Hearing of this, Isabella and Ferdinand both fell ill with fever; he recovered but she died at fifty-three. Juana now became queen of Castile. She and Philip sailed to claim the kingdom. They were shipwrecked in England, staying with the old king Henry VII and Juana’s sister Catherine, widow of Prince Arthur. Henry watched Juana carefully. ‘She seemed fine, restrained and gracious,’ he noted, ‘although her husband [Philip] and those with him made her out to be mad.’
When they reached Spain, her father and husband decided Juana was indeed insane, agreeing that if ‘the said most serene Queen, either from her own choice or from being persuaded by other persons, should attempt to meddle in the government, both would prevent it’. It is now impossible to gauge how much her confinement was a male conspiracy, how much manic depression. She was ill-treated: when she refused to eat, Ferdinand ordered her whipped, then, entrusting Spain to Philip, he sailed for Naples.
Despite her ‘insanity’, the couple were still sleeping together. In September 1506, after hard partying, Philip died either of typhoid, sunstroke or alcohol: Ferdinand returned to rule Castile. While Philip was being embalmed, Juana, who was pregnant with a sixth child, seized the body and took it with her to Tordesillas Palace, refusing to bury him and travelling with the body. But, however mad Queen Juana was, the biological gamble of Maximilian’s marriage alliances paid off for both families in ways they could not yet imagine.
Ferdinand ruled the expanding empire alone. America now attracted shiploads of aspiring conquistadors, often energetic and talented, if voracious and ruthless, who went to the Indies to ‘serve God and the King and get rich’, objectives in which, like the Crusaders, they saw no contradiction. In 1504, trained as a notary, Cortés settled in Santo Domingo, earning an
The chaplain on these killing sprees was the angular, bald, intense Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who had received his own estate on Hispaniola, but now he declared, ‘I saw here cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see.’ He went on to denounce the cruelty to King Ferdinand, who recalled Diego Columbus. It was not enough: de las Casas himself sailed for home to see the king. Yet the conquest had now reached the mainland.
Pizarro joined one of these expeditions led by Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who founded the future Cartagena (Colombia), then crossed the Isthmus of Panama where, falling to his knees in wonder, he was the first European to see the ocean he called the South Sea. Balboa,
In Italy too, Ferdinand was triumphant, recovering Naples and Sicily. He no longer needed the duplicitous Borgias. It was they who needed him.
‘I had foreseen my father’s death and made every preparation for it,’ Cesare Borgia confided to Machiavelli, ‘but I hadn’t anticipated that I’d myself be wrestling with death.’ In August 1503, Alexander VI and Cesare both fell ill. When Alexander died, his corpse – ‘its face changed to the colour of mulberry, covered with blue-black spots, nose swollen, mouth stretched by a double-sized tongue’ – was, according to the gleeful Burchard, ‘rolled up in a carpet and pummelled’ into a narrow coffin. Lucrezia had adored her father: the poet Pietro Bembo saw her after her father’s death ‘in that dark room, in your black gown, lying weeping’. And Cesare was too ill to prevent the enthronement of his deadliest enemy.
THE BIGGEST BALLS: TWO
