Isabella meanwhile secretly negotiated her own marriage. She had known her candidate since childhood: Ferdinand of Aragon was playful, handsome and cunning but he was a double cousin: his father, Juan, king of the maritime Aragonese empire of Catalonia, Sicily and Sardinia, was a Trastámaran and his mother was Castilian; and their marriage would unite two kingdoms. It was a lot to arrange: Isabella also had to fix papal dispensation for consanguinity. Just eighteen years old, she enjoyed the drama, signing cryptic messages as The Princess. She was both an excited teenager planning an elopement and a hard-headed politician designing her future reign, in both of which she would perform God’s work.
When Enrique ordered ‘that I be captured and deprived of my freedom’, Isabella sent a note to Ferdinand redolent with romantic conspiracy, ‘Order me and I’ll do it.’ Ferdinand replied with a gold necklace adorned with ‘seven fat rubies’. ‘To run the same risks she is running’, the seventeen-year-old Ferdinand, king of Sicily, wearing disguise, galloped by night to Valladolid to fulfil their assignation, accompanied by five horsemen.
On the road, they met an urbane Spanish cardinal who had rushed from Rome with the bull permitting the marriage. The deliverer was Rodrigo Borgia, whose libertinism and vulgarity horrified Isabella. The Borgias, minor Aragonese nobles, had already flourished in Rome: Rodrigo’s uncle, Calixtus III, had promoted him to cardinal. Borgia proved a masterful Vatican player. When Paul II suffered a coronary (according to his enemies, while being sodomized), Borgia delivered the tiara to Sixtus IV, who backed Isabella. She was informed of Borgia’s ‘uncontrollable passions’ and his ‘depraved games’ featuring naked mudwrestling ‘courtesans, Jews and donkeys’ – but he was her cardinal.
In October 1469, she spotted Ferdinand riding into Valladolid – ‘That’s him! That’s him!’ – where they swiftly married. ‘Last night in the service of God, we consummated the marriage,’ announced Ferdinand. Isabella added, ‘This subject is embarrassing and hateful to noblewomen,’ but ‘our actions are the evidence we must present’. The bloody sheets were displayed.
Ferdinand ‘loved [her] greatly although he also gave himself to other women’. Suffering regular pangs of jealousy, Isabella tolerated his mistresses and bastards. Four infantas arrived fast. Keen to conceive a son, they consulted their Jewish doctor Lorenzo Badoc before the birth of Infante Juan. They kept the kingdoms separate but agreed never to overrule each other. Ferdinand was a lover of ‘all kinds of games’ whose ‘special gift [was] that whoever spoke to him wanted to love and serve him because he talked in such a friendly way’. He was happy to take Isabella’s advice because, wrote a courtier, ‘he knew she was so very capable’.
On Enrique’s death, the couple created a new entity, Spain, but they had to fight for it. Afonso the African and his Portuguese troops invaded, joining their other enemies. ‘You can freely kill them without any punishment. I’m just a weak woman,’ Isabella announced, rallying her knights, but ‘If there’s danger, it would be better to take it like medicine and for it to be over in an hour than to suffer a prolonged illness,’ adding, ‘If you tell me women shouldn’t talk about this, I answer: I don’t see who’s risking more than me!’ At sea the Portuguese routed her Castilians at the battle of Guinea, winning the gold and slave trades, the first European clash for Africa; but on land Isabella expelled Afonso. Spain was home to many Muslims and 150,000 Jews. The latter had been there since Roman times, though many more had converted to Catholicism; these
Isabella’s itinerant court, moving between Seville, Toledo and Valladolid, was pious and prim yet not joyless – she enjoyed dancing, music, singing and dressing up, sporting dresses of scarlet brocade and gold. She knew the Jewish leaders well: the octogenarian Abraham Seneor was a veteran adviser, and her doctor was Jewish. But in 1478 she asked Pope Sixtus for her own Holy Office of the Inquisition, appointing her childhood confessor, the ascetic Tomás da Torquemada, as grand inquisitor. The couple sought denunciations of secret ‘Judaizers’ who were tortured on the rack and by waterboarding, their property seized. Then if they were declared to be ‘relapsed’, these
