Chapter 1
Love and Excess/Love as Excess
E por ende fue en España sienpre acostumbrado de los omnes onrados enbiar a sus fijos a criar a las cortes de los reyes porque aprendiensen a ser corteses, e enseñados e quitos de villanía e de todo yerro, e se acostunbren bien así en dicho como en fecho, porque fuesen buenos, e los señores oviesen razón de les fazer bien.
And so it was in Spain that all of the nobles had long been accustomed to send their children to be raised in the courts of the kings in order that they might learn to be courteous, and to be educated and be purged of vulgarity and all vice, and they might learn to be good both in word and in deed, because once they were good, their lords would be inclined to do them well.
Alfonso X the Learned, Espéculo
The royal court functioned as a particular community of privileged individuals arrayed around the royal family, and consisted of relations by blood and marriage, courtiers and clients, counselors, religious advisers, companions, dependents, warriors and guardians, entertainers, and a myriad of officials and servants. It was in this environment—the royal courts of Castile, Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal—that Isabel of Portugal, Isabel of Aragon, and Juana I, together with most of the other individuals, historical or literary, who appear in this book, spent their formative years and, in some cases, their entire lives.
The circumstances of the age demanded that royal courts be itinerant, rather than occupy a fixed capital. Rulers circulated through their territories, staying in their own palaces or imposing themselves on the lay and ecclesiastical lords who owed them hospitality. They were obliged to move constantly throughout their kingdoms in order to make manifest the presence of the monarchy, to reinforce royal power, to administer justice, and to sap the resources and undermine the intrigues of their seignorial subordinates. Thus, in the Middle Ages regal entourages were constantly coming and going across the peninsula, their arrival in each new place typically marked by elaborate festivities to celebrate the royal entrance—displays of royal dignity and power intended to impress their subjects at large, and vividly reinforce the notion that monarchs occupied a special position of prestige and privilege.
One of the few Iberian kings to break with the practice of itinerant monarchy was Alfons “the Magnanimous” (1416–58) of the Crown of Aragon, who settled in his newly acquired Naples from 1420 to 1423 and made it his home again from 1432 until his death in 1458. He was only able to do this because his wife, María of Castile, and his brother and successor, Joan II (1458–79; then ruling as king consort, Juan of Navarre, 1425–79), remained in Alfons’s peninsular territories, serving as his lieutenants. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Felipe II of Spain (1556–98) and Portugal (1580–98) also adopted a more sedentary model of kingship, having built the combined palace, monastery, and royal pantheon at San Lorenzo de El Escorial (ca. 1563–1584), which came to serve as his primary residency and the seat of his court.1 This was possible because he, too, was able to delegate the task of managing the far-flung provinces of his empire to members of his family and trusted noblemen, who served as viceroys.2 In both cases, the royal court was not so much centralized as dispersed through the satellite courts of royal lieutenants/viceroys.
Whether mobile or fixed, the court was the epicenter of the monarchy—the manifestation of the royal presence, and the theater of authority, government, diplomacy, and ceremony. But it also served as a forum in which the young noblemen and noblewomen of the realm, including members of the dynasty who were raised there, learned courtesy and sophistication and were inculcated in the rules of civility and behavior proper to their station.3 Because the monarchs and their children were thought to constitute models for their subjects, the expectations that weighed on them in this regard were particularly onerous.
The thirteenth-century king of Castile-León, Alfonso X the Learned (1252–84), recognized this, reflecting as follows on the role of the queen as an example, in the Mirror (Espéculo; 1255–60), his treatise on government and law: “The greater her profile and the more honored she is than the other women of the kingdom, such is the bad example she gives, because she inspires intrigue and boldness among other women.”4 Similarly, according to the same king’s legal compilation, the Seven Parts (Siete partidas; ca. 1265), “The king ought to be sure that the woman whom he marries have four qualities: first, she must be of good lineage; second, she must be beautiful; third, she must be well-mannered; fourth: she must be rich.”5 Next, he specifies that good lineage, character, and education were most important because “the better her manners, the more pleasure [the husband] would receive from her, and the better she will guard her honor and her husband’s.” All this because the queen was seen as the monarch’s “companion in tastes and pleasures, and she shall be his companion in sorrows and cares.”6
Parts of the Espéculo and the Partidas drew on the genre of “mirrors of princes”—didactic treatises on the qualities and virtues of rulers composed since ancient times and throughout the Middle Ages.7 Some of these compositions were generic, while others were dedicated to or presented as gifts to specific monarchs or their children, whether commissioned by family members or offered unsolicited by moralists or clerics hoping to influence or gain favor with the royal family. These works, which were read by leading members of the royal household, were important because, as Theresa Earenfight has noted, the monarchy was regulated by “a repertoire of collective norms, institutional structures, and strategies for participation” that all of its members needed to understand and adhere to.8
This shared responsibility for maintaining the royal image reflects our recent understanding that premodern monarchies did not consist of only the king himself. Over the last twenty years or so queenship studies has revealed the power, influence, and authority that queens embodied in the various realms of Europe, and particularly in the Iberian Peninsula. The queen consort was often a crucial actor, representing as she did—albeit to a secondary degree—the person of the monarch. She could serve as a softer, more accessible intercessor for those who sought the ear of the king—a new Queen Esther or even an analogue of the Virgin Mary, who presents a less-daunting figure than God the Father or Jesus. The importance of such partnerships is clear in the case of the Crown of Aragon—a dynastic aggregate of Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia, as well as other Mediterranean territories—where a series of queens served as lieutenants either of the entire Crown or of a particular kingdom at times when the ruling king needed to exert the royal presence, but could not do so in person.9 In Castile, several queens ruled or acted as regents, including Catherine (hereafter, Catalina) of Lancaster, who served as co-regent from 1406 to 1418, together with her brother-in-law Fernando de Antequera (the future king of Aragon), during the minority of her son, Juan II (1406–54).10 In Portugal we find figures like Leonor of Aragon, the dowager of Duarte I (1433–38), who ruled in the name of her young child, Afonso V (1438–81), but whose regency faced strong resistance, leading ultimately to her dismissal.11 Likewise, a king’s siblings and children, particularly adult heirs, often played essential roles, as regents or agents of royal power. Monarchy was by nature a family affair and no ruler, male or female, could effectively govern without the support of at least part of their family and of a significant sector of the aristocratic elite.
While the court was the environment in which members of the upper aristocracy were trained in statecraft, law, and history and instructed in Christian values and morality, it was also where they acquired the earthlier skills that were seen as just as essential in the formation of a courtier. It was here that young nobles learned the protocols of polite society, where they were taught to read and write, where they learned to sing and dance, to play music and recite poetry, and to master the other skills, from embroidery to hunting, that were considered integral to their gender, station, and vocation. As such, the court was the gateway to political and personal success; it was where one found favor with powerful patrons, cultivated networks of allies, and perhaps secured a favorable marriage. It was at once a political, social, and emotional community—one with behavioral expectations and conventions that were not only complex and demanding, but also distinct from those that governed the rest of society.
Barbara Rosenwein proposed that an array of distinct “emotional communities,” with differing affective styles, constituted medieval societies and that individuals learned to adapt to the expectations of each in order to be able to move between church, tavern, and palace.12 William Reddy, writing on early modern France, discerned the existence of competing “emotional regimes” that served to disseminate and enforce dominant social norms. Being forced to conform could provoke “emotional suffering,” or turn individuals into “emotional refugees”—who, chafing at this conformity, sought release through the deliberate or spontaneous display of eccentricity.13 Such tensions were evident in the royal courts of the late medieval and early modern Iberian Peninsula, which were political and emotional hothouses in which the potentially abundant rewards of success were off-set by the potentially grave consequences of failure. This chapter will examine how courtiers behaved and were expected to behave in the courtly environment, how love was understood, and why it was seen as dangerous. This examination of behavior is necessary to contextualize the lives of the queens and other historical personalities discussed in this book, and to highlight the contradicting messages regarding love, marriage, virtue, and rulership circulating at court. Social expectations were particularly onerous for women. Moreover, we have little evidence of the private lives of royal women, who were constantly accompanied and observed by servants, ladies-in-waiting, courtiers, and attendants, and who were under near-constant surveillance.
Poetry and Masculinity at the Royal Court
The aristocratic masculine ideal of the late Middle Ages embodied its own tensions, among which was the need to manifest force and demonstrate intellect. Whereas force had its outlet in violence, whether practiced in warfare or the hunt or stylized in the tournament, intellect was often manifested in the composition and recitation of verse— specifically poetry about love. The pursuit of love complemented the warrior persona of the knight, redeeming his essential brutality.14 To follow Stephen Greenblatt’s terminology, the poetic became an essential element of nobles’ “self-fashioning” as courtiers and men.15 In the introduction to his Songbook (Cancionero), an anthology of courtly poetry compiled in the late 1420s, the royal scribe Juan Alfonso de Baena advised his noble readers: “One should always appear to be and pretend to be in love, because it is the opinion of many wise men that any man who is in love will understand whom he ought to love, and how he ought to and where he ought to.”16 Alfonso de Baena was himself of rather humble origin—the son of a Jewish convert—but he rose in the court because he understood its culture. Both Juan II of Castile (1405–54), to whom Alfonso de Baena dedicated the Cancionero, and Álvaro de Luna, the king’s all-powerful favorite, composed love poetry.17
The ideal of chivalric love championed by Baena in the mid-1400s was still very much in fashion a century later at the court of the Spanish emperor Carlos V (1516–58), as can be seen in the writings of the courtly historian and commentator Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557). Oviedo had been raised at the court of the Catholic Kings and appointed page to the heir, Juan. After the prince’s death in 1497 he was dispatched to Italy and then to the Caribbean colony of La Española (the modern Dominican Republic), before being recalled to Spain in 1523 to be appointed chronicler of the Indies by Carlos. On his return to the Spanish court, Oviedo observed that noblemen, even those of advanced age, cultivated the affectation of being in love. In his collection of fictionalized courtly dialogues, Battles and Fifties (Batallas y quinquagenas), he notes, “The custom in Spain among the lords of the land is, once they arrive at court, although they are not in fact in love, or are beyond middle age, nevertheless to pretend to be in love.”18 Oviedo concludes, “Madness is only excused for those who are crazy or love-struck and caught up in its follies.”19 This same idea was parodied by Cervantes in 1605 when Don Quijote, as an errant knight, is obliged to find a lady to love and serve before he leaves home: “Nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady to be in love with; for a knight-errant without love was like a tree without leaves or fruit, or a body without a soul.”20
Of course, this aristocratic affectation of love and its outlet in poetry were not innovations of late medieval Castile, but have a long pedigree in the peninsula and beyond. In Islamic culture, proficiency with poetry is an element of adab—the refinement that aristocrats were expected to appreciate and exhibit. The emirs, caliphs, and kings of Muslim al-Andalus not only lavishly patronized poets; many wrote verse themselves. Al-Mu’tamid ibn ‘Abbad, the eleventh-century king of Seville (1068/9–91/2), is regarded as one of the era’s greatest versifiers. A favorite theme of his was love, and his infatuation with his wife, the poet I’timad al-Rumaykiyya. Love and desire were popular themes among contemporary Jewish poets, too, such as Dunash ben Labrat (d. 990) and his wife, Qasmuna, Moses ibn Ezra (d. ca. 1138), and Judah ha-Levi (d. 1141)—whether writing in Hebrew or Arabic.21 The influence of Arabic verse on Western poetry and of Andalusi culture on that of the Christian kingdoms is well established, and is reflected in their poetic and prose traditions, particularly that of Castile, which drew heavily on Arabic-language styles and works.22
Some Christian rulers in the peninsula carried on the tradition personally. Alfons the Troubadour (1164–96), the first count-king of the Crown of Aragon, composed chansons in Occitan, while his descendants, Jaume I the Conqueror (1213–76) and Pere the Ceremonious (1336–87), were pioneers of Catalan-language autobiography and chronicle.23Alfonso X of Castile composed his hymns to the Virgin, Las Cántigas de Santa María, in Galician/Portuguese and collaborated on and promoted numerous prose works in Castilian. No less that 137 cantigas in Portuguese have been attributed to Alfonso’s grandson, Dinis of Portugal (1279–1325), whereas a century later, his descendant Duarte “the King-Philosopher” (r. 1433–38) wrote both poetry and prose.
Noblemen of late medieval Iberia were warriors by formal vocation. They were expected to know how to handle themselves in battle, and to practice chivalric sports, like the juego de cañas, and take part in tournaments. But they also needed to demonstrate their sophistication, and many did so through literature. There are numerous examples of poet-knights, like Jorge Manrique (d. 1479), and a few, like Enrique de Villena (d. 1434), Álvaro de Luna (d. 1453), and Pedro, the Constable of Portugal (d. 1466), even composed notable works in prose.
Eventually, the culture of courtesy of the Latin West was formalized in The Book of the Courtier (Il libro del cortegiano; 1528)—a work Peter Burke characterized as an important factor in the “Europeanization of Europe” by virtue of its many translations, and the emergence of a network of readers who disseminated the text and thus contributed to the creation of a common standard of conduct among the European aristocracy.24 In this work, the Lombard nobleman Baldassare Castiglione (d. 1529)—who was sent as an envoy to the court of Carlos V—imagines four evenings of conversation taking place in the court of Guidobaldo de Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, in 1507. Through these dialogues the reader learns that a courtier is expected to gain both the favor of his prince and the admiration of his peers and to cultivate sprezzatura—a sort of studied detachedness, which would make the most difficult and complex abilities appear natural, spontaneous, and effortless.
Only six years after the original publication, the poet Juan Boscán (d. 1542) translated Castiglione’s text into Spanish, making a few additions, and dedicating it to his cousin Gerónima Palova de Almogávar. Boscán’s friend and fellow poet Garcilaso de la Vega (d. 1536) wrote the prologue. The Book of the Courtier quickly spawned peninsular imitations. For example, the musician and writer Lluís de Milà (d. ca. 1561), composed his own manual for courtesy for the court of Germana de Foix and Fernando of Aragón, Duke of Calabria (1488–1550), who from 1537 served as viceroys of Valencia on behalf of Carlos V. For Milà, the courtier was to be “the father of truth, the son of fashion, the brother of good pedigree, the kinsman of gravitas, a man of law, the friend of integrity and the enemy of intemperance.”25 For aristocrats, appearances were paramount, whether “pretending to be in love” as observed by Juan Alfonso de Baena in the court of Juan II of Castile and by Fernández de Oviedo at that of Carlos V, or projecting sprezzatura.
Love, Poetry, and the Trastámara Dynasty
Poetry carried a special resonance for the Trastámara dynasty—the family that came to rule first Castile and then Aragon, and who joined these realms dynastically with the marriage of Isabel and Fernando the Catholic in 1469, thus setting the stage for the tenuous and accidental uniting of Spain of the Habsburgs. The dynasty originated in the passions of Alfonso the Learned’s great-grandson, Alfonso XI of Castile and León (1312–50). The object of the married king’s desire was his lover, Leonor de Guzmán, who would bear him the “natural son” who would, in 1369, murder Alfonso’s legitimate son and successor, Pedro the Cruel (1350–66), and take the throne as Enrique II Trastámara (1366–67). In happier days, Alfonso had composed a florid poem for his paramour:
En un tiempo cogí flores / There was a time I picked the flowers
del muy noble paraíso, / of very noble Paradise,
cuitado de mis amores / pressed by my love
e del su fermoso riso; / with their beautiful laughter;
ca siempre vivo en dolor / but now I live in never-ending pain
e ya lo non puedo sofrir; / which I can no longer endure;
más me valiera la muerte / it would be better for me to die
qu’en este mundo vivir. / than to live in this world.
Yo con cuidado d’amores / I, with my obsession for love
(vos lo vengo a dezir), / (and this is what I have to say),
que he d’aquesta mi señora / that I have of this my lady
que mucho deseo servir … / whom I desire greatly to serve …
En el tiempo en que solía / In that time that it was my custom
yo coger d’aquestas flores, / to pick those flowers,
d’ál cuidado non avía / which I did without care
desque vi los sus amores, / until I found her love;
e non sé por quál ventura / and I don’t know by what circumstance
me vino a desfallir, / I came to fall—
si lo fizo el mi pecado, / whether it was from my sin,
si lo fizo el maldezir. / or from some curse.
Yo con cuidado d’amores … / Me, with my obsession for love …
No creades, mi señora, / Do not believe, my lady,
el maldezir de las gentes, / the untruths of the people,
ca la muerte m’es llegada / because death will come to me
si en ello parardes mientes. / were I to lie about this.
¡Ay señora, noble rosa! / O, my lady, noble rose!
Merced vos vengo a pedir: / I come to plead mercy from you
e aved de mí dolor, / that you may take away my pain
no me dexedes morir. / and not let me die.
Yo con cuidado d’amores … / Me, with my obsession for love …
Yo soy la flor de las flores / I am the flower of flowers
de que tú solaz cogías. / that you used to gather.
Cuitado de mis amores, / Pressed by my loves,
bien sé lo que tú querías. / I know well what you wanted.
Dios lo ha puesto por tal guisa / God has made it so,
que te lo pueda cumplir: / such that I am able to comply
ant’ yo quería mi muerte / and I would rather die before
que te así vea morir. / seeing you die thus.
Yo con cuidado d’amores … / Me, with my obsession for love … 26
Here, Alfonso XI confesses the love he feels for “his lady,” Leonor, expressing the pain this provokes in him, and his desire to serve her. This was no mere conceit. Serve her he did, indeed: treating her publicly as his queen, and generously providing for the ten children she bore him, all the while scandalously neglecting his legitimate queen, Maria of Portugal, and spurning Prince Pedro, his legitimate son and heir.27 But, Alfonso’s infatuation notwithstanding, Leonor was merely a concubine, and did not enjoy the power and prestige the title of queen afforded. Nor did she have a family powerful enough to protect her. Consequently, when Alfonso was unexpectedly struck down by the Black Death in 1350, and the mercurial Pedro came to the throne, Leonor was left at the mercy of the new king and his mother, Maria of Portugal, who ordered her imprisonment and eventual execution.
Leonor’s eldest surviving son, Enrique, whom Alfonso XI had ennobled as Count of Trastámara, vacillated between reconciliation and revolt, before eventually joining forces with Pere the Ceremonious in the so-called War of the Two Peters, which broke out when Pedro invaded the Crown of Aragon in 1356. In 1369, the increasingly unpopular and erratic Castilian king was lured into a parley at Montiel, where the bastard prince ran him through with his dagger, leaving Enrique “the Fratricide” to take the throne as the first monarch of the Trastámara dynasty.
Consequently, the family would soon entrench itself across the peninsula. In 1412, when the line of the native Catalan dynasty of Barcelona failed, Fernando de Antequera, a grandson of Enrique and the uncle of Juan II of Castile, was elected king of the Crown of Aragon (1412–16). In the decades that followed, the family married into the Crowns of Portugal, Navarre, and Castile, before joining Castile and Aragon through the marriage of Isabel and Fernando. This laid the foundations for the Spanish kingdom that the Habsburg emperor, Carlos V, would inherit in 1516 through his mother, Juana I of Castile, the daughter and heir of the Catholic Monarchs.
Some literary scholars, including Brian Dutton, see Alfonso XI’s poem as the origin of the cancionero or “songbook” genre—a variety that quickly became popular in the aristocratic courts not only of Castile, but of Aragon (and Naples), Navarre, and Portugal, with works composed in the various vernaculars of those realms. The success of this new style, particularly among kings, reflects the extent to which both the pursuit of love and the composition of verse were seen as courtly vocations tied closely to notions of masculinity. The rapidity of the style’s dissemination is a reflection of the interconnectedness of the peninsular realms—both in terms of the aristocracy, who married among each other, and of the clergy and literati who traveled among these courts, and who brought with themselves the latest fashions, tastes, and trends.
This interconnectedness intensified with the acclamation in 1412 of Fernando de Antequera as king of the Crown of Aragon, which then included Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, and Mallorca, as well as Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. He and his wife, Leonor de Alburquerque, were masterful players of the game of thrones, passing the Crown of Aragon on to their eldest son, Alfons the Magnanimous (who himself went on to take the Kingdom of Naples), and securing Navarre through the marriage of their second son, Joan, who reigned there as king consort from 1425 to 1479 and would in due course inherit the Crown of Aragon from his brother. At this point, the Kingdom of Naples went to Alfons’s illegitimate son, Ferrante (1458–94). Fernando and Leonor’s elder daughter, María, became queen consort of Castile (1420–45), through her marriage to Juan II, and Leonor, the younger, became queen consort (1433–38) of Portugal’s Duarte I. Of their younger sons, Enrique, Duke of Villena, married Catalina of Castile, a daughter of Enrique III of Castile (1390–1406), while Pedro was named Count of Alburquerque. These political marriages had significant cultural ramifications because they stimulated the circulation of clerics, courtiers, ideas, fashions, and books among the courts of Castile, Aragon, Naples, Navarre, and Portugal, thus contributing, on one hand, to the Iberianization of the Spanish kingdoms, and, on the other—through the links with Naples and Sicily—to the Mediterraneanization of Iberian culture.
Not every monarch was a poet, but even those who were not knew the language of love. We see this in the letters that Fernando the Catholic, the last Trastámara king, wrote to his wife, Isabel, in his own hand. In a missive sent five years after their wedding, he calls her “my Lady” (mi Señora), while lamenting the “hell” it is not to be close to her and the “pain” of his separation from her, which was necessitated by the war of succession between Castile and Portugal and the war between Aragon and France. This was hardly a conceit: between 1472 and 1474, when the letter was written, the king had only seen his bride intermittently and for a total of seven months.
Seeing this, I cannot tell you my sorrow, for I understand that if I were in hell, I would be in much less pain than I am now, and I wish so many times for my death that someone will come to me to fulfill my thought, that I do not know why Our Lord gave me so much good, for so little enjoyment of it, that it has already been three years that I have not been with Your Lordship but seven months at times.28
Unfortunately, no such letters from Isabel survive. Perhaps they were lost, or, more likely, she did not feel comfortable embracing the tone and vocabulary of passionate love, even with her husband. Royal letters were public documents that were normally dictated to courtiers and were then archived—they were not a medium conducive to indiscretion or displays of vulnerability. Nevertheless, hints of her feelings are reflected in occasional remarks, such as “I kiss your hands, my lord, a hundred thousand times for all the care you have to know about me.”29
Indeed, in another letter, written from Tordesillas on May 16, 1475, Fernando urges Isabel to write to him in her own hand with news of herself and their daughter, his despondency giving way to bitterness: “I cannot sleep, so many are the couriers who arrive without letters [from you], nor for any lack of paper or because you do not know how to write, but because of lack of love and out of pride (salvo de mengua de amor y de altiva).”30 Nevertheless, a letter written not long after closed with another declaration of love:
God knows how it weighs on me not to see Your Ladyship in the morning, such that I swear on your life and on mine that never have I loved so much. And I close with my desire to serve Your Ladyship more than ever.31
Over the years, the impassioned tone in which Fernando addressed Isabel within the era of conflict and uncertainty that marked their early years of marriage waned. His correspondence took on a more serious quality, reflecting his continued affection and consideration for her and his commitment to their common dynastic project, but also, perhaps, his ongoing extramarital affairs, and the parallel, illegitimate children they produced much, to the queen’s jealousy.32
Still, in his last will and testament, composed in Madrigalejo on January 22, 1516, Fernando recalled the love that had united them. Isabel had died twelve years earlier, requesting in her will that, when the time came, she be laid to rest at his side, “out of the unity which we shared in life.”33 Fernando had remarried in 1506, taking Germana de Foix as wife, doubtless hoping she would produce an heir. As it was, they had a son, a new Prince Juan, but he died shortly after birth. After the king’s death, Germana served together with each of her two husbands as Carlos V’s lieutenant in Valencia. While Fernando naturally included Germana in his will, he made it clear that it was Isabel who lived in his heart as the love of his life.
Item. Considering that among the many other great mercies, benefits, and boons that from Our Lord, out of his infinite beneficence and not out of our own merits, that We have received, one very much outstanding one has been to have been given as wife and companion the Most Serene Lady Isabel, Our very dear and very much beloved wife, may She be in Glory, whose passing Our Lord knows greatly wounded Our heart, and the deep feelings We had for Her, as is so right for such a person who was so close to Us, and who deserved for Herself to be inculcated with so many and so unique qualities, that She has been in Her life an example in every act of virtue and of fear of God, and loved and guarded so much Our life, health, and honor, that it obliged Us to love and treasure Her over everything else in this world.34
And so, it came to pass that the couple were laid to rest together in the specially constructed Royal Chapel within the Cathedral of Granada (fig. 1).35 The work on the chapel started in 1504, but Domenico Fancelli did not finish their marble sepulcher until 1517. Four years later, Carlos V transferred the remains of his grandparents from the monastery of San Francisco in Granada to the monumental tombs in which they remain to this day.36
In sum, the Trastámara era was an age of song. The composition of Juan Alfonso de Baena’s cancionero in Castile was followed by several other major collections, including, for example, the Cancionero de Estúñiga (ca. 1460), the Cancionero de Herberay (Navarre; fifteenth century), the Cancionero de palacio (mid-fifteenth century), and the Cancionero geral (1516), along with a number of minor collections, such as the cancionero that Pedro Marcuello dedicated to Juana I of Castile in 1502. As Vicenç Beltrán has pointed out, after the mid-fifteenth century these songbooks came to focus increasingly on themes of love, eroticism, and courtly games, rather than morality and religion, which were more prominent in earlier collections.37 These were not considered edifying topics, and for Dorothy Severin this is why songbooks circulated for some time only in manuscript form. It was not until 1496 that Juan del Encina’s Cancionero was printed, followed by Hernando del Castillo’s in 1511.38 While a number of kings themselves composed verse, for the most part it was male courtiers and clergy who wrote poetry. Although many compositions were anonymous, only a handful can be attributed to women.
Love and Excess
The case studies that follow in chapters 3 through 8 focus on women who at times were presented as loving excessively. However, we do not have any documentation produced by them that expresses their feelings openly. We can get a sense of how love was perceived in this period through works of literature, including fiction, chronicles, and medical and moral texts, almost all of which were written by men. One of the few women poets attested in late fifteenth-century Castile is Florencia Pinar, who on one occasion described love as a “worm” and a “cancer.”
El amor es un gusano, / Love is a worm,
bien mirada su figura: / as seen in its form;
es un cánçer de natura / it’s a cancer on nature,
que come todo lo sano. / that consumes all that is good.39
In this era, passionate love was recognized as provoking strong reactions in both mind and body, each of which was at the mercy of fluctuations of the four bodily humors. If one’s object of desire were unachievable, one would become mired in melancholy and anguish—states of mind that were also manifested physically. Desire, whether requited or not, could easily spiral into irrational excess, and, thus, love was seen as an incontrollable sickness, the mal de amor or enfermedad del amor (lovesickness). Love could provoke either ecstasy or suffering. In De amore or The Art of Courtly Love (De arte honesti amandi; ca. 1190), a seminal Latin treatise that had circulated in translation in the Iberian Peninsula since the late fourteenth century, Andreas Capellanus defined love as “an inborn suffering proceeding from the sight and immoderate thought upon the beauty of the other sex, for which cause above all other things one wishes to embrace the other and, by common assent, in this embrace to fulfill the commandments of love.”40
The troubadours and trobairitz of the twelfth century have traditionally been credited with the invention of “romantic love” in the European tradition, and as being the first to write about the fin’amor (true or refined love) that eventually crystallized as the conventions of “courtly love.” Maria Rosa Menocal emphasized the pedigree of this poetic tradition in Arabic literature; following Julián Ribera she saw trobar as derived from the Arabic word taraba (to sing poetry).41 William Reddy, on the other hand, saw the origins of this mode of love in the Gregorian Reform, which through the mid-eleventh and twelfth centuries entrenched the notion of sexual desire as an appetite. He claimed that troubadour compositions show how desire can be mastered by true love—the “selfless care and devotion to another”—which implies both reciprocity and exclusivity.42 Love was corporeal, immoral, and a hallmark of original sin that needed to be sublimated in order to achieve the spiritual. For his part, Jacques Lacan, who considered sexual yearning an ahistorical drive rooted in human physiology, saw desire as a wellspring of fantasy in terms of both one’s self and one’s beloved. In his study of courtly love, he viewed these poems as a sort of desire-induced fantasy with no correspondence to lived experience.43
A love treatise that predates Capellanus and the emergence of courtly love in the Latin world is The Dove’s Neck Ring (Tawq al-hamamah), composed ca. 1022 CE by the Cordoban polymath Abu Muhammad ‘Ali ibn Hazm (d. 1064). This scholar, jurist, theologian and philosopher proposed the following.
As for what causes Love in most cases to choose a beautiful form to light upon, it is evident that the soul itself being beautiful, it is affected by all beautiful things, and has a yearning for perfect symmetrical images whenever it sees any such image, it fixes itself upon it; then, if it discerns behind that image something of its own kind, it becomes united and true love is established.44
Three centuries later, the Catalan philosopher and Franciscan tertiary Ramon Llull (d. 1315), known in his own time as the “Doctor illuminatus,” drew on the same passionate sentiment to describe his love for God. In his Book of the Lover and the Beloved (Llibre d’amic e amat)—a reference to the Believer and God—he proclaimed the hallmarks of this love.
It is to bear on one’s heart the sacred marks and the sweet words of the Beloved. It is to long for Him with desire and with tears. It is boldness. It is fervor. It is fear. It is the desire for the Beloved above all things. It is that which causes the Lover to grow faint when he hears the Beloved’s praises. It is that in which I die daily, and in which is all my will.45
In other words, from eleventh-century al-Andalus to the fourteenth-century Crown of Aragon, love was presented as irrepressible—a malady or affliction that could provoke both pleasure and pain.
In the courtly love tradition unrequited desire was emphasized. The object of the (usually male) poet’s love was typically unobtainable— often a married or otherwise inaccessible woman, to whom the lover submitted himself as her sentimental vassal. As Joan Ferrante has pointed out, twelfth- and thirteenth-century poets “seemed to be working with conventions that were common to all of them and familiar to their audiences, to such an extent that they could parody them and count on the audience to get the joke.”46 In the later songbook tradition, this all-consuming love was seen as a gateway to blasphemy, given that it encouraged the veneration of mortal women in a manner more properly reserved for God. In fifteenth-century Castile, it became a “religion of love” in which the Lady was equated with God.47 In his misogynist tract, The Archpriest of Talavera (El arcipreste de Talavera; 1438)—later nicknamed Corbacho (an echo of Boccaccio’s Corbaccio)—Alfonso Martínez de Toledo (d. ca. 1470) laments how “the lover chaotically breaks all ten of the Commandments.”48 Among the upper classes, love was seen as particularly dangerous. In court circles, marriages were a crucial means of building political alliances and networks of patronage. In a society where women were expected to remain virgins prior to marriage, and not to engage in extra-marital sex once they had wed, and in which either of these could compromise the honor and power of an entire lineage, love could be a force for destabilization and violence.49 Similarly, as we will see in the chapters to follow, love complicated the Christian injunction to accept the death of loved ones.
Amor hereos
Love was also medicalized. Contemporary medicine had its own take on amor hereos (lovesickness)—a view that spilled over into literature and back from literature into medicine. This can be seen in later editions of Ovid’s several treatises on love.50 The seminal second-century physician Galen considered lovesickness an affliction of the soul associated with both melancholy and mania. Centuries later, physicians of the Islamic world adapted the works of Galen and other medical authorities of Greco-Roman antiquity and developed a formal pathology of lovesickness, reframing it as a disease. The great Persian-Uzbek physician and philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) whose Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi-‘l-tibb) was translated into Latin by the thirteenth century and remained the standard medical textbook in Christian Europe until the 1600s, saw love as an obsessive mental disorder resembling depression, and composed a Treatise on Love (Risala fi’l-‘ishq).51 The earliest vector for the spread of this new conception of amor hereos to the Latin West was the Viaticum, a medical treatise by the North African, Muslim-cum-Benedictine monk Constantine the African (d. ca. 1098).52 These works and the commentaries they generated provoked European physicians to reclassify amor hereos as a type of madness—an overbearing unhappiness provoked by the strong desire to experience the amorous object. They also saw it as both a physical and a moral illness—one that could be triggered by humoral imbalance or originate from a faulty act of will.53
De amore heroico (ca. 1280), by the Catalan physician Arnau de Vilanova (d. 1311), is considered the first Latin treatise systematically dedicated to this topic.54 For Vilanova, amor heroicus is not only tied to emotion, and to a debility of the soul; he also situates it in the literary tradition of fin’amor.55 For his part, Bernard de Gordon (d. ca. 1330), in his popular diagnostic manual, The Lily of Medicine (Lilium medicinae; 1303), which was printed in translation in Seville in 1495, saw amor hereos as a “passion”—a “melancholy devotion caused by love of women.”56 In his view, if left unchecked, it could provoke madness.57 Gordon constructed passionate love as a heterosexual phenomenon and specified that a man in love “desire[s] without means or measure,” noting, in an echo of Virgil, that “so many things stir the heart of the lover to madness.”58 He goes on to explain that it is referred to as “heroic” because it affects the noble and the wealthy to a greater degree, because of their propensity for pleasure. But, obviously, as we will see, love also affects women.
Similarly, Alonso de Madrigal “el Tostado” (d. 1450), an influential author at the court of Juan II who ended his career as bishop of Ávila, also theorized love, holding that amor hereos can be conducive to melancholy. He wrote The Introduction to Love and Friendship (Breviloquio de amor e amiçiçia) and, likely, the Treaty on How Man Needs to Love (Tratado de como al hombre es necesario amar).59 In his treatises two notions seem clear: men need love (meaning carnal love), and love can encourage irrationality and therefore sickness, and even madness, because “the irrational desire of love is greater among men than beasts.”60 More than a century later, in 1569, Alfonso de Santa Cruz repeated similar ideas in his treatise Regarding Melancholy (Sobre la melancolia). Following works attributed to Cadmus of Miletus (sixth century BCE), Santa Cruz calls love “the lustful passion of love or of the soul” and considers that “the youth entrapped by love, at not being satisfied by their fantasies and desires, are filled with great sadness, out of which streams a burning of blood; the heart and brain thus stricken by this melancholy and over-heated blood, gives rise to this mental illness called love.”61
Lovesickness in Literature and Life
Lovesick characters abound in Spanish literature and are inevitably gendered, and usually aristocrats.62 The protagonist is typically a lovestruck knight who feels dejected, infirm, and anxious as a consequence of amor hereos, and who imagines he can be cured if only his lady were to reciprocate. The lovesick nobleman who suffers in vain pursuit and is lost at the mercy of his lady and his desire thus became an archetype in Iberian letters, with an entire literary genre, “sentimental fiction,” dwelling on the impossibility of love—or at the very least, of love that ends well. These novels inevitably end in tragedy—testimony to the dangers of passion. They center on aristocratic characters and take place in and around royal courts in exotic locales. However, they were consumed by a broad readership, disseminated, and popularized in the sixteenth century thanks to the arrival of the printing press. Scholars debate as to which works can be properly classified as sentimental fiction, but texts of this type were produced in the Crowns of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal.63 Sentimental fiction is a genre that bridges the traditional boundaries of the medieval and early modern, and flourished between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Credited as the genre’s foundational text, the Willing Slave of Love (Siervo libre de amor; 1439) was written by Juan Rodríguez del Padrón (d. 1450), who later gained renown as a “defender of women,” thanks to his apologetic The Triumph of Women (Triunfo de las donas; ca. 1445), in which he provides forty reasons that women are superior to men.64
In some cases, as in the novel Grisel and Mirabella by Juan de Flores (d. ca. 1525), the protagonists do manage to fall in love and enjoy its benefits and pleasures, but only until the illicit affair between the princess and her paramour is discovered. Each then goes on to suffer a violent and tragic death as a consequence of defying social and religious norms. Flores’s Triumph of Love (Triunfo de amor) reflects the frustration provoked by the apparent impossibility of enjoying love. In this allegory, Cupid, the god of love, is arrested, put on trial, and condemned to death by a multitude of dead lovers who had been resuscitated by Medea, only to be rescued by an army of living lovers, who have come to see how hopeless the world would be without love.65 In the end, the Triumph of Love reverses gender roles, presenting men as demure and virtuous, and women as demanding love.66
The sentimental text par excellence is Diego de San Pedro’s The Prison of Love (Cárcel de amor; 1492), which was not only translated into several languages, but circulated also in the form of tapestries.67 San Pedro’s sentimental hero, Leriano, is in love with Princess Laureola, who—mindful of her reputation and well-being and aware of her duties as a noblewoman—refuses his advances. Despairing of hope, Leriano dies of lovesickness, having first ingested the letters she sent to him as if he were taking Holy Communion.68 As Sol Miguel-Prendes puts it, “The triumph of erotic desire transforms sentimental heroes into madmen.”69
This book and the sentimental genre as a whole present elites also as emotional. A sensitive nature came to be seen as the domain of privilege. Most literary protagonists were aristocrats, and many noblemen composed poetry, hence the association of emotion with the refined classes rather than the “rougher” and “simpler” lower orders. Thus, when Leriano’s mother is about to witness her son dying of lovesickness she envies commoners’ incapacity to feel: “Blessed are the base of nature and the rude of wit, for they feel things only to the degree in which they understand them; and unhappy are those of subtle judgement who comprehend all, those who because of acute understanding have delicate feeling.”70 This type of literature was fashionable at court, and as his mother laments, sensitive youth like Leriano were vulnerable to the mixed messages it sent as to what was acceptable regarding love, desire, and sensitivity.
Nevertheless, La Celestina (or Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea; ca. 1499–1502) by Fernando de Rojas—one of the great texts of the Spanish canon and a widely translated early modern bestseller— parodies the sentimental genre. In La Celestina, although love is only fleeting, it can be a fatal affliction.71 Here, the aristocratic Calisto is persuaded by his servants, Pármeno and Sempronio, to enlist the assistance of an aged procuress, Celestina, to gain the heart of his beloved Melibea. Not only does this bring about his demise, but it does so in the most unheroic manner. Departing from one of his assignations with Melibea, Calisto falls from the ladder he had used to climb the wall of her garden, dashing his brains out on the pavement below. When Melibea learns of this, she confesses the affair to her father and kills herself. By this point, Pármeno and Sempronio have both been executed for the murder of Celestina, who had refused to share with them the fee Calisto had paid her. The only survivors are the least noble and virtuous characters: Elicia and Areúsa, the two prostitutes who had been Celestina’s apprentices and Pármeno and Sempronio’s lovers—those who loved the least.72 As far as we know, La Celestina was not among the books held in the library of Isabel the Catholic, but as Joseph Snow speculates, some at court must have known about it and read it.73
A Knight in Love: When Life Imitates Fiction
Lovesick and chivalric characters were not merely the stuff of fiction, however; just as literature can imitate life, life can also imitate fiction. For example, among the knight-poets of the court of Juan II of Castile and his favorite, Álvaro de Luna, we find Suero de Quiñones (ca. 1409–56), who took his obsession with the heroic far beyond his poetic complaints.
Dezidle nuevas de mi, / Tell her again of me,
et mirat si avrá pesar / and look if she is sorry
por el placer que perdí. / for the love that I lost.
Contadle mi fortuna / Recount my fate
et la pena en que yo vivo; / and the pain in which I live;
et dezid que soy esquivo, / and tell her that I avoid
que non curo de ninguna, / and that I care for none other,
Que tan fermosa la vi, / that to me she was so beautiful
que m’overia de tornar / that it drove me
loco el día que partí. / crazy the day I left.
Suero gained immortal fame thanks to his embrace of courtly ideals and his staging of a pas d’armes—a chivalric extravaganza that took place from July 10 to August 9, 1434, at the strategic bridge over the River Órbigo en route to Santiago de Compostela. The event is known in detail thanks to a notarial document meticulously compiled by Rodríguez de Lena and is also recounted in the Chronicle of Juan II.74 In it, the nobleman, Suero, and nine of his men (mantenedores) defended a bridge, challenging any knight who dared to cross it to fight or be disgraced. It was through this penitential ordeal that Suero sought to be released from a vow of love he had made. To this end, he already wore a penitential iron ring on his neck on Thursdays, and he had fought in battle against Muslim Granada handicapped, with his right arm unprotected by armor. But now, to free himself from his pledge of love, he planned the passage of arms that would make him famous. As Suero himself recounted, “I … have been imprisoned by a Lady for a long time, in recognition of which every Thursday I bear this iron on my neck… . And now, great Lord, in honor of the Apostle Saint James, I have plotted my rescue, by means of three hundred broken lances.”75 And so this personal trial was transformed into a chivalric celebration with propagandistic, emotional, and political undertones. Suero de Quiñones and his nine squires fought against sixty-eight knights. The contest lasted thirty days, in which there were 727 jousts, leaving 166 broken lances, after which the exhausted fighters recognized Suero as absolved of his vows and restored to his honor.
This event was so sensational that Suero is one of the examples put forward in Cervantes’s Don Quijote as proof of the existence of chivalry. When Don Quijote’s friends were trying to convince him that caballeros andantes (knights-errant) were not real, he replied: “Say then, that the jousts of Suero de Quiñones, ‘he of the Pass,’ were a joke.”76 But Suero de Quiñones was not unique. As Martí de Riquer put it, “The paso de armas is yet one more manifestation of a tendency that sharpened in the fifteenth century to novelize the knightly lifestyle.”77 For Amancio Labandeira Fernández, Suero’s adventure constituted a response to the conflict between Juan II, Álvaro de Luna, and their faction against the Infantes of Aragon and their supporters that was wreaking havoc on Castile at the time.78 Labandeira Fernández suggested that Álvaro de Luna helped Suero (who was a supporter) publicize the event in order to overshadow the legacy of a similar “passage of arms” that had been held in Castile by a rival in 1428.79
The occasion for this earlier tournament was the sojourn of Leonor of Aragon (Juan II of Castile’s cousin and sister-in-law) in Valladolid from April 20 to July 21, 1428, on her way to marry King Duarte of Portugal. Here, Álvaro de Luna, together with seven knights, “fought” against Juan II of Castile and his cousins, King Juan of Navarre (the future Joan II of Aragon) and Prince Enrique of Aragon, together with a few more nobleman. The celebration, known as the “Passage of Fuerte Ventura,” took place on May 18 and marked the beginning of a trend.80 Another celebration would be held in Valladolid in 1440, this time called by Ruy Díaz de Mendoza, the mayordomo of Joan of Navarre, on the occasion of the ill-fated wedding of Juan II’s son and heir, Enrique of Castile, to Joan’s daughter, Blanca, the heiress of Navarre. However, this passage was a washout, and had to be canceled by the king after some of the knights were injured and died.81 Two more modest passages of arms took place in Castile, one in 1459 in Madrid and another in 1461. Similar passages were held elsewhere in the peninsula and beyond. In 1455, for example, the “pas du Pin aux Pommes d’or” was organized by Gaston II of Castellbó, Count of Foix, the focus of which was a pine tree adorned with golden apples planted in a square in the Born (the social and economic hub of Barcelona) to honor a lady. Much earlier, in 1393, King Joan the Hunter of Aragon (1387–96) had instituted a Catalan version of the Jocs Florals (Floral Games)—a competition originally founded to promote poetry written in Occitan that had been celebrated annually in Toulouse since 1324.82 These represent only a portion of the many tournaments and chivalric exercises that were frequently convened in late medieval Iberia and Europe.83
Knights across Christendom also advertised their chivalric prestige through books written in their honor, including fictionalized or embroidered biographies, chronicles, chivalric novels, and manuals of knightly training.84 The best-known noble biographies of this type are The Book of Deeds of the Good Sire Jean le Maingre (Le livre des faits du bon messire Jehan le Maingre, dit Boucicaut, maréschal de France et gouverneur de Jennes), an anonymous vita of this marshal of France (d. 1421), and Le livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing (The Book of Deeds of Jacques de Lalaing), a biography of a Burgundian knight (d. 1432)—both of whom were regarded as epitomes of chivalry.
The best-known example from Castile is El victorial or The Chronicle of Pero Niño (ca. 1448) by Díez de Games. The book, widely considered the first Spanish-language biography, was commissioned by its subject, Pero Niño (1378–1453), Count of Buelna. He was so determined to have his deeds remembered for posterity that in his last will and testament he ordered a copy to be held in the church of Santiago de Cigales, where he and his wife were interred, and even advertised the book in the inscription of their tomb.
Don Pero Niño, Count of Buelna, he who by the mercy of God mediated by the Virgin Saint Mary, His Mother, was always the victor and never the vanquished whether on land or on sea, just as his biography recounts in detail.85
No chivalric memoir would be complete without a meditation on love, which the Victorial defines as “the union of two beings of whom one loves the other or desires possession of the other.” It continues:
I find that there are three degrees in love. The first, I call attraction; the second, predilection; the third, devotion.86
In the end, this knight’s vita was closer to a chivalric than a sentimental novel, given that Pero Niño did succeed in marrying his lady and the object of his desire, and the Victorial recounts him discretely but passionately conveying his declaration of love to Beatriz of Portugal:
He discovered someone through whom to say to Doña Beatriz that she was the one lady in the world whom he would most desire to serve for his honor, and that he thought to vow himself thereto until death, for she was more noble than any of the queens of all Spain, that there was no damsel of fairer fame, nor of higher lineage; and that he besought her to be pleased to allow him to call himself her knight, and he should show himself such in all due place.87
Morality and Love
Despite its normalization in the discourse of chivalry, writing, reading, or hearing about love and sexuality carried an air of danger and subversion. In sentimental fiction, in cancionero poetry, and works like El victorial, love was characterized as a quasi-religious experience that ennobles men through the adoration and reverence of their beloved. According to Michael Gerli, this provoked a literary backlash that resulted in the proliferation of misogynistic texts. The Spanish example, par excellence, is Corbacho, or The Rejection of Worldly Love (Reprobación del amor mundano; 1432), written by Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, archpriest of Talavera and chaplain to Juan II.88 This work consists of a series of treatises condemning lust (concupiscentia), vilifying women, and taking aim at the weak men who fell victim to them. Inspired by Boccaccio’s Corbaccio, written a century earlier, it has traditionally been considered part of the controversy known as the querelle de femmes or “female question,” which from 1400 or so saw European scholars, writers, and moralists arguing about women’s character, merits, and place in society. In this context, texts like Padrón’s Triumph of Women have been read as a direct rebuttal of Corbacho and its ilk, as was, in more muted form, Castiglione’s Cortegiano.
In a turn typical of misogynistic tracts of the time, Luis de Lucena (d. 1530) in his The Repetition of Loves (Repetición de amores; 1497) associated women with the disgrace that love entails. Lucena defines love as an “ulcer” (llaga) and claims that
it is passion that does not give the lover respite; thus, enmity is passion that distresses he who suffers from it, that he might do something about it, and flee from that which distresses, and flee from that which makes him feel this passion. And both of these passions afflict the soul.89
Following Alfonso X’s Primera crónica general, Lucena characterizes women thus: “Therefore, woman is the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, constantly demanding, and an unending conflict, a continuous harm, a house of storms, an impediment to chastity, and a danger to the chaste.”90
For its part, the Church, with its aim of controlling behavior in the name of morality, made a mortal sin of lust and condemned sexual desire, which was seen as a vice, a debasing physical indulgence, and a distraction from the pious worship of God. As Saint Paul famously observed in his letter to the Corinthians, celibacy was preferable to acting on desire, “but if they do not have self-control, let them get married. For it is better to marry than to burn [with sexual desire]” (1 Corinthians 7:9). On the other hand, human nature entailed that sexuality and desire had to be tolerated as a necessity of procreation and, therefore, as part of God’s plan, at least within the framework of marriage and when its aim was to procreate. Sex within marriage was a means of emulating the companionship that was an integral part of the story of Creation in Genesis—when Eve was created by God to serve as Adam’s companion in order that they might “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 9:7).91 As such, marriage served as a prophylactic against greater sins, such as fornication and sodomy.
“Sodomy” referred in this era to any sexual activity apart from that carried out in the “missionary position” by a man and a woman with the aim of procreation—this arrangement not only reaffirmed male dominance, but was considered to be the most efficacious and the least enjoyable. Needless to say, it was easier for the Church to present these views as a sort of official doctrine on sexuality and marriage than it was for its members and for society as a whole to follow them. The history of what really happened in people’s bedrooms is elusive to say the least, and concubinage, prostitution, and barraganía (a form of unofficial nonreligious union) were very common in medieval and early modern Iberia and beyond.92
Regardless of everyday realities, following Saint Paul, the medieval Church presented celibacy as morally superior to marriage. As such, it could be formalized and legitimized by entering a religious order and taking the concomitant vows of chastity and poverty, submitting to the obedience of the Church, renouncing the body, and withdrawing from the world. But neither celibacy nor the monastic life was a valid option for a king, who was expected to marry and to produce at least one heir in order to ensure the continuity of the dynasty and the stability of the kingdom. Indeed, given the short life expectancies of the time, and the difficulties inherent in conceiving, it was advisable to have several children, not only to serve as a “spare” for the heir, but to be used as tools for establishing permanent political alliances with leading noble families and foreign princes. Thus, it was not unusual for queens and women of the upper nobility to be almost continuously pregnant. For example, Fernando de Antequera’s wife, Leonor de Albuquerque, bore seven children in a sixteen-year period. Her daughter, Leonor, queen and wife of Portugal’s Duarte I, bore nine children in a span of only ten years.
The king’s marriage, like medieval marriages in general, was expected to be grounded in a measured affection, but not in passionate love or sexual obsession. Emotional or carnal infatuation, or even worse, a combination of the two, could undermine the authority of the king, by giving the queen, who already had some formal authority by virtue of her title, excessive influence over the mind of her husband and disproportionate power within the realm. Indeed, as will be discussed in chapter 3, this is precisely how Isabel of Portugal, the queen consort of Juan II of Castile, was portrayed in the chronicles, in which the aging king is caricaturized as enraptured by his beautiful, young queen. Likewise, as we will see in chapters 5 and 7 love and desire were used to criticize the relationships the princesses Isabel and Juana had with their husbands. For theologians, concupiscence was always immoral, and enjoying sexual activity was considered sinful even within the context of marriage. Moreover, humanist discourse went even further, by emphasizing chastity as the most important virtue for women to embody. In On the Education of the Christian Woman (De institutione feminae christianae; 1523), a book he dedicated to Catherine of Aragon (Isabel the Catholic’s daughter, Catalina), the famous Valencian humanist Joan Lluís Vives wrote: “A woman’s only care is chastity; therefore, when this has been thoroughly elucidated, she may be considered to have received sufficient instruction.”93
Whether writers were “for” women or “against” them—and this is not an easy distinction to make—love emerged as the predominant literary theme from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century during the transition out of the Middle Ages toward the modern era.94 But the place of love was ambiguous. When its power was celebrated, this tended to be in narratives that linked desire to death, and so they also served as cautionary tales. Men and women were expected to control their appetites and passions. This was the message that was pounded home by other genres, including conduct literature, mirrors of princes, and devotional texts. The poetry of love and the prose of sentimentality constituted a reaction to this, provoked by the stresses and anxieties among male authors as a consequence of the suppression and vilification of sexuality. In either case, this literature expresses the fear men had of the feminine and the power that originated in the irrational and uncontrollable love and desire women inspired. At times male authors may have been conscious of these anxieties, but as we know from affect theory, power can be felt before it is discerned or identified.95 In sum, passionate love was celebrated in prose and verse, but it was also seen as dangerous, as an incontrollable sickness, and therefore incompatible with dynastic marital strategies, family obligations, and Christian religious ideals. This had important consequences for the queens who are the focus of the following chapters, and even for noble and royal men who were seen as succumbing to their passions because of love or grief, or a combination of the two.
1. Felipe II nevertheless continued to travel. “One may categorically assert that probably more than a decade of his life and reign were spent in travel, with four of them abroad and two or more in the Crown of Aragon alone.” Ruiz, A King Travels, 18.
2. Rivero-Rodríguez, La edad de oro de los virreyes; Lalinde Abadía, La instutición virreinal; Gamero Igea, “Las lugartenientes de la Corona de Aragón,” 315–16; Silleras-Fernandez, “La formación de la identidad,” 9–16, 183, 219–20; and Molas Ribalta, “La administración real de la Corona de Aragón,” 430–31.
3. For the elaborate games played at court, see Boase, Secrets of Pinar’s Game.
4. Alfonso X, Espéculo, b.2, Tit. 3, prologue.
5. Alfonso X, Partida II, Tit. VI, Law 1; trans. Parsons and Burns, Las siete partidas, II, 298.
6. Alfonso X, Partida II, Tit. VI, Law 2; trans. Parsons and Burns, Las siete partidas, II, 298–99.
7. On role and importance of the Partidas, see Rodríguez Velasco, “La urgente presencia” and Velasco, Dead Voice.
8. Earenfight, Queenship and Political Power, xvi.
9. Earenfight, The Kings Other Body, 1–18; Ruiz Domingo, “Del qual tenim loch,” 307–13; García-Herrero, “María de Castilla, reina de Aragón”; Silleras-Fernandez, “Iberian Queenship,” 307–10; Silleras-Fernandez, Power, Piety and Patronage, 5–7.
10. Echevarría, Catalina de Lancaster, 93–118; Muñoz Gómez, Fernando “el de Antequera, 85–99.
11. Rodrigues, As tristes rainhas, 191–200.
12. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” 842; Rosenwein, “Thinking Historically about Medieval Emotions,” 831–33; Rosenwein, Generations of Feelings, 28–34.
13. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 124–29. Reddy also coined the term “emotives,” which are emotional expressions of feelings through the use of language. See Reddy, “Against Constructionism,” 327–51.
14. Karras, From Boys to Men, 220–2l; García-Herrero, Los jóvenes en la Baja Edad Media; Gómez Redondo, “Modelos políticos y conducta,” 300; Perea Rodríguez, “El entorno cortesano,” 292.
15. “Perhaps the simplest observation we can make is that in the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process… . Fashioning may suggest the achievement of a less tangible shape: a distinctive personality, a characteristic address to the world, a consistent model of perceiving and behaving.” Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 2.
16. Gerli, Poesía cancioneril castellana, 50. See also Greene, Unrequited Conquests, 5–6.
17. Álvaro de Luna also composed a book in defense of women, his Book of Virtuous and Illustrious Women (Libro de las virtuosas e claras mujeres; 1446).
18. Fernández de Oviedo, Batallas y quinquagenas, I, Diálogo, 28.
19. Fernández de Oviedo, Batallas y quinquagenas, I, Diálogo, 28.
20. Cervantes, Don Quixote, I, chap. 1; trans. Ormsby.
21. Homoerotic desire was a popular theme among both Muslim and Jewish poets of al-Andalus. In late medieval Christian Europe Jews incorporated the culture of courtly love into both exegesis and poetry. See, for example, Japhet, “‘The Lovers’ Way,’” 2:863–80; and Prats, “The Love Poetry of Shelomoh Ben Reuben Bonafed,” 149–63.
22. Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History; “Visions of Al-Andalus”; Hamilton, Representing Others, 11–32; Monroe, “Tracing the Remnants of a Romancero Tradition,” 159–97; Wacks, Framing Iberia, 1–15; Mallette, The Kingdom of Sicily.
23. Aurell, Authoring the Past, 39–54 and 91–108.
24. Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier, 2.
25. Milà, El cortesano, 120–24.
26. Dutton, El cancionero, VII–VIII.
27. See, generally, González Crespo, “El patrimonio dominical”; and Silleras-Fernandez, “Iberian Queenship,” 317–19.
28. AGS: Estado Castilla, Autógrafos RC, leg. 1, f. 177, n. 2 (Zaragoza, beginning of December 1474); ed. Prieto Cantero, “Apéndice III: Isabel en la opinión,” III:74. See also Gómez Redondo, Historia de la prosa de los Reyes Católicos, 1:653–56.
29. AGS: Casa Real, Autógrafos RC, n. 9 (Córdoba, May 18, 1486), ed. Prieto Cantero, “Apéndice III: Isabel en la opinión,” III:74.
30. AGS: Estado Castilla, Autógrafos RC, leg. 1, f. 177, n. 2 (Tordesillas, May 6, 1474), ed. Prieto Cantero, “Apéndice III: Isabel en la opinión,” III:9.
31. AGS: Estado Castilla, Autógrafos RC, leg. 1, f. 179–180, n. 4 (Real de Tordesillas, Monasterio de Santo Tomás, July 14, 1475); ed. Prieto Cantero, “Apéndice III: Isabel en la opinión,” III:94.
32. Pulgar notes that Isabel “loved the king, her husband, greatly, and was jealous of him beyond measure,” while the king “loved his wife, the queen, greatly, but gave himself over to other women.” Pulgar, Crónica de los Reyes Católicos, I:76 and 75.
33. Torre, Testamentaría de Isabel la Católica, 64. For a detailed analysis of Isabel’s will, see chapter 7.
34. Calderón Ortega, El proceso de redacción, 47.
35. Martín Barba, “El itinerario del cortejo fúnebre,” 472.
36. Redondo Cantera, “Los sepulcros de la capilla real de Granada,” 187–89.
37. Beltrán, “Desequilibrio genérico y ampliación,” 33–36.
38. Severin, Del manuscrito a la imprenta, 35–46.
39. For a reading of the poem, see Deyermond, “La ambigüedad,” 370.
40. Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, 28.
41. Menocal, The Arabic Role, x–xi. For a more traditional approach to medieval lyric in Provence and Iberia, see Milá y Fontanals, De los trovadores de España; and Menéndez Pidal, Poesía juglaresca y juglares. For theories on the origin of courtly love, see Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love, 62–99.
42. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love, 2–3. For Reddy “love breaks with sexuality while embracing it.” Reddy, “The Rule of Love,” 34. See also Macpherson, “The Game of Courtly Love,” 95–96.
43. Lacan, Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, VII:167–78.
44. Hazm, The Ring of the Dove, 13.
45. Llull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, 20.
46. Ferrante, “Cortes’ Amor in Medieval Texts,” 686.
47. Gerli, “La religión del amor,” 68–69; and Gerli, “Eros y Agape,” 318–19; Archer, “La misoginia como remedium amoris,” 237–54.
48. Talavera, Corbacho, 110.
49. As Tallis points out, it has generally been believed since the 1950s that there are two basic types of love: passionate/romantic love and companionate/marital love. He defines passionate love “as a state of intense longing for the beloved” and companionate love as involving deep closeness, which is therefore less intense, but more stable. Tallis, Lovesick, 47–48.
50. Ovid’s Ars amatoria was a common text read as part of the training in the ars dictandi. Miguel-Prendes, Narrating Desire, 41–43. Homeric epic already associated eros with suffering. Kanellakis, “Introduction,” 2; and Cyrino, Pandora’s Jar.
51. The Risala was not available in the West in the Middle Ages, but the excerpt from Avicenna’s Book of Healing (Kitāb al-Shifāʾ), known in Latin as On the Soul (De anima) and containing his ideas on love, was translated into Latin in the mid-twelfth century. See Anwar, “Ibn Sina’s Philosophical Theology of Love,” 331–45; Hasse, Avicenna’s “De Anima” in the Latin West; Shoja and Tubbs, “Disorder of Love,” 228–29; and Grunebaum, “Avicenna’s Risâla fî ʾl- ʿIšq and Courtly Love,” 233–38.
52. González de Pablo and Evans, “Medicine of the Soul,” 507; Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, 5–6.
53. González de Pablo and Evans, “Medicine of the Soul,” 507.
54. Ciavolella, La malattia d’amore, 68; Mensa Valls, Arnau de Vilanova, 115–37.
55. Mensa Valls, Arnau de Vilanova, 16.
56. Demaitre, Doctor Bernard de Gordon; and Gordonio, Lilio de medicina, 107.
57. Gordonio, Lilio de medicina, 108.
58. Gordonio, Lilio de medicina, 107.
59. Cátedra, Amor y pedagogía, 33; Vélez Sainz, “Curing the Malady of Lovesickness” and Vélez Sainz, De amor, de honor, e donas, 105–7.
60. Cátedra, Del Tostado sobre el amor, 10; Cortijo Ocaña, “Notas sobre El Tostado De Amore,” 72.
61. Santa Cruz, Sobre la melancolía, 35.
62. See a discussion of melancholy in chapter 2.
63. On sentimental fiction, see, generally, Cortijo Ocaña, La evolución genérica de la ficción sentimental; and Gómez Redondo, Historia de la prosa medieval de los Reyes Católicos, 2, chap. 10; Miguel-Prendes, Narrating Desire; and Francomano, The Prison of Love.
64. See Rodríguez del Padrón, The Triumph of Ladies/Triunfo de las donas. For an overview of how medieval and early modern European authors envisioned love after death, see Jussen and Targoff, Love after Death, 3–14.
65. As Medea put it, “Innocents suffer the pain that is the fault of love.” Flores, Triunfo de amor, 90.
66. Gerli, “Gender Trouble,” 169–84.
67.Cárcel de amor was translated into Catalan (1493), Italian (1514), French (1525 and 1550s), and English (ca. 1548). See Recio, “La literalidad en el caso de la Cárcel de amor,” 271; Francomano, “Reversing the Tapestry,” 1060; Francomano, Prison of Love, 3–4; Miguel-Prendes, Narrating Desire, 14.
68. From 1496 Cárcel de amor had usually been published with an epilogue by Nicolás Núñez, who continued the narrative. In this addition Laureola is in love with the deceased Leriano and is thereby condemned to a life of suffering deprived of her beloved.
69. Miguel-Prendes, Narrating Desire, 187.
70. San Pedro, Prison of Love, 1492, 79–80; San Pedro, Cárcel de amor, 148.
71. The first version of the Celestina dates from 1499 and a second, longer, version from 1502. The work was translated into Italian (1506), Hebrew (1507), German (1520), French (ca. 1526 and 1578), Dutch (1550), Latin (1624), and English (1631). See Hamilton, “Joseph ben Samuel Safarti’s ‘Tratado de Melibea y Calisto,’” and Kish, “Early Responses to Celestina,” 305–6.
72. Gerli, Celestina and the Ends of Desire, passim.
73. Snow, “Celestina en la corte de los Reyes Católicos,” 296–97.
74. This text has been edited by Labandeira Fernández. See Rodríguez de Lena, El passo honroso.
75. Rodríguez de Lena, El passo honroso, 84.
76. Cervantes, Don Quixote, I, chap. 49.
77. Riquer, Caballeros andantes españoles, 11.
78. The Infantes were the sons of Juan’s uncle, Fernando de Antequera, king of Aragón, who held territory in Castile, and whom Fernando used to undermine his kinsman’s rule. They are discussed in chapter 3.
79. Labandeira Fernández, “Estudio preliminar,” 16.
80. Riquer, Caballeros andantes españoles, 13. On chivalry, see also Labandeira Fernández, “Estudio preliminar,” 15; Rodríguez Velasco, “Los mundos modernos de la caballería antigua”; Velasco, El debate sobre la caballería en el siglo XV, 25; and Ruiz Domènec, La caballería o la imagen cortesana del mundo.
81. Labandeira Fernández, “Estudio preliminar,” 18.
82. Riquer, Història de la literatura catalana, vol. 1.
83. See Andrés Díaz, “Las fiestas de caballería,” 81–107; Flores Arroyuelo, “El torneo caballeresco,” 257–78; and Fallows, Jousting in Medieval, 267–304.
84. Some examples from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries include Ponç de Menaguerra’s Lo Cavaller (1493), Juan Quijada de Reayo’s Doctrina del arte de la cavalleria (1548), and Luis Zapata’s Del Justador (ca. 1589–93). Much earlier, Ramon Llull (1232–1316) had written The Book of the Order of Chivalry (ca. 1275/6) in Catalan, which was then translated into Latin, French, English, and Scots in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its goal was to train Christian knights in a new and more virtuous model of knighthood.
85. See Beltrán, “El caballero en el mar,” 75.
86. Díaz de Games, El victorial, 125; Evans, The Unconquered Knight, 19.
87. Díaz de Games, El victorial, 381; Evans, The Unconquered Knight, 84.
88. Gerli, “La religión del amor,” 81–86; Solomon, The Literature of Misogyny, 67–69; Archer, The Problem of Woman, 64–89.
89. Lucena, Repetición de amores, 60. See Matulka, An Anti-Feminist Treatise. The full title of Lucena’s work is Repetición de amores y arte de ajedrez con 101 juegos de partido (The Repetition of Loves and the Art of Chess with 101 Games of Competition). Love and chess were both games of strategy.
90. Lucena, Repetición de amores, 83.
91. Crawford, European Sexualities, 26; Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society; Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, 79.
92. Armstrong-Partida, “Concubinage, Illegitimacy and Fatherhood,” 195–212; Armstrong-Partida, Defiant Priests; Armstrong-Partida, Gerson, and Lightfoot, Women and Community, 7–8; Poska, Women and Authority, 9–14; Coolidge, Sex, Gender, and Illegitimacy, 65–102. See also McDonough, Witnesses, Neighbors, and Community; McDougall, Royal Bastards and Bigamy and Christian Identity.
93. Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman, 116. For a general discussion of books on women, see chapter 3 and the conclusion.
94. Cátedra, Tratados, 278.
95. Schaefer, The Evolution of Affect Theory, 3.