Read Online 1492: The Year Our World Began by Felipe Fernández-Armesto - Free Book Online Page A

husband’s mistresses out of the court. “She loved after such a fashion,” said one of the court humanists, “so solicitous and vigilant in jealousy, that if she felt that he looked on any lady of the court with a look that evinced desire, she would very discreetly find ways and means to dismiss that person from the household.” 18 Her object in persecuting her husband’s floozies was, however, according to the same source, her own “honor and advantage” rather than amorous satisfaction. A document often cited as evidence of her affection for her husband is the letter she wrote to her confessor describing Ferdinand’s escape from an assassination attempt in Barcelona in December 1492, but the incident reveals feelings deeper, in Isabella, than love. A knife-wielding maniac, “long crazy and out of his mind,” as an eyewitness observed, took advantage of one of the regular Friday audiences, at which petitioners were allowed to confront the monarch in person. On the face of it, the sentiments the queen declared at the time seemed admirably, lovingly selfless. “The wound was so big,” she bleated,
    so Dr. Guadalupe says, for I hadn’t the heart to behold it—so wide and so deep that four fingers’ lengths would not equal its depth and its width was a thing of which my heart trembles to tell…. and it was one of the griefs I felt to see the king suffer what I deserved, without deserving the sacrifice he made, it seemed, for me—it quite destroyed me.
    Yet for all her expressions of tenderness for her spouse, it was evidently for herself that Isabella most grieved and feared. She made her sorrow seem worse than her husband’s affliction. A professional court flatterer, Alonso Ortiz, told her that her suffering “seemed greater than the king’s.” She congratulated herself on persuading the would-be assassin to confess, thereby saving his soul. And she took up most of her letter to her confessor with reflections on her own unpreparedness fordeath. Ferdinand’s plight convinced her “that monarchs may die from any sudden disaster, the same as other men, and it is reason enough to be ready always to die well.” She went on to ask her confessor to prepare a handy list of all her sins, including especially the vows she had broken in the pursuit of power. 19
    The monarchs’ affection for each other may have become a fact, but it began as an affectation. The language of love the king and queen exchanged in public had little to do with real sentiments and much to do with the courtly ethos that made the monarchs’ style of government seem far removed from modernity: the cult of chivalry, which was probably the nearest they got to an ideology. Isabella’s mental image of heaven is suggestive. She saw it as a sort of royal court, staffed by paragons of knightly virtue. Chivalry could not, perhaps, make men good, as it was supposed to do. It could, however, win wars. Granada fell, said the Venetian ambassador, in “a beautiful war…. There was not a lord present who was not enamored of some lady,” who “often handed warriors their weapons…with a request that they show their love by their deeds.” The queen of Castile died uttering prayers to the archangel Michael as “prince of the chivalry of angels.” 20
    To see how important chivalry was, the best measure is the frequency and intensity of jousting. (The joust was chivalry’s great rite—a sport of unsurpassed nobility, which afforded many opportunities for political jobbery.) In April 1475, in the midst of war with Portugal, the monarchs held a tourney at Valladolid that the local chronicle acclaimed as “the most magnificent that had ever been seen, men said, for fifty years and more.” The host and master of the joust, the Duke of Alba, exhibited the value of valor. He “fell from his horse on his way to risk himself at the tilt and was rendered dumb, unable to speak, and he hurt his head, and they bled him. Yet he still came out armed and