Iberia (71 page)

Isabel’s half brother, the infamous Enrique IV, ascended the
throne and debauched the Spanish court to an extent that made
him the worst king Spain ever had. Morals degenerated, sexual
abuses became open, and it is generally believed that the austerity
which characterized Isabel stemmed from her revulsion at her
brother’s behavior. She became personally involved when Enrique
discovered that in her he had a pawn of value and started those
tedious negotiations whereby he offered her in marriage to this
or that impossible French or German or Portugese royal
personage. At one point he proposed a most decrepit Spanish
nobleman and at another he conducted serious discussions over
a possible marriage to the hunchback who later became Richard
III of England, but Isabel shied away. It was degrading, to waste
one’s time cooped up with a near-mad mother and to be bandied
about by a degenerate half brother, but that was the way Isabel
passed her days in Arévalo.

By the time I picked her story up again at the little town of
Toro, perched on a cliff overlooking the Río Duero, which crosses
northern Spain to enter the Atlantic at Porto, her luck had
changed dramatically. She had taken matters into her own hands
and had found a husband for herself, the dynamic and gifted
Fernando de Aragón, two years younger than she but a handsome,
daring fellow who was to prove so adroit in manipulating Spanish
interests in Italy that Niccoló Machiavelli would use him as the
archetype of the cynical ruler in

The Prince
. It was a love match,
at least on Isabel’s part, but also a miraculous union of equals;
Fernando was probably the best man in Europe for Isabel to have
married and together they made a formidable team.

Never did Fernando look better, either to history or to his
young wife, than at Toro, for here by his gallantry he ensured her
crown. Her incompetent father, Juan II, had died. Her half
brother, King Enrique IV, had also died. Her full brother, who
might have inherited the throne, had died earlier; but this did not
leave Isabel next, because Enrique had left a daughter Juana, who
if she were legitimate would become queen. Juana was born in
wedlock, of that there was no question, but nobles who sought
to place Isabel on the throne pointed out that during Enrique’s
life he had been known openly as The Impotent, and a credible
rumor was started: ‘Juana is the daughter of the queen but not of
the king.’ Matters were complicated when the King of Portugal,
seeing a good chance to meddle in Spanish affairs and perhaps
win the throne for himself, announced his betrothal to Juana and
his intention of using the Portuguese army to put her on the
throne. This the nobles supporting Isabel could not permit and
war became inescapable. After much jockeying back and forth,
the two armies finally faced each other here at Toro in the year
1475.

I was fortunate in Toro in finding as guide—impromptu friend
might be the better word—an old man some five feet tall and
weighing about two hundred and twenty pounds. He was
remarkable both for his information and for his trousers, which
had to be ample to cover his girth but which also came nearly to
his chin. He was encased in wool and his fly was at least twenty
inches long. He was in love with Toro and its distinguished old
buildings but his field of specialization was the Battle of Toro. ‘It
determined the course of Spanish history,’ he said. ‘If Portugal
had won, no Isabel the Catholic. No Carlos Quinto. And Portugal
would have won except for two Spanish heroes. You ever hear of
Cardinal Mendoza of Toledo? Our warrior cardinal? His bravery
helped save the day. But our hero was Fernando. How lucky Isabel
was to have chosen such a man. What he did here at Toro will
always be remembered.’

What my roly-poly guide told me next was so improbable that
I did not believe him, convinced that he was repeating a legend
but later when I looked it up in histories I found that he had been
telling the truth. In 1475 Fernando made this proposal to the King
of Portugal: ‘Since our armies cannot seem to reach a conclusion,
let you and me duel in the old manner, the lady of the winner to
become Queen of Spain.’ At first the Portuguese agreed and plans
were made for what would have been the last time in history when
two sovereigns met in single combat to decide the inheritance of
their nations, but at the last moment the King of Portugal
withdrew, not surprisingly, since he was forty-three while
Fernando was only twenty-three. Later in 1476, when battle
between the armies could no longer be avoided, Cardinal
Mendoza’s firmness and Fernando’s fine generalship gave victory
to the Spaniards, and Juana, whom many modern historians
accept as the rightful heiress to the throne, was driven from Spain.
Isabel, by right of conquest, was Queen of Castilla, and as soon
as the Moors could be driven out of Granada, would be Queen
of Spain as well.

Standing on the cliff at Toro, looking down at the Duero below
me, I listened as my fat guide with the amazing pants said, ‘To
think that the history of an entire peninsula should have been
decided here…in a little town like this,’ but when I questioned
him on details, he had to admit that the battle hadn’t occurred
exactly at Toro. ‘Farther down the river…toward Portugal…and
if the truth were known, Queen Isabel wasn’t here during the
battle. She was back in Tordesillas, waiting, waiting. King
Fernando rode down that road over there to take her the news,
and when he reached her and assured her that she was to be queen,
she wept. It was a very good marriage, that one.’

I was much taken with Toro, for it was an excellent town, far
enough from the main road to receive few tourists yet so filled
with memories that those who did come could see shadows of
kings as they prepared for hand-to-hand combat. At dusk one
night I crossed the river to travel out to the scene of battle, and I
understood then how Fernando had utilized the river to
advantage, and when I turned back, there was Toro atop its
eroding red cliff, magnificent in outline against the dark sky of
evening, its turrets jagged, its crumbling walls still defiant. Next
morning I went on to Medina del Campo, coming in sight of this
once-great city not long after dawn.

I stopped on a slight rise to imagine what it must have been
like, in the sixteenth century, to be a merchant coming to Medina
del Campo from Flanders. The journey across France and the
Pyrenees had been difficult, but the fair at Medina was so
important that one dared not miss it, for here the commerce of
Europe was largely determined. From a hill like this, one would
have seen a dozen informal caravans converging on Medina:
Italians on horseback, Germans on foot, Frenchmen in a brotherly
union of merchants and churchmen, all on their way to the fair.
Off to the left, down from the upland plains of Castilla, there
would be herdsmen from Extremadura bringing cattle. As many
as fifty thousand traders converged on Medina each year in its
days of greatness.

But when I reached the city I could find no evidence of that
glory. No restaurants were open, no bars, but I did find a bridge
that crossed the Río Zapardiel, a stream I had often read about:
‘From Antwerp and London came the merchants to set up their
booths along the banks of the Zapardiel.’ I had imagined a broad,
flowing river. It was four feet wide, six inches deep and its banks
were lined with rubbish, but at one end of the bridge there was a
churro shop, and even though I knew I would be sick the rest of
the day, I entered.

‘Señor! You’re a norteamericano but you know what’s good,
eh?’ The speaker was a robust woman barely visible through clouds
of smoke coming from deep pots in which boiling oil was being
used to fry churros. The smell was overpowering but it did have
a certain enticing quality, as if to say, ‘You know damned well
churros are inedible, but don’t they smell good?’

At a chrome-plated machine the woman was cranking a handle
which extruded a flour paste about the diameter of a quarter, but
with fluted edges. This she cut off in ten-inch lengths, twisting
their ends together and plopping them into the crackling fat,
where they fried for a few minutes to emerge an appetizing brown.
She sprinkled them with a coarse sugar and set two before me.

‘Chocolate?’ I nodded, and into a small cup she poured a
chocolate thicker than most soups and as delicious as it was
aromatic.

Churros and chocolate! I suppose if one searched the
restaurants of the world one could not find a worse breakfast nor
one that tasted better. The churros were so greasy that I needed
three paper napkins per churro, but they tasted better than
doughnuts. The chocolate was completely indigestible, but much
better than coffee. And the great gobs of unrefined sugar were
chewy. Any nation that can eat churros and chocolate for breakfast
is not required to demonstrate its courage in other ways.

I remember Medina del Campo as fifty-percent churro
indigestion, fifty-percent frustration, for when the town was awake
I went into the plaza and began asking people, ‘Where is the old
palace in which Queen Isabel died?’

‘She died in the castle up there on the hill,’ they all said,
pointing to one of Spain’s better-preserved fortresses, and it was
appropriate to think that a girl who had lived so long in a similar
castle at Arévalo had died in this enormous pile of rock, but I
knew that this was only legend. Records proved that Isabel had
died in a small place somewhere inside the gates of Medina del
Campo and I wanted to see where.

‘Wait till the stores open,’ the policeman said, so I wandered
in the plaza and came upon something I had not expected, four
low pillars not more than two feet high, connected by heavy
chains, inside which stood two large ruined pillars and a plaque
which read:

DURING THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES, WHICH
MARKED THE APOGEE OF THE CLASSICAL FAIRS OF MEDINA DEL
CAMPO, AT THIS POINT IN THE PLAZA MAYOR THE
MONEYCHANGERS AND BANKERS OF THAT TIME INSTALLED THEIR
BOOTHS OPEN TO ALL THE WORLD. MEDINA WAS, DURING THESE
CENTURIES, COMMERCIALLY ECUMENICAL AND HERE THE LETTER
OF EXCHANGE WAS CRYSTALLIZED IN ITS DEFINITIVE FORM
.

More important than the cattle fair or the assembly of merchants
had been this yearly meeting in Medina of bankers from all over
Europe for the purpose of determining the relative values of
national currencies and the clearing of loans against one another.
For example, a merchant in Antwerp could promise a customer,
‘I will pay your banker in London three hundred pieces of gold
at the fair of Medina del Campo.’ Or a banker in Naples could
say, ‘Three hundred coins, their value to be determined by the
price of gold at Medina.’ Here also were developed, as the signs
said, the sophisticated instruments of international banking, for
just as the university at Salamanca had constituted a kind of
clearing house for ideas, so Medina had set standards for
commercial dealings. While I was in Medina a conference of
international bankers was being held in Madrid, but they did not
take a side trip to Medina, where their profession began, and I
thought that a pity.

When the stores opened, so did my confusion. ‘Isabel’s palace
was over there,’ I was told, but that was wrong. ‘It’s over there,’
another said, but that was wrong too. Finally a friend had the
good idea of inquiring at a bank, and by luck we hit the nephew
of Medina del Campo’s cronista that is, the town’s historian, poet,
bibliographer and publicist—and the young man said, ‘You won’t
believe what I’m going to show you, but it will be the palace in
which Isabel died.’

‘How can you be sure?’ I asked.

 

‘My uncle is the cronista. He knows everything.’ And he led us
to a crumbling building at one corner of the plaza, and no one
could have guessed that this had once been a palace fit for the
death of Europe’s noblest queen. Inside the creaking door a
temporary wooden booth had been erected for the sale of tickets
to a comic bullfight; ‘The Fireman Bullfighter! Estupendo! 75c!’
A fine old wooden stairway led to a second floor littered with all
kinds of filth, and the rooms which once had housed the queen
and her attendants were now barred, for a century ago the palace
had been converted into a jail. Men who had stolen sheep or
murdered tailors had spent their last days in the room which
Isabel had used for her dying. With the coming of indoor toilets
one closet had been redesigned, but it had degenerated into a
state of filth. And so it went through all this historic site. It was
ironic, I thought as I left the palace, that even the nearby church,
which Isabel had done so much to save, was the ugliest I was to
see in Spain, a true masterpiece of junk.

 

But her monument is not a broken-down palace in Medina del
Campo nor an ugly provincial church nearby. Spain is her
monument, united and Catholic, as she had determined it should
be. Her administration was the best the country would know, for
she kept little books in which she listed the names of all the
capable men she met, so that when a vacancy occurred in any
department she had an immediate replacement, who rarely proved
unworthy. Militarily, financially and spiritually she left Spain a
bulwark among nations, and I judge her to have been twice the
ruler that her grandson Carlos V was and also better than her
great-grandson Felipe II.

 

It was an Italian humanist, Pedro Mártir de Anglería, servant
at the Spanish court since 1487, who wrote in a private letter the
eulogy which most Spaniards accept as the final word on Isabel:

The pen falls from my hand and my strength fails through grief:
the world has lost its most precious ornament, and the loss should
be mourned not only by the Spaniards, whom she has so long led
along the road to glory, but by all the nations of Christendom,
because she was the mirror of all virtues, the refuge of the
innocent, and the scourge of the evil; I doubt that there has lived
in the world a heroine, either in ancient or in modern times, who
merits comparison with this peerless woman.