CHAPTER 3: Difficult Beginnings: Heiresses with Crowned Husbands, 1300

At the opposite extreme, between 1362 and 1430 three women, all over the age of thirty, successfully governed important European kingdoms for at least fifteen years without any male associate—a novelty in Latin Christendom. After 1450 joint rule reemerged as the dominant form of female sovereignty in Europe, with husbands of heiresses again playing prominent rules—a model incarnated in Spain by the best-known and most successful late medieval “power couple,” Isabel and Ferdinand.

Both female inheritance and female exclusion acquired special importance after Europe's largest hereditary monarchy annexed its smallest monarchy, and the same princess was involved in both developments. Her experiences offer dramatic evidence that the rights of heiresses were more easily accepted in smaller and weaker monarchies because in 1328 a woman who had just been excluded for the third time from her father's inheritance in France was invited to rule her father's (and grandmother's) small kingdom of Navarre, which thus became separated from the French crown to which it had been joined for fifty-four years.

Jeanne I had become heiress to Navarre when she was three years old. Her first grandchild, a girl, was barely four when her father died in 1316. When a posthumous brother, whom French genealogies call Jean I, died after a few days, Capetian France “fell to the distaff” for the first time. However, royal succession followed different trajectories in very large and very small kingdoms. After 1274 Navarre had been governed by regents until its heiress married. In France the obvious regents in 1316 were her father's two younger brothers. The older one bypassed his young niece and claimed the throne himself, staging a hastily organized coronation ceremony at Rheims.

Navarrese notables accepted this fait accompli and sent a delegation to the French court to offer homage. The new king promised in Paris to uphold Navarre's traditional privileges, or fueros, rights about which Navarrese remain extremely prickly seven centuries later. When Philip V died after a six-year reign, he left daughters but no sons. Following recent precedent, his younger brother Charles succeeded him and informed his Navarrese subjects that they could perform homage when he visited Toulouse, the seat of royal administration in southern France.4 Navarrese sources insist that this king never swore to uphold their fueros, and they gave him a strikingly different nickname: in France he is Charles the Handsome (Charles le Bel), while in Navarre he is Charles the Bald (Carlos el Calvo).

History proceeded to repeat itself: this king also died after a six-year reign also leaving a daughter but no sons. At this point (1328) the succession issue acquired special urgency in both kingdoms. Its resolution in France, where the Capetian male line had finally ended, proved extremely significant in European history. France's political nation rejected a claim from England's crown prince (who, like France's two previous kings, was a descendant of Philip IV, but on his mother's side) and provoked what became the Hundred Years’ War with England. Although the term would not appear until 1358, the fully developed Salic law had become operative in Europe's largest and most prestigious hereditary kingdom: henceforth only the strictest possible direct descent through an unbroken male line provided a legitimate claim to its throne.⁵

However, when describing the momentous choice of a new French king in 1328, both French and English historians tend to overlook its consequences for the long-standing union of the French and Navarrese crowns. While French political notables reinforced their taboo against female succession, those in Navarre vigorously asserted a woman's hereditary right to their throne. They had an heiress, one directly descended from another heiress two generations earlier, who was now sixteen years old. She was also legally an adult because, like most other princesses in the later Middle Ages, she was already married—to a French prince, Philippe of Evreux, with only a remote claim to the French throne.

When news of the uprising and the offer reached them in northern France, the heiress and her husband rapidly reached an agreement with the new French king in July 1328. After she dropped her claims, through her grandmother, to another French province, he permitted them to accept the Navarrese throne. Each spouse quickly accredited three representatives; her husband (who had received no official invitation) already entitled himself king of Navarre. A month later, from Avignon, the pope, possibly unaware of the actual terms of the proposals, offered his congratulations to her husband, but not to his wife, as Navarre's new monarch.⁷

As these representatives hurried south to arrange the official coronation they encountered Navarre's emissaries just north of the major pass across the Pyrenees headed in the opposite direction. Preliminary discussions were followed by hard bargaining with Navarre's interim regents south of the summit at Roncesvalles. His chief agent reported to the heiress's husband that the Navarrese laid down four preconditions:

Afterward, our Lady (Madame) is raised [on a shield] and throws money [to spectators], because she is the heiress [dame naturele] and no one can be raised except an authentic heir [seigneur naturel].

Within six weeks, in midwinter, the new royal couple crossed the Pyrenees to Pamplona. Their coronation oaths, in local dialect, remain in Pamplona's archive. Navarre's new sovereign then officially handed her kingdom to her husband during his lifetime, together with a magnificent gift of one hundred thousand livres tournois. Two months later they concluded an agreement about the succession, stipulating that if her husband survived her and remarried he ceased to become the guardian of their children.⁹

In important respects Navarre's situation changed very little after 1328. Its newly restored heiress was a French princess who never mastered Navarre's language. For the next fifty years French officials continued to represent its usually absent monarchs. Until 1375 all eight chancellors were French; none of them even visited Navarre until 1364. The first Navarrese-born treasurer was appointed in 1363. Even when residing there for two years after their coronation the royal couple never became accustomed to their distant little kingdom; their presence always seemed provisional, and they spent nothing on their Navarrese residences. Apart from a second visit in 1336–37 to conduct official business, they lived at her husband's seat in Normandy or at the French court.¹⁰

Thus functioned what I propose to call the Navarrese solution to female inheritance. It became the dominant form among European monarchies confronting this issue in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and was followed in Navarre itself on every subsequent occasion (1425, 1483, and 1555) when a woman inherited its crown. A young heiress to a small kingdom, usually one struggling to maintain (or, as in the case of Navarre in 1328, to recover) its autonomy, was married as quickly as possible to a suitable prince in hopes of producing a male heir. Upon her predecessor's death, she and her husband were jointly invested with sovereign powers. Afterward, he took primary responsibility for governing his wife's kingdom, particularly its military affairs. Such political arrangements seemed obvious to contemporaries. As her Hungarian mother-in-law argued in the mid-1340s to a much more important royal heiress, Joanna I of Naples, “Didn't she agree that for the good of the kingdom as well as for her own peace of mind, it would be preferable that her husband assist her in sharing the burden of power? … There exist issues that their subjects would rather see a man tackle than a woman, and if enemies had to be repulsed, this would be a matter for the husband more than the wife…. All that would be needed would be to set limits that he should not infringe upon.”¹²

From the standpoint of female sovereignty this remarkable royal testament had equally remarkable consequences. Before this heiress died almost forty years later, she had had four marriages (a record among these thirty female monarchs) but left no surviving children. Her earlier marriages show similarities to Navarrese-style joint rule. Her first husband's representatives negotiated a joint coronation which never took place. Her second husband enjoyed an official coronation and used it to exclude her from exercising significant political authority until his death, making Joanna a Navarrese-pattern female monarch for ten years. Afterward, contemporaries agree that during her final two marriages she governed her large inheritance by herself for almost twenty years. Her posthumous fame is as uneven as her personal authority. Joanna acquired a negative reputation in her Neapolitan capital, while Provence, where she lived for some years, remembers her as bello reino Jano, “good Queen Jeanne.” Contemporaries provide much evidence about her, including generally favorable but occasionally very negative opinions from such well-known people as Giovanni Boccaccio, Petrarch, and St. Bridget of Sweden.

By mid-1345 the papacy had decided that Joanna's seventeen-year-old husband should play a real role in Neapolitan government. A legate was sent to Naples with a bull empowering him to perform a double coronation in which, as at Pamplona in 1329, husband and wife would be anointed together as corulers. But even at this juncture, with their child soon to be born, Andrew still possessed no specific powers. Instead, he had to sign a document stating that he could not inherit if his wife died without surviving children, and the Neapolitan clergy and nobility swore a public oath that if Joanna died they would not declare him king.

About this time, Boccaccio returned to Naples, a city he loved, carrying an almost completed manuscript with a novel twist on Plutarch: a collection of lives of illustrious women. Boccaccio dedicated it to another noblewoman, while telling her that he originally intended it for Joanna, and added a final essay, the only one about a living woman, extolling the queen of Sicily and Jerusalem. It begins by describing her, correctly, as “more renowned than any other woman of our time for lineage, power and character” and as governing “a mighty realm of the sort not usually ruled by women.” Boccaccio avoided naming any of her husbands and ended by calling her “a singular glory of Italy … never seen previously in any nation.” Although composed very early in her long personal reign, it remains her most durable monument, surviving in numerous manuscripts and being reprinted many times during the Renaissance.¹⁶

Joanna avoided any suggestion of a coronation for her third husband. He soon began quarrelling incessantly with both the Neapolitan baronage and his wife, who avoided giving him any important military responsibilities. After experiencing a miscarriage in 1365, Joanna encouraged him to go abroad to claim his own throne. Although the range of documentation for her personal reign does not equal that for Navarre, there is every reason to believe she now ruled as autonomously as her grandfather had; surviving records indicate that she governed her French possessions effectively. Much evidence shows that throughout her personal reign she also collaborated loyally with her pontifical suzerains until the schism erupted in 1378. Joanna even provided them military aid, sending ten ships in 1367 to escort the pope back to Italy (the other Italian naval powers combined sent only thirteen). The following year Joanna became the first woman ever awarded the Golden Rose, which the papacy usually reserved for crusading knights.

As Elizabeth Casteen has pointed out, Joanna's change of papal obedience at the beginning of the Great Schism in 1378 proved disastrous: it not only destroyed her carefully reconstructed reputation for piety, but also led directly to her deposition, imprisonment, and death. She shifted her allegiance to Avignon after the new Roman pope, who knew Naples well, reportedly told her ambassadors that her kingdom “had been poorly led and governed for a long time by a woman, and he wanted to give it a man to lead and govern … and wanted the queen to enter a religious order of her choice.”18 The succession to Joanna's large possessions soon became linked with the schism. After her three children all died young, she had adopted the orphaned son of a first cousin as her heir. After repudiating the Roman pope for his Avignon rival, she replaced him with a French prince. In June 1381 Joanna legally transformed her new heir into her biological son and named him coruler throughout her territories. But her original heir, already crowned at Rome exactly three days earlier by the rival pope, invaded Joanna's kingdom. Outmaneuvering her fourth husband, he soon captured both of them at Naples and forced her to abdicate before her new heir could intervene. By the time his French rival invaded Italy, the original heir had moved Joanna to a remote fortress; when his enemy approached the kingdom, he had the old queen killed. Joanna's body was taken back to Naples and exhibited at the foot of the splendid mausoleum she had built for her grandfather.

As the first autonomous female sovereign to rule a large European state for a long period, Joanna I set many precedents. She had more marriages than any other female monarch in European history. She was Europe's first heiress to break tradition by subordinating her last two husbands, whose names are omitted on her coins or official documents. Joanna also set some dubious precedents. She was the first modern heiress (but not the last) to be accused of murdering her husband. She became the first female monarch to be deposed and the only one to be murdered afterwards—both by her adopted heir. Her biography inspired a theatrical performance at Marie Antoinette's court in the 1780s, but it seems rich enough to furnish sufficient plots for several operas, films, or television series.¹⁹

Margaret's determination to hold power became evident in 1386 after the sudden death of her seventeen-year-old son deprived her of any legal claim to govern either Denmark or Norway. Her father's original heir, her Mecklenburg nephew, immediately claimed the Danish crown. However, Denmark's old drost needed exactly one week to arrange Margaret's election by various notables as “Almighty lady and husband and guardian for the whole kingdom of Denmark.” This unprecedented document constituted sovereignty in everything but name; it made her a de jure regent for an indefinite period, “until the day when she and we agree to elect and appoint a king, with her and our advice.” Four provincial assemblies soon confirmed this remarkable arrangement. This tactic was then imitated in Norway, which, unlike Denmark, was a hereditary kingdom. The archbishop of Norway, whose name headed the list of notables at the Danish meeting, soon summoned his kingdom's royal council. Overlooking the rules of succession which favored the king of Sweden, they named Margaret “Mighty Lady and Righteous Husband of Norway … in all the days of her life.”²¹

Now ruler of two kingdoms, she intrigued to dethrone another Mecklenburg enemy from the Swedish throne, but she also needed to name a successor. For that purpose she chose a six-year-old grandson of her older sister, a Pomeranian princeling named Bugislav. His father brought him to Denmark, where Margaret adopted him and renamed him Erik. Six months later her troops defeated the Swedish king, capturing him and his son. Margaret kept the king imprisoned for almost six years. After this success, by 1391 she was using a privy seal with all three Scandinavian crowns. Nevertheless she still needed prolonged negotiations with the Hanseatic League before gaining control of Stockholm. The road finally lay open to the Union of Kalmar, which in 1397 unified the three Scandinavian crowns for a second and last time.

Joanna II, a childless widow, was the oldest woman who ever acquired a European kingdom when she inherited Naples from her brother. Although she remained on her throne for twenty years, her reign ranks among the most obscure of any late medieval woman sovereign. Unlike that of Joanna I, her government left no documentary evidence outside Italy to compensate for the destruction of the Neapolitan archives in 1943. Joanna II, like her better-known predecessor, collaborated successfully with the papacy and also built a mausoleum for the man who had made her his heir. But she also repeated some of her predecessor's political mistakes in selecting husbands and adopted heirs.²³

Joanna II's worst political error was her remarriage to a French nobleman, Jacques de Bourbon, in 1415. Although their prenuptial contract, like Joanna I's final marriage, refused him royal authority, he arrived with a military entourage, claimed royal rank, and soon made her a virtual prisoner. By 1416 she had reversed the situation through a mixture of cunning and bribery, fomenting a rising by local barons that liberated her and imprisoned him instead. By winter 1418 the Roman pope officially acknowledged Joanna II's sovereignty, and his legate performed her coronation in January 1419. A few months later her husband escaped from captivity and soon returned to France, where he eventually retired to a monastery.

For fifteen years Joanna II governed her kingdom alone. Like Joanna I and Margaret of Scandinavia, she employed ministers from nonaristocratic backgrounds, but the succession question also bedeviled her reign. Joanna II revoked her first adopted heir in 1423 but subsequently revoked her new heir in 1433 for her original choice before changing her mind again two months later. Joanna II's death in 1435 provoked sixty years of sporadic aggression from her adopted French successor and his heirs, while her original Aragonese heir and his descendants governed her kingdom (ironically, one of them left his wife in charge of his own kingdom for over twenty years). Joanna II also left the largest surviving statue of any early European female monarch. It sits alongside one of her brother in the Neapolitan chapel which she endowed, near a smaller monument (with an epitaph by Lorenzo Valla) to the only notable murder victim of her reign: her long-serving principal minister, Ser Gianni Carraciolo.

Four Young Royal Heiresses

Between 1377 and 1384 four young heiresses, all between the ages of ten and sixteen, claimed thrones in widely dispersed kingdoms: Sicily, Hungary, Portugal, and Poland.24 Relatively little is known about them; for example, it is unclear when Portugal's heiress died, although her place of burial is known.²⁵ None of their final testaments survives, if indeed they bothered to make any, and no published documentary base as rich as that from Navarre survives in any of their kingdoms. Nevertheless, all four satisfy both fundamental criteria for identifying authentic female sovereigns: each woman left behind a handful of coins with her name followed by “D.G. Reg.” and a few original signed documents.

These four contemporaneous heiresses have some interesting distinctions. Two full sisters acquired separate royal thrones in Hungary and Poland, a unique occurrence in European history, and each promptly made suitably impressive royal seals. Three girls inherited before the age of twelve; in Portugal and Hungary, their widowed mothers closely supervised their actions and arranged their marriages. All four heiresses were married to men of princely rank, one in Poland exactly at the canonical minimum age of twelve and another in Portugal even earlier. All four husbands carried out the ordinary business of government in their kingdoms; in other words, by the end of the fourteenth century the Navarrese solution of 1328 had already been repeated elsewhere four times (or five, counting Joanna I's second marriage).

However, this solution failed everywhere except in Navarre. Despite their early marriages, none of these four heiresses produced a surviving heir to her kingdom. One, whose husband already had a son by a previous marriage, remained childless; the others had only one child each, and all three (like Joanna I's three children) died in infancy. The childless heiress had already been deposed five years before her husband's death; the husbands of the other three outlived them. All three men had enjoyed official coronations in their wife's capital and therefore continued to rule her kingdom after her death as legitimate sovereigns. Unsurprisingly, all three widowers promptly remarried, but only one eventually founded a new dynasty, an accomplishment which took him twenty-five years and required three more wives.

These were indeed difficult times for royal heiresses. If they died young and childless after their husbands had received joint power, they risked being virtually erased from their kingdom's history—except, perhaps, for numismatists.26 Two were deposed in the same year (1385) in widely separated kingdoms, Hungary and Portugal; one later recovered her throne. The papacy's Great Schism, which had undermined Joanna I's rule at Naples, further complicated their situation. One heiress, whose small kingdom backed the Roman pope, was held hostage for fourteen years by a larger kingdom, whose rulers backed his Avignon rival. On the other hand, the one heiress who lined up early and consistently behind the Roman pope achieved a unique distinction among Europe's female monarchs: six centuries after her death, Jadwiga of Poland has finally become a saint.

In 1377 Maria of Sicily inherited a monarchy which recognized papal suzerainty and maintained a fragile autonomy between two larger kingdoms, Naples to the north and Aragon to the west; her father gave Malta to his illegitimate son and made him heir to Sicily if his unmarried daughter died childless. Her uncle, the Aragonese king, vainly protested to the pope that women should not inherit; then he kidnapped Maria. After fourteen years of closely supervised captivity outside Sicily, the next Aragonese king used a dispensation from the antipope at Avignon to marry her to his nephew, who was barely half her age. When Maria returned for a joint coronation with her husband, she was “exhibited as a powerful fetish, an object or symbol of sovereignty, lost some time ago and recently recovered.” Only four surviving documents bear her signature.27

Like her Sicilian counterpart, Beatriz of Portugal was an unfortunate political pawn. Her father, after losing several wars against Castile, was compelled on his deathbed to betroth her to the son of his hated enemy. However, the Castilian king suddenly became a widower and decided to marry Portugal's underage heiress himself. The decision soon proved to be a serious political mistake. He lost control of his child-wife's kingdom when rebels supported an illegitimate prince who won a dramatic victory in 1385. Because the victor founded a new dynasty, Portugal's unlucky heiress has been expunged from its official record, which still describes the two years separating her father's death from her bastard uncle's coronation as an interregnum.²⁸

Europe's next heiress, Maria, was the older daughter of Louis the Great, king of Hungary and Poland. Her luck was little better: she became the second female monarch to be deposed by the same Angevin prince who had removed Joanna I of Naples in 1381. Within a week of Louis's death in 1382, his ambitious widow staged a solemn coronation making the twelve-year-old Maria king (rex) of Hungary. This act not only overturned her husband's intentions (Maria supposedly inherited Poland), but it also bypassed a German fiancé whom her mother disliked. For a few years the dowager governed Hungary; but disaster struck when her autonomous Croatian cousin invited Joanna I's assassin to add the Angevin heritage in central Europe to his Mediterranean possessions.

Advancing rapidly, the invader met little resistance. In late 1385 he was crowned as Hungary's new king, while its young heiress made a humiliating renunciation and her mother stood by helplessly. But within two months the dowager had organized a conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of the usurper. Maria and her mother then moved south to Croatia, where both were soon imprisoned. In early 1387 her captors murdered the dowager regent. Maria's original fiancé finally reached Hungary and became the third person crowned as its king within five years. A few months later she was finally liberated with help from Venice. Their subsequent marriage and joint reign until her death in 1395 seem anticlimactic.

The destiny of her younger sister Hedwig (Jadwiga in Polish), separated from her mother and pushed into her father's other kingdom, took a totally unpredictable turn. One must penetrate very thick clouds of incense concealing a thin layer of surviving documents in order to grasp events in Poland before and after Jadwiga's coronation as its king in October 1384. She was obviously manipulated by Polish magnates, who prevented her from marrying the Habsburg prince with whom she had been raised. Instead, they promised her to their powerful non-Christian neighbor, the grand duke of Lithuania. In exchange for accepting Catholic baptism and marrying Poland's official monarch, he would be crowned king of Poland. And so it happened. The thirty-six-year-old Jagiello was already unanimously accepted as king and lord of Poland even before being baptized at Cracow, the kingdom's capital, taking a new Christian name, and marrying Poland's other “king” three days later, on her twelfth birthday. His coronation, which required additional negotiations, followed five weeks later.

Understandably, objections were raised: the Habsburgs opposed the wedding, and the Teutonic Knights opposed the conversion. In 1386 and 1388 two papal legates investigated, but both found the marriage to be canonically legitimate and the conversion authentic. In order to reduce their dependency on Poland's magnates, this oddly assorted royal couple, though unable to speak a common language, quickly established a working political relationship. With Jadwiga's mother and sister imprisoned in Croatia, Poland's new king sent his young wife off to claim a disputed province from Hungary; she accomplished this successfully while he began implementing the conversion of Lithuania. A few months later she reminded Polish officials that Jagiello was the kingdom's “natural lord.” Poland's queen remained active in Hungarian affairs; after the death of her sister Maria, Jadwiga added “heiress of Hungary” to her official titles.29

Jadwiga took great interest in promoting Latin Catholicism in her husband's territories, which were populated mainly by Orthodox Christians. In 1398 she endowed a college for Lithuanian theology students at the University of Prague. When she died a year later (between 1126 and 1853 she was Europe's only female monarch to die from complications following childbirth), her jewelry was sold to help reestablish a university in Cracow that still bears her husband's name. Twenty years later, churchmen who owed their careers to her began campaigning for her beatification.30 Her sainthood is unquestionable; but the extent of her political agency in Poland seems much less than that of her paternal grandmother, who governed this kingdom for many years with minimal intervention from her son. From a political perspective, St. Jadwiga was simply the least ineffective of these late fourteenth-century Navarrese-style heiresses.

Navarre Unravels

Although the Navarrese solution to female inheritance generally worked well in the small kingdom that had originally developed it, one of Europe's most energetic and capable fifteenth-century heiresses, Blanca of Navarre, became involuntarily responsible for undermining its long-term autonomy. Her first husband, Martin the Younger of Aragon (who had acquired the kingdom of Sicily by outliving his first wife), died childless in 1409 and bequeathed Sicily to his father, who then appointed his son's widow to govern this nominally autonomous kingdom. Despite having no hereditary ties, Blanca did so successfully for five years before her Aragonese in-laws repatriated her. (Aragon's fifteenth-century kings were unusually comfortable with female surrogates; as Theresa Earenfight has recently demonstrated, a Castilian wife administered Aragon for her husband for twenty-one consecutive years after he had inherited the kingdom of Naples from Joanna II.) Blanca unexpectedly became the heiress to Navarre in 1420 and, now a thirty-four-year-old childless widow, married the twenty-two-year-old Aragonese prince who had followed her as Sicily's viceroy. Their marriage produced a son and two daughters before Blanca's father died five years later. Navarre's heiress and her husband (not a crown prince) later held an elaborate joint coronation at Pamplona in 1429.³¹

Blanca had previously governed Sicily, and her young husband was preoccupied with the far larger kingdom of Castile, so she ordinarily managed most governmental business in Navarre. Until Blanca became chronically ill after 1437, almost three-fourths of Navarre's state documents were issued in her name and usually bore her signature. Afterward, her son, Carlos (born in 1421), became increasingly involved in governing Navarre (see table 3.1).

Table 3.1. Government under Blanca of Navarre, 1426–40
Year	Joint names	Queen only	King only	Crown Prince


1426	29	177	7
1427	48	134	0
1428	17	131	1
1429	37	235	19
1430	42	355	29
1431	33	274	0
1432	123	121	4
1433	60	211	11
1434	21	177	7
1435	6	227	9
1436	27	177	5	1
1437	13	128	16	3
1438	12	57	73	22*
1439	18	19	35	78
1440	15	44	7	168

* also 5 signed jointly by king and crown prince Source: Florencio Idoate, ed., Archivo General de Navarra: Catálogo de Comptos

During Blanca's lifetime all three of her children had been sworn as potential heirs by Navarre's representative assembly with their order of succession confirmed, and all three had been married off, the crown prince to a German bride. Despite such precautions, one unforeseeable circumstance caused the Navarrese solution to unravel after Blanca's death. All three of her children would eventually claim her throne, but none ever enjoyed official recognition because of their father's exceptionally long survival. Juan I of Navarre lived until the age of eighty-two; after making a second marriage that produced his famous son Fernando the Catholic, he later inherited his father's kingdom, becoming Juan II of Aragon. Every key document in the gradual erosion of Navarrese autonomy, from the prenuptial agreement of 1420 to the testaments of all three children, is still extant. They outline what could and did go wrong when a formally crowned “dowager king” outlived a royal heiress by thirty-eight years but refused to let any of their adult children rule her kingdom. In this political tragedy, the most important document was Blanca's testament, long and “barely legible in places,” as its leading expert acknowledges.32 It confronted an unprecedented situation: she was Europe's only royal heiress who was survived both by a crowned husband and an adult son already accustomed to exercising authority, and she bequeathed her jeweled crown to a son who never wore it. The political abilities of all parties involved make Blanca's testament and its subsequent manipulations exceptionally important in the history of late medieval joint monarchy.

After King Juan remarried the daughter of a Castilian grandee in 1443, relations between father and son deteriorated rapidly. Within a decade, a very small kingdom had two parallel administrations. The father imprisoned his son for two years; the prince then fought an unsuccessful civil war, infuriating his father by minting his own coins as they traded mutual accusations of falsifying Blanca's testament. Juan summoned Navarre's Estates and formally disinherited both his son and his older daughter “as if dead of natural causes,” considering them “erased [suprimidos] from the royal House of Navarre.” The prince fled abroad, spent much time imprisoned, and died in exile. His older sister died shortly afterward while imprisoned by her younger sister and her husband, whom king Juan named as governors of Navarre. The younger daughter, now widowed, outlasted her octogenarian father by only a few weeks in 1479. This fifty-two-year-old heiress, the oldest in European history, lived just long enough to make a will bequeathing Navarre, still split between two warring clans, to her grandson, advising him to avoid Aragon and rely on French support to maintain its independence.³³

Four years later, what remained of a very small kingdom acquired a very young heiress, Catherine of Foix. Alvaro Adot has demonstrated how Navarre—now joined to the independent principality of Béarn across the Pyrenees, which she also inherited from her father—experienced a brief renaissance as a viable trans-Pyrenean state under Catherine and her French husband, Jean II d'Albret. Their marriage proved both biologically and politically fruitful. To an even greater degree than their better-known Castilian contemporaries Ferdinand and Isabel, theirs was truly a joint government: almost 80 percent of the 434 documents issued for Navarre between their joint coronation in 1494 and their expulsion in 1512 bore both their names. Catherine's official testament, drawn up at Pamplona in 1506, resembles that of her fourteenth-century predecessor Jeanne II in its generous provisions for her “husband and good companion.” Its primary clauses awarded him fifty thousand gold florins “for good marital love” plus one-fourth of Navarre's revenues even after their heirs occupied the throne—unless he remarried, in which case his paternal rights and revenues would “cease immediately.”34

Catherine's and Jean's downfall came suddenly and unexpectedly. In 1512 their overmighty neighbor Fernando the Catholic, son of Juan II of Aragon (Juan I of Navarre) by his second wife, invaded their kingdom, conquered it, and annexed it to Castile. Navarre's ruling dynasty lamented his “completely unreasonable” actions (gran sinrazón cometida por el rey Fernando) and retreated north of the Pyrenees. Their defeat was not quite total or permanent. Within twenty years their son had reclaimed the northernmost bit of their Navarrese kingdom from Spain and governed it from Béarn.³⁵ Within eighty years, their great-grandson unexpectedly inherited France and thereby reunited two crowns which had been separated by the Salic law in 1328.

Cyprus: The Last Crusader Monarchs

The kingdom of Cyprus, Europe's last surviving state founded by crusaders, lost its independence through the misfortunes of its two fifteenth-century female rulers. Their fates were truly extraordinary: the first was overthrown by Muslim intervention, and the second was deposed by a republic which had legally adopted her. In the first case an Egyptian sultan (who ignored the sacramental status of Christian monogamy and the associated notion of legitimate birth) sent a jihad to replace a young woman ruler with her bastard half brother; the second woman ruled as a puppet of Venice, which ultimately forced her abdication when she threatened its interests.36

When John II, the last legitimate male king of Cyprus, died in 1458, his island had become a protectorate of Egypt's Mameluke sultans, to whom it paid an annual tribute. By his second wife, a Byzantine princess, John II left a daughter, Charlotte; by another Greek noblewoman he also had an illegitimate son, whom he intended to make the island's Latin archbishop. Since a legitimate female, although younger, outranked an illegitimate male, the Cypriot barons duly arranged Charlotte's coronation in October 1458, absent the archbishop-elect of Nicosia. The major political issue was to arrange her marriage to a younger son of the duke of Savoy, which duly took place a year later.

Meanwhile, her half brother escaped from virtual house arrest and fled the island. The political fate of this crusader kingdom would now be determined by its Egyptian suzerain, and the extraordinary tale is best recounted primarily through Egyptian chroniclers, who provide its basic narrative: “On Sunday 28 Ramadan 863 [May 29, 1459] Jakum the Frank, son of Jawan, ruler of the island of Cyprus, arrived in the Egyptian realm with a request of the sultan that he be granted possession of Cyprus in his father's place. The people of Cyprus had installed his sister, supplanting him, since he was the product of adultery, or some such condition that did not legitimate his succession in their community.” Help was soon promised. Three months later “the sultan convened a ceremony in the royal courtyard of the Citadel of the Mountain. He presented Jakum ibn Jawan and draped him with a Kamiliyya robe of honor, enrobing two other Franks who were presented with him. The sultan gave him a horse with a golden saddle and mantle with gold and silver brocade, which he rode for the duration of his stay in Egypt. The sultan designated him governor of Cyprus and pledged to establish him there, delivering Cyprus to him.” A few weeks later, “the sultan commenced construction of the vessels designated for the jihad, with Jakum accompanying them to Cyprus.” Four days later, he sent an emissary to Cyprus “to inform its populace that the sultan desired the sovereignty of this Jakum over Cyprus in place of his father, and the deposition of his sister, censuring them for the lack of sovereignty of this Jakum and the preferment of his sister in his place.”

Greater honors followed: “On Sunday 25 Rabi [864/January 19, 1460], the sultan celebrated the Prophet's birthday in the royal courtyard as per tradition every year. The sultan presented Jakum al-Firanji, son of the ruler of Cyprus, and seated him among the notable officials of state.” As the chronicler observed, “This distressed the populace grievously. So I have said: Possibly the sultan did not present him at this court session, except to see him glorify Islam and diminish unbelief.” Jakum al-Firanji was surely the only Latin archbishop-elect who ever attended such a ceremony, and rumors about it “distressed the populace grievously” on the Christian side as well: his enemies insisted he had renounced his faith, and no pope ever trusted him again.

On Cyprus, many Frankish barons protested the sultan's repudiation of their queen. When his emissary returned to Cairo on March 24, 1460, he was accompanied by “a large group of Frankish princes and people from Cyprus in two factions: one unit requesting that the designated queen be confirmed; the other demanding her deposition and installation of her brother.” When the sultan finally decided the matter a few months later, events took two unexpected twists. On May 27, 1460, reports the Cairene chronicler, “a heinous event occurred in the realm: the sultan convened the notable Cypriot Franks, filling the royal courtyard. He intended to confirm the queen as ruler of Cyprus as she was established.” The sultan had changed his mind because the queen's emissaries had offered to raise the island's tribute and brought the money with them: “He enrobed her emissaries, the notable Franks,” and “appointed [his falconer] as her escort, bearing her diploma and her robe of honor.” Meanwhile, “her brother was in attendance, seated below the commanders of 1000. The designation of his sister … pained him. He rose to his feet and called for support. He spoke words to the effect that he had come to Egypt, taken refuge with the sultan, sought his protection, and submitted to him this lengthy period. [He asserted] that he had more right to the kingship than his sister. The sultan did not heed him, being resolved upon confirmation of his sister, and ordered him to depart to his residence. Thus, Jakum had no recourse but to depart from the middle door of the royal courtyard. His adversaries, his sister's entourage, followed after him.”

At this point, chaos ensued because James's chief adviser and a Mameluke interpreter had outbribed his sister's representatives among the emirs.37 “Then some veteran Mamelukes extended their hands against the adversaries of Jakum among the Franks. They inflicted blows and lacerations upon them, tearing up the robe [of honor]. They called in one voice that they wanted nothing but the confirmation of this Jakum in his father's place. The tumult heightened, leaving the sultan no recourse but to yield immediately, deposing the queen and acclaiming Jakum. Thus was Jakum confirmed in spite of the sultan. The sultan immediately enrobed Jakum. He ordered the departure of an expedition of officers to invade Cyprus and to proceed with Jakum to Cyprus.” Twelve days later “the sultan summoned the sultani Mamluks to the royal courtyard. He designated a group of them for the jihad, that is: to depart in the company of Jakum al-Firanji for Cyprus.”

This jihad was successful. By November 1460 Mameluke military muscle had enabled Jakum to gain the upper hand on Cyprus, pinning his sister's loyalists into an impregnable coastal fort. He spent three years rallying support among the Cypriot barons and finally forced his sister and her Savoyard husband off the island. Once firmly in control, James massacred his remaining Egyptian elite troops in cold blood and sent an emissary to Cairo accusing their commander of “abducting comely youths from their parents.” Relating this tale, the Cairo chronicler expresses skepticism before concluding laconically, “Jakum took possession … on the grounds that he was the sultan's viceroy. In any case, [he] remained as ruler of Cyprus.” On the Christian side, his sister found shelter with the Knights Hospitallers on Rhodes, and the papacy refused to acknowledge the island's new monarch.

James had no fleet, and his island kingdom required protection from Venice; he therefore decided to marry the daughter of a prominent Venetian aristocratic family with many investments on the island and few scruples about his right to rule Cyprus. In July 1472, two months before she sailed to Cyprus, the Republic of St. Mark officially adopted his bride, Caterina Cornaro. This ceremony, unique in the Republic's long history, sufficed to give legal footing to another unprecedented event after James died in 1473. When Queen Charlotte tried to persuade a Venetian fleet that “James, now dead, was a bastard and held the kingdom wrongfully, for it is wrong that while the heir is alive others should take the kingdom … in justice, you are bound to help her win [the kingdom],” the commander refused because James was “the king appointed by the sultan.”38 Instead of restoring the heiress, the Most Serene Republic proclaimed the pregnant widow of the sultan's king the new ruler of Cyprus. Charlotte sent another embassy to Egypt, but her claim was refused and her emissary sent in chains to her female rival.

After the infant son of King James died in 1474, his teenaged widow became the island's official sovereign. Money was coined and decrees were issued in the name of Catherine of Venice, Caterina Veneta. The pope and the sultan were duly informed of her elevation; the sultan sent an official robe and asked for his unpaid tribute. She herself enjoyed scant respect. Her father received permission to visit her soon after her proclamation (she was Europe's first titular female monarch with a living father) and complained that she was treated worse than her married sisters. Theoretically, she ruled Cyprus for fifteen years, until the Most Serene Republic, upon hearing rumors of her projected remarriage, sent her brother to force her resignation. This constitutional charade ended when, for the only time in European history, a large, powerful republic swallowed a small, weak monarchy: on February 13, 1489, the Lusignan standard was lowered on Cyprus and replaced by the Lion of St. Mark. Unlike accounts of her official adoption, elaborate descriptions of her abdication ceremony have been preserved. In return for her cooperation, Venice permitted her a dignified retirement at full salary governing the minuscule lordship of Asolo, while the republic ruled Cyprus for more than seventy years.

Successful Joint Rule in Castile

The thirty-year reign of Isabel I of Castile (1474–1504) is deservedly far better known than those of her late medieval female predecessors. It marked the first time a woman had exercised supreme authority for such a long time in one of Europe's largest kingdoms; not only was Castile vastly larger and more powerful in 1474 than when Urraca had inherited it in 1109, but Isabel's kingdom increased greatly in size and influence during her reign. It has also been noticed that a sudden development in the game of chess, involving the greatly increased powers of the only female piece on the board, the queen, originated in Castile shortly after Isabel's greatest military success, the conquest of Granada; the new rules were first described in a treatise dedicated to her son.39 In the history of female kings, both the beginning and the end of this well-studied reign hold special significance. It began with a succession disputed between partisans of two women that was resolved only after a lengthy civil war, and it ended with one woman leaving her kingdom to another woman, the only such occurrence in European history until the twentieth century. On both occasions Isabel's husband proved indispensable both in ensuring victory over her niece and in preserving Isabel's Castilian heritage from their politically incompetent daughter thirty years later. To a degree not always recognized by current scholarship, he proved no less indispensable throughout the long period between these events. The Catholic kings enjoyed the most successful truly joint reign in European history.

Isabel's marriage in 1469 to Ferdinand, her slightly younger second cousin and crown prince of Aragon, required elaborate prenuptial arrangements—particularly since her brother, the king of Castile, opposed it and soon used her disobedience as reason for disinheriting her. Seen in the context of similar arrangements between her fiancé's father and his first wife and those involving another Navarrese heiress in 1485, its provisions do not seem unusual. Its most important clauses required the husband to spend most of his time in his wife's kingdom; he could not remove her or their children from it without express permission. Royal authority was to be held jointly: they must share all titles and sign all documents together. The agreement employed the plural form throughout.40 Ferdinand's father donated the Sicilian crown to enhance his son's rank and forged a papal dispensation. They married and soon had a daughter.

Five years after this marriage, Isabel's brother died after having repudiated her as his heir. She immediately claimed the Castilian throne, arranging an official proclamation in Segovia while her husband was in Aragon. Isabel acted so hastily because she knew that her brother's only child, her unmarried thirteen-year-old niece, would also claim his throne once she became a legal adult. Surprised by Isabel's gesture, Ferdinand returned to Castile and soon assured Aragonese authorities that he had been quickly confirmed as its king: “In the field, I was sworn, received, and raised as king of these realms.” Under emergency conditions, their prenuptial contract obviously required some retouching, although its essential provisions required only minor modifications: for example, his name preceded hers on joint declarations, but her coat of arms preceded his on the attached seals. A few months later, as war was breaking out, this revised arrangement was updated a second time, giving her husband power to make appointments “without my intervention, consultation, or authorization.” For his part, Ferdinand made a testament leaving his titles to his daughter with Isabel, who must also raise her husband's two previous illegitimate children.⁴¹

The ensuing civil war became Europe's last lengthy struggle between rival female claimants to a major throne (in 1553 England had one that ended within a few days). Each side exercised the prerogatives of sovereignty by issuing decrees and coining money. In important ways this conflict mirrored that between Portugal and Castile ninety years before, but with the protagonists reversed. Both times, a very young heiress lost her kingdom after being forced to marry a neighboring older king who already had a male heir; both times, the women who lost ended up in convents in their husband's kingdom; and both times, prominent noblemen and church prelates who backed the losing side became permanent exiles.

One major difference is that in the 1470s, as Carrasco Manchado has emphasized, the older woman manipulated various strategies of legitimation throughout the struggle, even turning military setbacks into propaganda victories after her husband's first campaign ended in failure. It took four years to conclude the fighting (the Castilians eventually did better), but Isabel won the peace quickly. In 1479, with her husband away reorganizing his dead father's kingdom (this was also the moment when Ferdinand's widowed half sister successfully claimed the kingdom of Navarre), Isabel personally handled negotiations with Portugal. Preoccupied with permanently neutralizing a dangerous niece whom she never referred to by name (Juana was always aquella, “that woman”), Isabel insisted on forcing her into a convent. Subsequently known in Portugal as the “excellent lady,” “aquella” apparently never stayed in a convent and long outlived her aunt; she eventually donated her Castilian rights to the Portuguese crown in 1522. But Isabel won the representational war so thoroughly that her unlucky rival's story has not been pieced together until quite recently.42

After Ferdinand and Isabel emerged victorious, this power couple drove the last Muslim government out of western Europe, sent Columbus on multiple voyages to explore a new continent, and opened a new chapter in religious persecution via the Spanish Inquisition. Their reputation as joint rulers is substantially correct because they worked tirelessly to implement their famous slogan to “command, govern, rule, and exercise lordship as one” (mandar, gobernar, regir, y señorear a una). In several ways they were the ultimate and certainly the most successful embodiments of a general late medieval phenomenon: the heiress with a husband possessing royal authority in her kingdom.

They differed from the Navarrese model because of the exceptional political activity and talent of the heiress. Their political relationship is represented with didactic clarity on their various gold coins, from early castellanos issued during the civil war to their dazzling new excelentes of 1497: all of them depict both as crowned monarchs, either seated or facing each other, with him in the position of honor on the left and his name preceding hers. But their most remarkable coin was not struck in Spain. Their silver carlino, made in 1503 for the recently conquered kingdom of Naples, was the first two-headed male and female coin seen in the Mediterranean world since the time of Antony and Cleopatra, and its single continuous inscription covering both sides represented Europe's closest numismatic approximation to gender parity during the high Renaissance (see fig. 4).

Castilian chronicles, composed by Isabel's well-paid officials and often published in the vernacular, tend to emphasize her role over her husband's. Juan de Flores, her first official chronicler, said that Isabel ruled “like a powerful man” (como esforçado varón). “It may be,” he reports her as saying, “that women lack the discretion to know things and the strength to stand up to others, perhaps even the language to express themselves properly; but I have discovered that we have the eyes to see.” And to read a great deal: Isabel read so many letters and documents that she became the first female monarch to own several pairs of spectacles. She also read printed books, relatively new cultural products that reached her kingdom during her reign. It is no accident that one of the earliest preserved portraits of a European female monarch, made about 1490, shows Isabel holding one of these.43

Contemporaries disagreed about which half of the Catholic kings was the dominant force in their partnership. In 1526 a Venetian diplomat praised Isabel as “a rare and most talented [virtuosísima] woman, who is universally spoken of throughout Spain much more often than the king [Ferdinand], although he also was very prudent and rare in his time.” Two years later, another Italian diplomat, Baldassare Castiglione, raised the issue of her husband's influence in his famous Book of the Courtier but gave the longest speech to Isabel's champion rather than to her husband's. However, Ferdinand of Aragon also had Italian admirers; the most famous, Machiavelli, praised him as “almost a new Prince.”

Ferdinand's grandson, Emperor Charles V, certainly believed the king was the dominant force in the partnership. When arranging the marriage of his son Philip to his cousin Mary Tudor, Charles advised him to imitate his Aragonese great-grandfather by acting "so that while he in reality does everything, the initiative should always seem to proceed from the Queen and her Council.”⁴⁴ Some seventeenth-century Aragonese authors, led by Baltasar Gracián, reduced Isabel to her husband's collaborator and subordinate; but after the French Bourbons, who had cause to dislike Ferdinand, claimed the Spanish throne, Isabel's moral preeminence has dominated the couple's posthumous reputation.

How did their much-praised joint rule actually work? The subject has not yet been adequately studied, despite (or perhaps because of) a superabundance of documentation.45 Joint rule should not be confused with equality or even symmetry. When she first visited his lands in 1481, Ferdinand gave his wife a few unusual privileges, but there was no symmetry between his authority in her kingdom and her authority in his. Every Castilian coin after 1474 bears his name, but no Aragonese coin uses hers. In Castile, this famous couple apparently behaved similarly to their younger counterparts in the small neighboring kingdom of Navarre, which was also being ruled at the end of the fifteenth century by an heiress and her husband. In both places, jointly proclaimed decrees outnumbered those issued by either sovereign alone, and the husband issued more individual decrees than his wife. In the 1480s Ferdinand usually handled certain types of routine royal business that generated lucrative fees, such as legitimations of bastards or appointments of public scribes. Much Castilian international business was signed by Ferdinand alone, even when Isabel was present, although the reverse was occasionally true.⁴⁶

In some other areas of state policy, Isabel's participation consistently outstripped that of her husband. Although they remain jointly famous as the Catholic kings, a title officially given them in 1496 by the Spanish-born pope Alexander VI, she took a far more sustained interest than her husband in improving the educational and moral level of senior appointments in the Castilian church. In Aragon, on the other hand, Ferdinand made his nine-year-old bastard son archbishop of Saragossa and later approved the nomination of the pope's bastard son, the notorious Cesare Borgia, as bishop of Valencia. At another point where religion intersected with politics, Isabel manipulated the incorporation of Castile's three great chivalric knightly orders into the royal domain by employing some remarkable displays of female authority over these supposedly entirely masculine organizations. The process began during the civil war, in 1476, when she personally attended the meeting to elect a new Master of the Order of Santiago (her husband, of course, was chosen). It concluded seventeen years later, when she persuaded the papacy to grant her the administration of all three orders—something “against all law,” grumbled papal officials, “and a monstrous thing that a woman could administer such Orders.”47

The most famous, or notorious, intersection of religion and politics in Isabel's kingdom was undoubtedly its new royally controlled Inquisition, founded in 1478. She personally conducted some of the necessary high-level diplomacy: after a papal suspension of its proceedings in Aragon in 1482, Isabel, not Ferdinand, signed a long letter to Rome defending inquisitorial procedures in both of their realms and eventually received a satisfactory answer. Nevertheless, as Henry Charles Lea demonstrated over a century ago, Ferdinand intervened far more often than his wife in the Inquisition's early affairs in Castile, frequently writing in the first person singular, while some of Isabel's interventions attempted to protect her converso officials.⁴⁸

Burgundian and Castilian Heiresses, 1477–1506

When her father was killed in battle early in 1477, nineteen-year-old Mary of Burgundy became the richest heiress in Christendom, inheriting a total of thirteen provinces with more than sixty-three hundred parishes. An embryonic great power, created essentially after 1430 by two ambitious Burgundian dukes in the Low Countries along the border between France and the empire, its constituent parts were vassals of these great overlords; Flanders, the largest and wealthiest province, was legally divided between them. This unmarried heiress, aided primarily by her shrewd stepmother, Margaret of York (sister to Edward IV of England), struggled to retain control of her sprawling inheritance. Despite an eloquent plea to the authorities of the Duchy of Burgundy, from which her house took its name, she was unable to prevent its reabsorption into France. Other parts of her father's possessions located in what is today France were also lost in 1477, some in the south permanently, others temporarily. Farther north, things went better. In exchange for extending local privileges which her father had infringed, Mary collected political and financial support from the core provinces of the Low Countries, but sometimes their loyalty was negotiated only after serious bargaining: for example, Holland, her third most important province, insisted on replacing court French with the local Low German dialect as its official language.49

Threatened by the French king Louis XI, who proposed to marry her to his son and heir, Mary needed a husband to provide military leadership to defend what remained of her patrimony. She and her stepmother quickly concluded an arrangement with her father's preferred choice, Maximilian of Austria, the eighteen-year-old heir of the Holy Roman emperor. In a region already famous for its elaborately opulent public ceremonies, they were married with minimal pomp at a moment when making war was more urgent than making love. It was a union of political equals; in 1479 a highly unusual two-headed medal depicted them with similar inscriptions on each side. Afterward, Maximilian did what was asked of him both by fathering heirs (three children in four years) and by winning a major victory against the French in 1479. Advised by his wife's stepmother, he also reorganized Burgundy's famous chivalric order, the Golden Fleece, after a five-year hiatus. However, Burgundian coinage testifies that Maximilian never enjoyed the official rank of other contemporary royal husbands like Ferdinand of Aragon in his wife's possessions. Burgundy's heiress managed many internal affairs in her remaining lands and attended any political assembly where she and her husband needed to raise revenue.

Mary of Burgundy was genuinely mourned when she died after a hunting accident at the age of twenty-five. Despite her short life, she left a noteworthy cultural legacy. She loved hunting with falcons and was the first woman ruler in Europe whose official seal showed her on horseback holding a falcon. Her most distinctive legacy to posterity is as Europe's only female ruler with a beer (Duchesse de Bourgogne) named for one of the last native rulers of a land unusually rich in breweries. Its current label adapts a portrait of her (with a falcon) that was commissioned by her widower three years after her death, itself an unusual distinction, Much later, the chivalric Maximilian reshaped his youthful adventures in the Low Countries into an illustrated fairy tale about a hero entitled the White King (Weisskunig).50 Mary of Burgundy also left her two surviving children a sizable political legacy as the Burgundians became the Habsburgs. In 1494, faced with increasing responsibilities in the empire, Maximilian handed a stable state to their sixteen-year-old son Philip. Two years later Maximilian approved his children's marriages to the son and second daughter of Spain's Catholic kings, Ferdinand and Isabel. The long-term consequences after the Spanish legacy passed to their Burgundian-Habsburg heirs proved far more important than anyone imagined at the time.

Spain's transition to Habsburg rule demonstrated in acute form the risks of female inheritance in an age of joint rulership. Isabel the Catholic had to change her official heir several times because her only son died childless in 1497 and both her oldest daughter and her first grandson also died by 1501. In 1504 Castile's succession therefore fell to Juana, another married daughter whose Habsburg husband already governed Europe's largest nonmonarchical state and was desperately eager to claim royal rank through his wife. Upon learning of Isabel's death, the so-called Burgundian theater-state staged a remarkably elaborate funeral service for her at Brussels. Jean Molinet, the official Burgundian chronicler, praised the Castilian ruler as a female crusader, a “very Catholic queen who besieged the strongholds and fortresses of the Moors in the absence of her husband: she received magnificently all embassies sent to her and gave elegant replies without using a spokesman such that everyone admired her prudence and noble countenance.” He also explained that the archduke spent fifty thousand florins on this ceremony “because Lady Jeanne was the one who will succeed to these kingdoms.” At its conclusion, the herald of the Order of the Golden Fleece named husband and wife as joint successors to the dead monarch, then formally invested Philip with a sword of state. In a complete reversal of her mother's central role at her own official proclamation thirty years before, Castile's new heiress remained a passive spectator as royal authority was ceremonially transferred to her husband.51

Like his father, Ferdinand of Aragon outlived a royal heiress; but unlike him, his authority in his wife's kingdom ended with her death. Isabel did what she could to protect her husband's position through a lengthy final testament which envisaged the possibility that her oldest surviving child would be either unwilling or unable to rule. But in the end there was no legal alternative to repeating the same formal proclamation that Isabel's followers had devised thirty years before, jointly acclaiming Castile's new proprietary heiress “and her legitimate husband.” The royal couple took over a year to reach Castile, whereupon Ferdinand relinquished his regency, remarried, and retired to his hereditary possessions.

Castile's new regime would not be a joint monarchy. Instead, its proprietary monarch became the exact antithesis of her mother by refusing to exercise any political responsibilities. Juana's self-erasure as sovereign became evident during her brief appearance in July 1506 before Castile's first parliament or Cortes held under its new rulers. The diputados, all of whom had experienced thirty years of Isabel's government, asked her daughter four specific questions. First, did she intend to govern her kingdoms? Second, would her husband reign jointly with her? Third, would she please dress like a Spanish lady? Fourth, would she please appoint Spanish women in her household? Only their third request received an encouraging answer; she promised to dress differently. However, she refused their fourth request “because of her husband's temperament [naturaleza].” Juana's responses to their two main questions reflect her experience when her husband had publicly claimed Castile's crown without associating her. She now refused to exercise any authority because “the Flemings do not have the custom of permitting women to govern.” Her remark was patently false, although she may not have been aware that her husband had inherited his lands from a mother who had governed them alone before her marriage.⁵²

Seen in the context of female sovereignty, Juana the Mad deserves her sad nickname. Spaniards were probably fortunate that her overbearing husband died within a few months of his arrival, but they were unfortunate that his politically catatonic widow survived him by almost half a century. By failing to participate in any rituals of government, she became the only reigning monarch in European history considered a political cipher by her husband, her father, and her son, all of whom governed successively in her name. Significantly, her magnificent tombstone in the new royal chapel in Granada was made without her knowledge at least two decades before her actual death, and she was never told when her husband's corpse was moved there.

Spain's resulting constitutional quagmire had various official consequences. The British Museum possesses a seal of Philip and Juana with the husband in primary position on the left; it was used on a document four years after his death, with his name erased. Although Juana's was a phantom reign, her name generally precedes her son's name on thousands of official Spanish documents—none of which she signed during the last forty-eight years of her life. Almost a year after her death, the official cession of the kingdom of Sicily to Philip II was still drawn jointly in the names of Charles and Juana.53

Spanish coinage reveals even greater confusion. Juana's husband died too soon to issue coins, but her de facto abdication in combination with her de jure title created major problems. During her father's regency, a real minted in Granada proclaimed “Ferdinand and Juana, by God's Grace King and Queen of Castile, León, and Aragon.” After news of Ferdinand's death reached Brussels in 1516, his grandson immediately had Spanish coins struck there, imitating the earliest coins of Ferdinand and Isabel, but with the important difference that his mother's name preceded his. Next year, in a document which never mentioned Juana, the papacy officially acknowledged Charles I as the Catholic king of Castile and Aragon. Afterward, the names of both mother and son appear on all Spanish coins; most inscriptions name her first. In Aragon, a gigantic one-hundred-ducat piece, more a medal than a coin, shows her in the primary position on the left, facing her son, with both wearing crowns (see fig. 5). In their Italian possessions, Juana's name usually comes first, but in their American possessions, her son's name precedes hers.⁵⁴

In assessing the overall political record of late medieval female sovereigns, one must remember the failures as well as the successes, Juana the Mad as well as her mother, Isabel the Catholic, while realizing that their contemporary Catherine of Navarre offers a more typical example than either of them. A royal heiress meant a change of dynasty, especially when her husband outlived her, which happened about half the time, partly because their husbands were often younger. The advent of female monarchs eroded political autonomy in some of Europe's smallest and weakest kingdoms, such as Sicily, Norway, Cyprus, and Navarre. Nevertheless, probably because opening royal successions to legitimate children of both sexes increased the possibilities of direct inheritance from one generation to another, only France unambiguously prohibited women from inheriting a royal throne.

The most common feature among these fifteen late medieval female monarchs was that, apart from two childless widows with no hereditary claim to their former husband's kingdom—Margaret of Denmark in Norway and Catherine of Venice in Cyprus—they were heiresses who were married during most, if not all, of their reigns. Like queens, husbands of royal heiresses were expected to play a political role in a spouse's kingdom. But whereas queens might be a temporary regent for an absent husband or an underage son, husbands were expected to perform most—but never all—of the work of governing their wife's kingdom. This general practice was best described in 1683 by Diego Dormer, an Aragonese with little knowledge of northern Europe. He argued that throughout Spain, including Urraca's reign in twelfth-century Castile and León and Isabel's reign three centuries later, husbands of heiresses had invariably governed their wife's kingdoms. But Dormer had to admit that this situation was not universal, and he lamented the “much greater unreasonableness and more unjust and dishonest pretensions of both Queen Juanas of Naples, who excluded some of their husbands from the title and rule of their kingdom.”55 Although the practice would have a final revival a few years later during England's so-called Glorious Revolution, expecting husbands of royal heiresses to govern their wife's kingdom had already become the exception rather than the rule when Dormer printed these remarks.

How did this come to pass?