Queen Isabella, King Ferdinand, and La Beltraneja: Prelude to Empire
I genuinely believe that history is composed of a series of accidents. You can plan, but it just doesn’t work the way you expected. Who would’ve thought that the most powerful kingdom on earth (Disclaimer: for a few decades, and this is open to debate) would come from a union with borrowed expenses, and then fall into the hands of a foreign dynasty? Who was La Beltraneja, and how was she sacrificed in a medieval political game?
This is part one of a short story about the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Isabella and Ferdinand. The more interested readers can refer to these research references below (Elliott, 2002) (Whitehead, n.d.).
The Marriage
The marriage between the pair, Isabella and Ferdinand, was a bit dramatic. It was, like most royal marriages in medieval Europe, a political arrangement. However, the reasons as to how this marriage unfolds, to me, rival the best of dramas. A brief overview of the protagonists: Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon (See below for geographical references). Isabella, a determined and unswerving princess, was the heiress to the Castilian throne. Her marriage, as with most princesses, had been constantly offered as a political leverage to powerful nobles and kings around Europe, by the King of Castille, Henry IV. As for Ferdinand, the tall, intelligent, and energetic heir to the Crown of Aragon, is inheriting a declining Mediterranean kingdom still recovering from a violent civil war.
The prelude to their marriage had been incredible. The King of Castille, who was also in reality Isabella’s half-brother, had been threatening her with arrest in the months before her marriage. For Ferdinand, who is a year younger than his bride, his father’s kingdom is now being threatened by both internal and external forces: the Catalan Civil War has weakened royal authority from the inside, and a probable French Invasion meant that the Crown was in serious need of allies — the needs of Isabella and Ferdinand for foreign alliance aligned at once. Whether there is love between the pair, seemed like a naïve question then.
On the rosy morning of 19th October 1469, the pair was married at a private residence. They had only met each other four days ago and travelled to the site in somewhat suspicious circumstances: Isabella was fleeing a possible house arrest from her brother, and Ferdinand had travelled as a servant to avoid unwanted Castilian attention. Ferdinand’s father, John II of Aragon, and the Archbishop of Toledo witnessed the event. I say “witness” with a significant sarcastic overtone, because it was exactly these two people that orchestrated the whole event. For the Aragonese, this marriage had been crucial to reviving a country that had since fallen into the backwaters of Europe.
What’s more, Isabella and Ferdinand were not supposed to get married in the first place: they were second cousins to each other. At the time, to marry within the family tree requires the Pope’s Consent, which is interesting from our perspective now, as if Catholicism makes incest alright. Nonetheless, to proceed with the marriage, John II and the Archbishop forged Pope Pius II’s consent (I.e. A Papal Bull) to consent to the marriage, who died four months ago.
History would later go on and shown that, Isabella and Ferdinand had indeed found the other half of themselves that Zeus had split, not for a magnetism between the souls, but through such a stochastic political alliance.
La Beltraneja
Naturally, there was upheaval from the Castilian court at the news of this marriage. The King had been particularly offended at this decision, despising how he was forced his hand. We now know little about how the King reacted personally to this message, but soon, and rather surprisingly, he declared a girl called Juana (Or, Joanna) la Beltraneja, as the heir to the Castilian dynasty.
Often called la Beltraneja by contemporaries, the girl had never really been taken as a serious contender for the throne. She had been rumoured by men and women around her as an illegitimate daughter of the King, with some saying that she didn’t even bear the King’s blood, and was instead the product of the Queen’s affair with another noble, Beltran de la Cueva. Her nickname in history, La Beltraneja, had been a contemptuous title thrown around by later chroniclers to discredit her legitimacy.
Powerful Kings and noble families rallied around La Beltraneja for the Castilian throne. Afonso V of Portugal, also known as Afonso of Africa for his North African invasions, had used La Beltraneja as a pretext for war with Isabella and Ferdinand. The King of Castille, also called Henry the Impotent, facilitated Afonso V’s intervention by promising the marriage of La Beltraneja to Afonso V of Portugal. Much less is known about how Juana felt personally about this arrangement. We only know that this was the third time that La Beltraneja had been offered as a political utility by her reputed father. 1464 was the first, with Infante Afonso of Castille; and 1472 the second, with the Duke of Guienne, brother to the King of France.
Henry the Impotent died on the 11th of December 1474. What followed was a violent civil war between the two rival heiresses staking their claim to crown. However, recent studies suggest that the struggle between Isabella and La Beltraneja had been the struggle between Isabella and Ferdinand, against Afonso V of Portugal. Ferdinand, with his characteristic charisma and energy, devoted all his attention to helping Isabella win the war. He negotiated with local magnates, arranged Aragonese support, and imported better Aragonese organizational strategies to help improve Isabella’s army. Afonso V, on the other hand, provided military support to the few nobles and towns supporting Juana.
The Conclusion
On a grey afternoon of March 1st, 1476, Isabella and Afonso’s army stood facing each other on the banks of the Duero River. Ferdinand led Isabella’s army against Afonso’s, and La Beltraneja stood not far from her husband, in the battlements of the town itself. Two hours later, Afonso V and his queen fled the banks, and Ferdinand emerged victorious. In two hours, Isabella gained control of Spain. Afonso’s reputation had been badly damaged from the war, and Ferdinand’s relentless campaign had already garnered much support from the war-weary Castilians. At the same time, the father of Ferdinand, John II of Aragon, passed away, leaving Ferdinand to inherit the Aragonese estates and become joint rulers of Castile-Aragon with Isabella.
To stamp out any lingering flames of resistance, Isabella gave La Beltraneja two choices difficult choices: to become a nun or to marry her one-year-old son when he comes of age. Perhaps dulled by the war, or more likely to avoid humiliation, she chose the nunnery, in which she remained for another fifty years. It’s hard to say whether she would’ve liked to be queen at the start when first addressed as the heiress of Castile by Henry VI in 1475. However, at the end of the war, she most definitely believed in the cause and believed that she was the heir to the throne. She would address herself in personal letters as “I, the Queen” throughout the remainder of her life, until her death.
The Crown of Aragon and the Crown of Castile have now finally been joined between Ferdinand and Isabella, whom the Pope praised as the “Catholic Monarchs” for their religious devotion. Whether La Beltraneja was the legitimate heir would never be known, for history had been written by the victors. Isabella and Ferdinand, throughout their marriage, grew a mutual respect and overcame great challenges together as King and Queen. They achieved great victories and economic reforms, that laid the groundwork for the Spanish Empire. But, alas, the future could not be planned by two individuals. Perhaps in a similar fashion to their parents, it was Isabella and Ferdinand’s arranged marriages for their children that gave the unified Spain and all her empire to a foreign dynasty, the Habsburgs.
Reference List:
Elliott, J.H. (2002). Imperial Spain 1469–1716. Penguin Books.
Whitehead, M. (n.d.). LibGuides: LALIS 431 Imperial Spain: Age of Conflict: Primary Sources. [online] libguides.richmond.edu. Available at: https://libguides.richmond.edu/c.php?g=42281&p=267430 [Accessed 27 Jul. 2024].
