sad event “without any display of joy,” while the princely funeral that followed provoked more sadness than any previous.¹⁰⁹

The coincidences were striking and must have sent Princess Isabel and her mother, the queen, reeling. Juan, the heir apparent of Aragon and Castile, died only six years after Afonso—both princes young and newly married.¹¹⁰ Juan passed away aged nineteen and only six months into his marriage. In his case, sickness is what killed him, although it was said to have been the “excessive love” he felt for his wife, Marguerite of Austria (1480–1530).¹¹¹ Popular wisdom held that it was the sex that killed him. At least this is how Alonso Ortiz explained it in the consolatory treatise he wrote to mourn the prince.¹¹² This reflected both the medical wisdom and the misogynistic discourse of the time, which characterized sexual intercourse as something women needed in order to maintain their health, but which could weaken and debilitate men who engaged in it too frequently.¹¹³ Juan, who did not enjoy a strong constitution, became ill with a fever and died thirteen days later. Once again—as Martire d’Anghiera reported—the Catholic Monarchs and their court were plunged into mourning.¹¹⁴ The French diplomat and chronicler Philippe de Commynes recounted how the kingdom came to a standstill for forty days, as the members of the court once again took up their mourning clothes and began to grieve—no one more than Isabel the queen and mother.¹¹⁵

It was as if the wheel of fortune had come full circle. The premature deaths of two princes had brought Isabel and Fernando to the throne—that of Isabel’s brother Alfonso (1453–68), whose death at fourteen cleared her path to the throne of Castile, and that of Carlos, Prince of Viana (1421–61), Fernando’s half brother, who passed away at age forty—and it was now the premature death of their son that would bring their line to an end. Of course, this was not something they could yet foresee. Juan’s death may have been a personal tragedy, but from a dynastic perspective it was not devastating. The Catholic Monarchs still had four daughters, who, according to the laws of the kingdom, could definitely inherit Castile, which had a precedent of feminine rule, and also Aragon (with some minor legal maneuvers).¹¹⁶

In the meantime, as had been the case with the mourning of Afonso, Juan’s death provoked a public display of pain, and generated a myriad of consolatory texts, poems, and romances, as well as a political recalibration.¹¹⁷ However, the responses of the two courts were distinct. While the Portuguese demonstrated a high degree of unrestrained emotional distress, the reaction in Castile, although intense, was more subdued. In Castile the ceremonial of grief, including mourning attire, literary memorialization, and the attendant funerary practices functioned as a sort of catalyst for the acceptance of the divine plan. Reflecting this, following the death of his son, Juan, Fernando did not—as far as we know—pluck out his beard or hair, nor did Isabel or their daughters tear out their hair or scratch their faces. While in response to Afonso’s death the Portuguese court followed a tradition of ritual lamentation that had originated in the classical Mediterranean—one that demanded a dramatic and public response to death—Castilian/Aragonese courtly society had moved beyond such ostentatious extremes.¹¹⁸ Thus, Martire d’Anghiera remarked that despite the depth of grief felt across the kingdom the bereaved monarchs did their best to conceal their pain:

The monarchs made efforts to disguise (dissimulare) their great sadness, but we could discern that inside their spirits were broken. When they were in public, they did not cease to gaze into each other’s eyes face to face, where one can see what one has hidden inside.¹¹⁹

As Zurita observed, “These masses and rites were more full of pain and sadness than any previously in Spain, more so than for any prince or king.”¹²⁰

Court culture—as Barbara Rosenwein posited for medieval societies as a whole—embodied various “emotional communities,” each with differing affective styles, with individuals learning to adapt to the expectations of each in order to be able to move among these different spaces.¹²¹ Royal courts also comprised their own “interpretive communities” (to use Stanley Fish’s phrase) that led them to read texts—including the consolatory treatises described in this chapter—through a similar lens because their experiences affected their understanding.¹²² The widow, Isabel, inhabited two distinct spaces, the royal court of Castile/Aragon and that of Portugal, each of which had its own conventions for grieving and the regulation of emotion. The reaction that Afonso’s and Juan’s deaths each provoked demonstrates the tensions that characterized the royal courts—political and emotional hothouses in which the potentially abundant rewards of success were offset by the potentially grave consequences of failure.

When in April 1498, soon after Manuel and Isabel had married, Marguerite, the dowager of Isabel’s brother, the heir apparent Juan of Austria, lost the child that she was expecting, the king and queen of Portugal hurried to be acclaimed as the heirs of Castile and Aragon. The cortes (parliament) of Castile and of Aragon recognized them as such, and on December 10, 1497, Manuel I signed his first document as “King of Portugal and Prince of Castile and Aragon.”¹²³ But despite this promising turn of fate, the happy recompense of Job eluded the ill-starred now-queen Isabel. On August 23, 1498, she bore Manuel a son, Miguel da Paz, but died in the presence of her parents shortly after, because of complications from childbirth.¹²⁴

This probably did not come as a surprise to the court. All her years of penance and modest deprivation, together with the restrictive diet she followed as a consequence of her grief for Afonso, had left her very thin and weak. In a note to Jorge da Costa, Martire d’Anghiera compared Isabel the Catholic to her daughter, in the course of recounting the young queen’s death. For him, the elder and younger Isabels resembled each other in terms of virtue and magnanimity, but not in bodily constitution: “The mother is stocky, while the daughter had been so consumed by loss of weight that she did not have the strength to endure the suffering of delivery.”¹²⁵ He goes on to explain that the younger Isabel anticipated her own death in childbirth—a common and justified fear for any woman of the era. As he explained,

She foresaw her own death, the death that she had announced so many times would come in childbirth. Thus, before the day of delivery had arrived, she carefully prepared for her last rites, and ensured that there were always clergy on hand for her to confess to. And, if by chance, she committed some sin, she would beg, pray, and insist, on her knees and with tears, that they give her absolution. Thus, we believe she has gained admittance to the celestial choirs.¹²⁶

On her death, Isabel was interred provisionally at the monastery of Our Lady of Jesus in Zaragoza, where she had died; previously, on September 4, her son Miguel was baptized at the Seo (the cathedral) of Zaragoza.¹²⁷ At the beginning of October, around five weeks after her passing, her body was transferred to the church of Santa Isabel in Toledo, where it remained. This is to say, she never made it to the monastery of Santa Isabel (also known as San Francisco) in the Alhambra, where Isabel the Catholic had specified in her own will that her daughter’s body be moved to lie beside her own. It was the Catholic Queen’s wish to be laid to rest there, unless Fernando preferred to be interred in a different location. Her priority was to rest at his side until the Day of Judgment.¹²⁸ As it was, the Catholic Monarchs’ ultimate resting place would be in the Royal Chapel of the Cathedral of Granada, where they would eventually be joined by their daughter and successor, Juana I, her consort, Philippe the Handsome, and Isabel of Aragon’s toddler, Miguel da Paz.

Of course, testamentary wishes were not always respected. After all, funerary rituals and the memorialization of the dead are at bottom for the living, and it is they who ultimately decide which wishes are respected and which directives are observed. Hence, the younger Isabel who had mourned her first husband according to the exuberant “Portuguese tradition,” requested a Castilian-style funeral for herself. This was to be an exercise of modesty and devotion; she demanded that all ceremonial and public displays of sorrow be minimized, requesting that mourners even eschew the rough woolen “burel” cloth traditionally worn during mourning.¹²⁹ Manuel, for his part, respected his wife’s last wishes and, having made arrangements, returned to Portugal on September 8, barely two weeks after becoming a father and a widower. Seven months later in Lisbon, on March 27, 1499, Manuel promulgated a decree intended to calm anxieties surrounding the imminent dynastic unification of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon, under Miguel da Paz and his successors, guaranteeing that the administration of his kingdom would remain in the hands of Portuguese courtiers.¹³⁰ Miguel himself was left under the care of his maternal grandparents, but died two years later, on July 19, 1500.¹³¹ Thus, in yet another unforeseen reconfiguration of the Castilian and Aragonese succession, Isabel’s younger sister, Juana, was declared heir to the Catholic Monarchs’ realms. Unbeknownst to all, Juana—like her sister—would soon be in need of consolation, but as we will see in the next two chapters, she certainly did not get much support.

In the meanwhile, Manuel I was once again in need of a wife, and this time around he was prepared to accept Princess María, who he had earlier passed over in favor of Isabel.¹³² They were married on October 30, 1500, only three months after the death of Miguel da Paz had once again put the Portuguese-Castilian dynastic alliance in doubt. In what appears to have been an act of pious one-upmanship, when Manuel was negotiating the marriage, his ambassador, Ruy de Sande, made his own demand in writing to Isabel and Fernando regarding the peninsula’s religious minorities: “Item, that the mosques should be destroyed and that [the Catholic Monarchs] should not consent to tolerate in their kingdoms and lordships any house adapted by the Muslims for them to worship in, guaranteeing this by other and signed agreement”—a requirement that in practical terms meant the conversion or expulsion of the Muslims of Castile and Aragon.¹³³ Later, in a letter Manuel wrote to Pope Julius II (1503–13), published in 1505 and partly incorporated into Manuel’s chronicle by Góis (under the title Epistola ad summum romanum pontificem), the king claimed that he was the inspiration behind the forced conversion of the Muslims of Granada and Castile promulgated by Isabel and Fernando in 1501 and 1502, respectively. Manuel, it seems, was determined to out-Catholic the Catholic Monarchs. In his letter, Manuel says that he asked his “father” (in-law) Fernando (surprisingly he does not even mention Isabel) to destroy all the mosques and to sequester the children of all the Muslims so they could be converted to Christianity.¹³⁴ But historians have not been sympathetic to Manuel’s claims. These edicts were not undertaken as a pious impulse, but as political calculations, relating to the revolt in the Kingdom of Granada, on the one hand, and because the mudéjares of Castile were likely to convert with little resistance, on the other.¹³⁵ In any event, Fernando never promulgated any such decree regarding his own Muslim subjects in the Crown of Aragon.

In their determination to achieve their political goals, the three rulers had no compunction in sacrificing the stability of their Jewish, Muslim, or converso subjects—people who in principle had nothing to do with these royal marriages. They would do so even at the cost of blatantly ignoring the laws of the Church against consanguineous marriage and prohibitions against marrying the widows and widowers of close blood relations. But if the papacy had any concerns for canon law in this regard, it too was willing to sacrifice them on the altar of expediency. María and Manuel were granted papal dispensation for their incestuous and canonically forbidden marriage.¹³⁶

In the end it was Manuel, not his first wife Isabel, who reaped the rewards of Job. He and María had many children, among them the future João III of Portugal and Empress Isabel, wife of Emperor Carlos V. Unfortunately for María, she died of complications relating to childbirth like her sister, Isabel, on March 17, 1517, delivering her tenth child in almost as many years. And so, Manuel I, who certainly was not in short supply of heirs, and who was already forty-eight years old, married again a year later. This time he wedded Leonor of Austria/Habsburg, the eldest daughter of Juana I of Castile (and, therefore, a granddaughter of the Catholic Kings)—a woman who was third in the line of succession not only to the thrones of Castile and Aragon, but also to a European and global empire that included much of the Americas. Leonor had, in fact, been promised to his son, the future João III, but much to the young prince’s dismay, the ageing Manuel took her for his own—his next step in the marital game of thrones that pitted the houses of Trastámara and Aviz against each other for the future of the peninsula.

Returning to the younger Isabel, her case shows that marriages that start as political alliances can at times turn into love stories; that dealing with intense grief appears to be a recurrent problem for the royal houses of Castile/Aragon and Portugal; and that being the second in the line of succession to two powerful kingdoms, Castile and Aragon, entailed obligations that could not be neglected and that were always put before personal health and desires. Royal women had particular and indispensable roles to perform in the construction and maintenance of dynasties, and contemporary courtiers were very much aware of both their power and potential. Had he not died, Isabel’s son, Miguel da Paz, would have gone on to become king of a united Iberian Peninsula (Fernando annexed Navarre in 1512) and of all the overseas colonies of Portugal and Castile. As it was, Ortiz and Li’s advice was only half right: Isabel would endure the tribulations of Job but would not enjoy his rewards. Simultaneously, and in the process, the princess’s obvious agency in her marital negotiations provoked pain and sorrow in those persecuted by the Inquisition and in the Jewish and Muslim minorities who were expelled from Portugal. Her grief rendered her implacable against anyone who did not conform to her view of a Christian God who was second to none and who was prepared to unflinchingly and brutally punish any transgression, even among the royal family. It is no small irony that both Ortiz and Li were New Christian converts from Judaism and that the latter was even investigated by the Inquisition, and that they were the ones reinforcing her exclusionary ideas and encouraging her to think of herself as someone who was being tested by God and needed to act accordingly. And so, she acted. Words have consequences.

1. Rodríguez Valencia, Isabel en la opinión, 3:43.

2. Torre, Documentos, IV, 94 (December 24, 1492).

3. Anglería, Epistolario, 1:b.7, doc. 146, 267–70; Sanz Hermida, “A vos Diana primera leona,” 382.

4. Anglería, Epistolario, 1:b.8, doc. 158, 295–96.

5. See chapter 5.

6. Anglería, Epistolario,1:b.9, doc. 171, 323–24; Guimarães Sá and Combet, Rainhas consortes, 74.

7. For her consolation in verse in Portuguese (João Manuel, Luís Anríquez, Álvaro de Brito) and in Spanish (Nicolás Guevara, Juan del Encina, Ambrosio de Montesino), see chapter 5.

8. Chartier, The Order of Books, x and 2.

9. Delbrugge, “Introduction,” in Andrés de Li’s “Summa de paciencia,” 2.

10. García Castillo, “Los nuevos tratados de educación,” 37–39; Gómez Redondo, Historia de la prosa, I, 848–66.

11. Alonso Ortiz was a “doctor”; Francisco appears as a licenciado; and Nicolás a bachiller. Lop Otín, “Un grupo de poder a fines de la Edad Media,” 639, 652, 659, 668; Lop Otín, “El cabildo catedralicio de Toledo,” 381, 384, 464, 750, 804–806; García Oro, Cisneros y la reforma del clero, 294–98. Ortiz is buried at the cathedral of Toledo with his mother. See Bertini’s introduction to Ortiz’s Diálogo, 1. Regarding Alonso’s library, see Sanz Hermida, “Un capítulo oscuro de la historia”; Sanz Hermida’s introduction to Ortiz’s Tratado del fallesçimiento, 19–21.

12. Sanz Hermida, introduction to Ortiz, Tratado, 18; Lop Otín, “La catedral de Toledo,” 358.

13. Giovanni, Diálogo sobre la educación.

14. Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 41.

15. Silleras-Fernandez, “The Queen, the Prince, and the Ideologue,” 398–9; Fanego Pérez, “Consolatoria super obitu.”

16. Escorial: Inc. 23–V–11, Los tratados del Doctor Alonso Ortiz, Seville, 1493.

17. Azcona, Isabel la Católica, 513–15.

18. Ortiz was deeply involved in the translation and publication agendas of Archbishop Mendoza and Cardinal Cisneros. See, for example, Perez, Cisneros, 223; Fanego Pérez, “Ad Illustrisimos,” 91–117; Fanego Pérez, “Alfonso Ortiz traductor”; González Rolán, El humanismo cristiano. He also translated for and wrote and dedicated works to Isabel I and other clerics and noblemen, notably a translation of Ubertino da Casale’s The Tree of Life of the Crucifix of Jesus Christ (Arbor vitae crucifixae Jhesu Christi), which he dedicated to the queen. Sanz Hermida, “Una traducción ignorada,” 188–89, 191. See García Castillo, “Los nuevos tratados de educación,” 41–42; González Ruiz, “El mundo de la cathedral”; and for a complete list of his works, Sanz Hermida, introduction to Ortiz, Tratado, 17–21 and 41–45; Alcalá and Sanz, Vida y muerte, 57–59.

19. Mauss, The Gift, 10–12 and passim.

20. There is also a recent edition in an unpublished honors thesis: Fondevila Mons, “Estudio y edición del Tratado consolatorio.”

21. Escorial: Inc. 23– V–11, f. 9r.

22. Escorial: Inc. 23–V–11, f. 9r.

23. Madsen, “Look upon My Affliction,” 289–90.

24. Job was a standard invocation for consolatory purposes. For example, when the councillors of the city of Barcelona were replying to a letter from María of Castile (Tudela de Duero, August 12, 1354) that had notified them of the passing of her brother, Juan II of Castile, and how anguished she was (restam amb molta congoxa), they urged her to take refuge in the patience of the unfortunate prophet, “the holyman, Job” (del sant hom Job). Duran and Sanabre, Llibre de les solemnitats, I:206–7.

25. Escorial: Inc. 23–V–11, f. 13v.

26. See chapters 5 and 7.

27. Escorial: Inc. 23–V–11, f. 16v.

28. Escorial: Inc. 23–V–11, f. 20v.

29. Escorial: Inc. 23–V–11, f. 24v.

30. Escorial: Inc. 23–V–11, f. 22r.

31. Gómez Redondo, Historia de la prosa, I:1018–28.

32. Pallarés Jiménez, “La imprenta en Zaragoza,” 381–83.

33. In chapter six of his work, Li explores passion devotions. See Rivera, “Vizualizing the Passion,” 57.

34. Robinson, Imagining the Passion, 372; Pereda, Las imágenes de la discordia.

35. Rivera, “Vizualizing the Passion,” 58.

36. Saenger, “Books of Hours and the Reading Habits,” 144.

37. The only complete remaining copy of the Summa de paciencia from 1493 is preserved at the Royal Library of El Escorial: Inc. 31-V-47. The front-page engraving is missing; it was stolen at some unknown time. There is also an incomplete copy at the BN: Inc. 1467, but it has no images. Even though this book is wrongly labeled an incunabulum, it is indeed Coci’s 1505 printed edition.

38. Delbrugge, “Introduction,” in Andrés de Li’s “Summa de paciencia,” 30.

39. Delbrugge has edited his Repertorio de los tiempos, Summa de paciencia, and Thesoro de la passión.

40. Delbrugge, “Ties That Bound,” 45.

41. Li, Summa, 51.

42. Rumeu de Armas, Itinerario de los Reyes Católicos.

43. Li, Summa, 49.

44. Li, Summa, 54.

45. Li, Summa, 59.

46. Li, Summa, 69.

47. Li, Summa, 74.

48. Li, Summa, 75.

49. Li, Summa, 75.

50. Li, Summa, 90.

51. Li, Summa, 90.

52. Li, Summa, 91.

53. Li, Summa, 91.

54. Li, Summa, 144.

55. Ruiz García, Los libros de Isabel, 620–21.

56. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 124–29.

57. Taddeo Alderotti, Commentum in microtegni (Naples, 1522), cited by Cohen-Hanegbi, “Mourning under Medical Care,” 51; Cohen-Hanegbi, Caring for the Living, 177.

58. Cohen-Hanegbi, “Mourning under Medical Care,” 53. The Hippocratic aphorism 6:23 already linked fear and sorrow to melancholy. Cohen-Hanegbi, Caring for the Living, 174.

59. Azcona, Juana de Castilla, 235; 167–69; Villarroel González, Juana la Beltraneja; Humble Ferreira, “Juana la Beltraneja,” 97–98.

60. Isabel and Fernando sent their ambassadors to Setúbal on May 13, 1492, to advocate for Manuel. AGS: PT, leg. 49–58 (date missing); Oliveira e Costa, D. Manuel I, 69–72.

61. Guimarães Sá, Leonor de Lencastre, 100–103.

62. Pina, Chronica de D. João II, chap. 11, 913; chap. 14, 917–24.

63.As gavetas da Torre do Tombo (GAV. 16–17), 3797, 102 (Alcáçovas, September 29, 1495).

64. Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos III, doc. 467, 1–8; Nogales Rincón, “Los proyectos matrimoniales,” 50–52; Rodrigues, “For the Honor of Her Lineage,” 9–10.

65. Góis points out how she wanted to live a religious life, but she was convinced by clergymen to marry to better serve God. Góis, Crónica, I, 50; Zurita, Historia del Rey, b.3, 16.

66. See chapter 5 for a more detailed account.

67. Santa Cruz, Crónica, I: 167.

68. Zurita, Historia del Rey, b.3, 23. Cf. Soyer, The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims, 237–39.

69. Guimarães Sá is not sure if Isabel alone or her parents were the ones behind the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal. Guimarães Sá and Combet, Rainhas consortes, 87–88 and 92–93; Oliveira e Costa, D. Manuel I, 84.

70. Nogales Rincón, “Em torno dos casamentos,” 316.

71. I agree with Guimarães Sá, who pointed out that there must have been a verbal agreement. Guimarães Sá and Combet, Rainhas consortes, 88.

72. Harvey, “When Portugal Expelled Its Remaining Muslims,” 2–4.

73. AGS: PR, 2873, leg. 28–3 (Burgos, April 20, 1497), ed. Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, doc. 469, [10] 9–12.

74. Góis, Crónica, 39; Lopes de Barros, “Muslims in the Portuguese Kingdom,” 65.

75. For Soyer the princess was referring to the conversos, around 150 families of whom remained in Portugal at the beginning of Manuel’s reign. Soyer, “A expulsão dos judeus e muçulmanos,” 117.

76. Guimarães Sá and Combet, Rainhas consortes, 87; Soyer, “Manuel I of Portugal and the End of the Toleration,” 343; Soyer, “King Manuel I and the Expulsion,” 40.

77. Ray, After Expulsion, 40–42; Martíndez Alcorlo, Isabel de Castilla y Aragón, 198.

78. “Ella [Princess Isabel] nos fizo saber que hauía embiado al rey [Manuel] la carta de su mano, que ella le scriuió; y pues desto sabeys la verdad, vos la podeis fazer de nuestra parte todas las saluas que el quisiere, de como no supimos nada desta dicha carta, ni le hablamos ni le oymos hablar en lo que la carta dezía, sino al tiempo del desposorio”; “nos dijo que la embió sin dezírnoslo, porque no ge lo estoruasemos.” ATTombo: gaveta 17, maço 7, n. 3; ed. Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, doc. 470, 12–15; Gavetas, VII:406–9.

79. In 1493, Bernat de Boyl, a monk from Montserrat, and twelve more companions (perhaps also from Montserrat) accompanied Christopher Columbus for pastoral purposes on his second trip to the Caribbean. Carreres Candi, “Visites,” 355.

80. “Está claro cuanto Dios es ofendido en tenellos [the heretics]; y que cree que lo acahecido en el príncipe [Afonso] que Dios aya, fue por esto, y que remediasse, podría acahecer en el rey y en ella y en el reyno toda desuentura.” Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, doc. 470, 13–14.

81. “La hauemos apremiado e le hauemos fecho fuerça.” Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, doc. 470, 13–14.

82. “Y que ya sabe que, al tiempo que se trataba este casamiento, la princesa pidió por condiçión que el rey huviese de echar todos los hereges de sus reynos y señoríos antes de que ella entrase en ellos, y esto mismo pidió al tiempo que se fizo; y no lo quería hazer hasta que fuesen salidos, sino que todos deximos que no lo detoviesse por aquello, que, antes que ella fuesse a Portugal, serían echados los dichos herejes; y con esta condiçyon fizo ella el desposorio.” Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, doc. 470, 13.

83. “Y acaheció que dos o tres días después de hesso, a tiempo que no pudía el ahún saber el despossorio ni la condiçión que en él se havía pedido, vino nueva como el havía mandado que saliesen de sus reinos todos los dichos hereges; de manera que a todos nos pareció cosa que venía de Dios, pues que a hun mismo tiempo puso en la voluntad aquello al rey allá y a la princessa aqua, no sabiendo el uno del otro y en lo que el mandó assí de suyo y tan temprano tuvímoslo por cosa hecha.” Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, doc. 470, 13.

84. “Antes sufriría la muerte que entrar en él no siendo salidos los hereges.” Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, doc. 470, 14. Zurita stated the same: the princess was prepared to die rather than enter a Portugal full of heretics. Zurita, Historia del Rey, book 3, 16.

85. “Otrosí, le dezid, que nos maravillamos mucho del que piense que nada de esto viene de nosotros, porque, si viniese, claramente ge lo haviamos de decir sin encubrilo; ni que piese que agora nos haviamos con él nuevos negocios nin demandas.” Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, doc. 470, 15.

86. “Porque non hauemos de querer del ni para él sino lo que querríamos para nuestros propios fijos, ni él deue esperar de nos sino lo que esperaría de verdaderos padres.” Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, doc. 470, 15.

87. “Echar fuera de todos sus reynos e señoríos a todos los que fueron condenados por herejes que stán en los dichos sus reynos e señoríos.” The document is preserved as BN MSS/20262/17 and ATTombo gaveta 17, maço 1, n. 9 (Medina del Campo, June 11, 1497); the latter is edited by Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, doc. 471 [17] 15–18.

88. “E nos doña Ysabel, por la gracia de Dios reyna de Portugal … prometemos en nuestra buena fe e palabra real e juramos a Nuestro Señor Ihesu Christo y al señal de la Cruz y a los santos quatro Euangelios, con nuestras manos corporalmente tocados, que siendo salidos de todos los reynos e señoríos del dicho rey, mi señor, todos los que fueron condenados aqua por hereges que stán en los dichos sus reynos e señoríos, y scriuiéndome el dicho rey, mi señor, e jurándome con carta suya que son salidos y que si algunos quedaren se assentará en ellos la pena que como hereges merecen.” Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, doc. 471, 17.

89. “Desterrase de sus señoríos, los que estaban infamados, y condenados por herejes.” Zurita, Historia del Rey, b, 3, 21.

90. Zurita, Historia del Rey, b.3, 153–57.

91. Guimarães Sá and Combet, Rainhas consortes, 89.

92. “Induzida a rainha princesa, como se teve por suspeita, pelos reis seus pais, escreveu uma carta a el rei pedindo-lhe que dilatasse sua vinda até ter de todo lançado de seus reinos os judeus.” Góis, Crónica, I, 50.

93. Meyerson, A Jewish Renaissance; Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths, 143–68.

94. Eliyahu Capsali claimed Fernando had “Jewish blood.” The chronicler traced Fernando’s Hebrew lineage to a Jewish great-grandmother, Paloma, who was raped by the admiral of Castile, who greatly esteemed the son they conceived, Alfonso, who went on to father Juana Enríquez, Fernando’s mother. Capsali, Seder Eliyahu Zutá, 133–36; Dauverd, Church and State, 64–81.

95. Rui de Pina states that João II let them in only to get hold of their money. Pina, Chronica de D. João II, 136. Hebrew sources, like Capsali’s chronicle, state that 15,000 Castilian Jews, who were too poor to pay King João’s tax, were enslaved, but that 10,000 of them were ransomed by the Portuguese Jewish community. For his part, Bernáldez states that only 1,000 were enslaved. Bernáldez, Memorias, 259. See Soyer, “King João II of Portugal,” 94–97; Soyer, The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims, 116–22. Regarding the fate of Jews after 1492, see Ray, After Expulsion, passim.

96. Ha-Kohen, Valle del llanto, (124), 182–84; Soyer, “King João II of Portugal,” 76. Regarding the Jews of São Tomé, see Garfield, “Public Christians, Secret Jews,” 645–54; Garfield, “A Forgotten Fragment of the Diaspora,” 73–87.

97. Soyer, “King João II of Portugal,” 98; Ha-Kohen, Valle del llanto, (123), 181–82; Capsali, Seder Eliyahu Zutá.

98. Góis, Crónica, 1, 23–24; Soyer, “King João II of Portugal,” 94–95.

99. Pina, Chronica de D. João II, 61; Soyer, “Was There an Inquisition?,” 183–99; Soyer, “King Manuel I and the Expulsion,” 35; Baquero Moreno, “Movimientos sociais anti-judaicos,” 3–11; Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, 333–34, doc. 378; Marcocci and Paiva, História da Inquisição, 23–48.

100. Soyer, The Persecution of the Jews and Muslims, 139–81.

101. Soyer, “King João II of Portugal,” 78.

102. Trillo San José, La Alpujarra antes y después.

103. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, 218–19; Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith, 383–426; Harris, From Muslim to Christian Granada, 8–27; Coleman, Creating Christian Granada, 91–118.

104. Val Valdivieso, “Cisneros y la cuestión del bautismo,” 148–56; Vincent, “Entre Cisneros y Talavera”; Pérez, Cisneros, 181–94; Poutrin, Convertir les musulmans, 49–75.

105. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, 217–19.

106. Boswell, The Royal Treasure, 30.

107. Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, 525–26, 508–35; Catlos, “Cristians, musulmans i jueus,” 8–16; Catlos, “Contexto social y ‘conveniencia,’” 259–68. See also Szpiech, “The Convivencia Wars,” 135–61; Soifer, “Beyond Convivencia,” 19–35.

108. Lopes de Barros, “Muslims in the Portuguese Kingdom,” 64; Lopes de Barros, Tempos e espaços de mouros, 195–604.

109. Zurita, Historia del Rey, b.3, 23.

110. Gómez Imaz, Algunas noticias; Maura, El príncipe que murió de amor; Camón Aznar, Sobre la muerte del príncipe; Pérez Priego, El Príncipe don Juan; Alcalá and Sanz, Vida y muerte; Cardaillac, L’Espagne des Rois Catholiques.

111. Juan’s marital agreement: AGS: PTR, leg. 56, doc. 2,1 (January 20, 1495).

112. Ortiz, Tratado del fallesçimiento, 58.

113. See chapter 3 for Isabel of Portugal’s relationship with her husband, Juan II. Similarly, in 1543, Emperor Carlos V (King of Spain, 1516–56), dictated secret instructions to his newlywed son, Felipe, advising him to moderate his sexual encounters with his bride, Maria Manuela of Portugal, to prevent the fate of Prince Juan. Fernández Álvarez, Corpus documental de Carlos V, II:90–103; Silleras-Fernandez, “Sois a chave que une as duas coroas,” 253–57.

114. Anglería, Epistolario, 1:b.10, doc. 182, 344–47; Zurita, Historia del Rey, 119.

115. Alcalá and Sanz, Vida y muerte, 193; Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires. See chapter 7.

116. Urraca, the daughter of Alfonso VI, inherited Castile and León and ruled in her own right (1109–26), even after her marriage to Alfonso I, the Battler, of Aragón. See Reilly, The Kingdom of León-Castilla. Later, Berengaria, the daughter of Alfonso VIII of Castile, briefly ruled Castile in her own right in 1217, and previously in León as queen consort (1197–1204) of Alfonso IX. See Shadis, Berenguela of Castile; Bianchini, The Queen’s Hand. See, generally, Silleras-Fernandez, “Iberian Queenship,” 310–15.

117. See chapter 7; Silleras-Fernandez, “Isabel’s Years of Sorrow.”

118. Amelang, “Mourning Becomes Eclectic,”16–24; Perea, “The Oblivious Memory,” 240–56.

119. Anglería, Epistolario, 1:b.10, doc. 183 (October 30, 1497), 347; Anglerii, Opus Epistolarum, 104.

120. Anglería, Epistolario, 1:b.10, doc. 182 (October 19, 1497), 346. See also Zurita, Historia del Rey, b.3, 23.

121. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities.

122. Fish, “Interpreting the Variorum,” 468, 473–85.

123. Oliveria e Costa, D. Manuel I, 87. Women had no problem inheriting the throne in Castile, while in Aragon there were no specific prohibitions against it, but little tradition. The Aragonese wanted to hold off on recognizing Isabel in case Fernando had another son. The problem was unexpectedly and tragically solved when Isabel died in childbirth and her son Miguel da Paz was declared heir. Zurita, Historia del Rey, b.3, 73; García Gallo, “La sucesión del trono”; Silleras-Fernandez, “Iberian Queenship,” 308.

124. Góis, Crónica, 26; Martínez Alcorlo, Isabel de Castilla y Aragón, 228. Resende mentions that only her father was present, while Zurita claims that both Isabel and Fernando were with her. Guimarães Sá and Combet, Rainhas consortes, 105–6. The dowager, Leonor of Portugal, sent a consolatory letter to the Catholic Monarchs. RHA: Salazar y Castro, A–10, f. 38.

125. Anglería, Epistolario, 1:b.9, doc. 197 (September 1, 1498), [374], 373–74.

126. Anglería, Epistolario, 1:b.9, doc. 197, 374.

127. Martínez Alcorlo, Isabel de Castilla y Aragón, 232; Alonso Ruiz, “La muerte de la reina de Portugal,” 244.

128. Torre, Testamentaría, 88. See chapter 7.

129. Resende, Vida e feitos, 315–16; Zurita, Historia del Rey, b.3, 69.

130. Gavetas, 4, doc. 2538, 4–7.

131. Manuel wrote to the royal secretary, Miguel Pérez de Almazán, requesting news regarding the cause of death of his son. BNE: Res. 226, doc. 131 (Lisbon, July 23, 1400). See also Oliveira e Costa, D. Manuel I, 88–94.

132. Zurita, Historia del Rey, b.4, 6.

133. “Item, que se deribem as mesquitas e nam consintam aver em todos seus reinos e senhorios casa ordeanda para mouros averem de fazer oraçan, guardando os juramentos e firmas que tem feitas.” AGS: Patronato Real, leg. 50, doc. 32, ed. Torre and Suárez Fernández, Documentos, III, doc. 480, 30–32 [32] (Sevilla, May 11, 1500). See Soyer, Manuel I of Portugal, 341; Ladero Quesada, Los mudéjares de Castilla, 320–24 (1502 edict); Lopes de Barros, “Muslims in the Portuguese Kingdom,” 82; Guimarães Sá and Combet, Rainhas consortes, 120.

134. Góis, Crónica, 1, 224–27. Soyer, Manuel I of Portugal, 338.

135. See Catlos, Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, 217–24.

136. AGS: PTR, leg. 50, doc. 22 (June 1493) and Guimarães Sá and Combet, Rainhas consortes, 116. Maria’s dowry was 200,000 doblas, and her dower was 66,666 2/3 doblas and Queen Leonor de Lancastre’s rents after her passing. Rodrigues, “For the Honor of Her Lineage,” 10.