With the fall of Granada, Juana and Katherine had settled down with their parents and their siblings at the town of Santa Fe, just outside the city. Ferdinand and Isabella, though elated by Boabdil’s departure and surrender, had not moved into his recently vacated palaces immediately. They had wanted to be sure the area was safe and they needed to make some basic repairs. This done, the family slept within the Alhambra’s walls for the first time in April 1492.
Juana had been born at Toledo on November 6, 1479. Isabella had not contemplated suckling the infant herself because breastfeeding was commonly believed to delay a mother’s ability to conceive. Instead she had entrusted her baby to a wet nurse, Maria de Santistevan. Soon the child grew into a very lively, pretty, and graceful little girl who was to develop into a beautiful woman. She was, the Venetian ambassador would write, “very handsome.”
Katherine had been born six years later, on December 16, 1485, in the Archbishop of Toledo’s castle in Alcalá de Hénares, a town about twenty miles from Madrid, her birth coinciding with a convenient lull in the wars against the Moors. Although known to us as Katherine, a name she was given after Isabella’s grandmother, the daughter of the English duke, John of Gaunt, she was always called Catalina within her birth family. She inherited her mother’s fair coloring, but her features were more sensitive than Isabella’s, her lips more yielding, the set of her jaw less pronounced, her “sweet face” suggesting a submissive, compliant nature. Appearances are often deceptive.
To imagine the Alhambra as Juana and Katherine’s childhood home is tempting but fanciful; the truth is that after their initial visit in 1492, the royal family did not return to the city until 1499. In fact, home was where their parents, usually their mother, was at the time, and she was rarely anywhere for long. All rulers sometimes traveled throughout their lands to show themselves to their subjects and establish their authority, but the Catholic Monarchs moved around more than most. After the civil wars that Isabella had fought to gain her crown in the first place, a public display of majesty and power was politic. Then, during the Reconquista, as the wars against the Moors were always known, the king and queen were to be found wherever the fighting happened to be. Isabella wanted her children with her whenever it was practicable, and so the close-knit family had journeyed together from camp to camp, from village to town, from city to city.
But although she was almost fourteen by the time she saw the golden walls of Granada again, the city was clearly very important to Katherine. When she left her homeland to marry abroad, she had to choose a personal badge. She chose the pomegranate. She never said why. Yet while she probably had many reasons for her choice, we have a clue to one of them: the Spanish word for pomegranate is “granada.”
It is easy to see why the city and Boabdil’s palace retained so special a place in her memory. Even today the Alhambra is magical. With its dramatic backdrop of the Sierra Nevada, the hill on which the main buildings are set dominates the rest of the city. As the young Katherine sat by one of the delicately carved arched or rounded windows, she could gaze down on the maze of tiny houses in the narrow streets below. She could see the great mosque that her parents would turn into a huge cathedral, she could see the Albaicin, the area that housed the metal foundries and the silk works, she could see the Vega, the richly fertile, well-irrigated plain that provided the city’s food. She could wander through the shaded arcades where Moorish sultans and their court had so recently sat on cushioned pavements, glowingly colored hangings adorning the walls behind them as they sheltered from the summer heat listening to music and poetry or discussing matters of state. And she could go into the throne room, with its tiled floor and intricately sculpted ceiling, where Boabdil had met with the Christian negotiators before accepting their terms and yielding his last stronghold. Years later Juana’s son, Charles V, was so enchanted by his visit to the complex that, contemplating Boabdil’s capitulation, he was reputed to have said that he would rather have made it his grave than have given it up.
It was not that Katherine was unacquainted with such buildings. The Catholic Monarchs and their family were familiar with Islamic art and culture since other former Moorish cities and towns, such as Córdoba and Seville, had already fallen into Christian hands. But the Alhambra was, and still is, different. Many of its rooms were small and intimate, their decoration spectacularly beautiful; its gardens were enticingly cool in the scorching summer sun; its setting was unique; its romance as the venue for the Moors’ last stand was beguiling. Isabella and Ferdinand both fell under its spell. They commissioned artists and craftsmen to restore it, albeit with alterations; they frequently held court there, and Isabella chose Granada as her burial place. But it was more than a work of art: it was the symbol of Christian success, the city that above all others represented the triumph of their faith over that of the Moors. Katherine shared her mother’s joy when the royal mosque was consecrated as a Christian church and a Franciscan monastery founded in what had been a leading Moor’s private house. Reverently, the Moors had carved Arabic inscriptions on the palace walls to glorify and praise Allah. “There is no conqueror but God” could be read everywhere, as it still can today. Neither Ferdinand nor Isabella would have had any quarrel with that sentiment, provided it was their God who was the conqueror. Capturing Granada and assuring the supremacy of Catholicism had been the queen’s personal crusade; Katherine and Juana, who would one day have their own crusades to wage, could appreciate that.
While the Alhambra brought them into close contact with Islamic art, learning, and wisdom, Juana and Katherine also grew up within the context of the European Renaissance. Keen to ensure that Spain was not a cultural backwater, Ferdinand and Isabella welcomed foreign scholars, endowed chairs in Hebrew and Greek in the University of Salamanca, and patronized artists from abroad as well as from within their own realm. Katherine and Juana may well have lived amid the bustle of a court that was forever on the move, but it was not a court bereft of ornament or exquisite artifacts.
Isabella’s art collection contained a number of stunning works. With an eye to posterity, she commissioned portraits of herself and her children, a few by one of her favorite court painters, Michael Sittow. While today many of her pictures, most on religious topics, are scattered through the galleries of Europe, many remain in Spain, some housed in the museum close to her tomb, a few paces away from the glass cases containing the standards and pennants that once dominated Granada’s towers. Thus it is still possible to gaze on pictures that Isabella loved, several of which Katherine and Juana too would have seen.
There is The Garden of Gethsemane by Botticelli, showing Christ kneeling beneath a comforting angel as He prays for the cup to be taken from Him; the disciples, separated from Christ by a wooden fence, sleep peacefully close by, blissfully unaware of what is to come. There are versions of the Nativity by masters such as Hans Memling, Rogier van der Weyden, and Dieric Bouts, all of breathtaking beauty. There are depictions of the Crucifixion that do not shield the viewer from the full agonies of Christ upon the cross or from the harrowing grief suffered by the Virgin at the death of her son. Such images are not for the squeamish. What is interesting, though, is that the type of painting that appealed to the queen, and to which she exposed her children, tended to be conservative and contemplative, with suffering a key theme: the queen bought Botticelli’s Garden of Gethsemane, not his Birth of Venus.
A similar emphasis can be seen in the tapestries that Ferdinand and Isabella accumulated over the years. They inherited some, received others as presents, but purchased most themselves, so that Isabella possessed about 370 tapestries by the time she died. Again they were religious or moral in tone, several being used by the queen and her family in their chapels or in their private places of prayer, and again the pain of the Crucifixion is overt. The children would have been left in no doubt that suffering was an inevitable part of life and should be borne with stoicism, even with willing acceptance.
And yet their early lives were not unhappy or filled with care. There was music and dancing, and there were presents. For the Christmas of the year when Granada fell, Ferdinand had taken time off from the Reconquista to choose dolls to delight his daughters. The little girls were even given dolls’ clothes in which to dress them. A much-cherished gift for the Catholic Monarchs’ son, Juan, was the chess set that he kept in his bathroom. And the children were often allowed the sweetmeats they so clearly relished; they could gorge on rose-flavored syrup, on quince jelly, on aniseed balls, on lemon blossom candy. And their clothes were splendid too, for upon such matters were royal houses judged. Cloth from Flanders and from England was imported; there were velvets and silks; there were pretty ribbons; there was coral; there were hoops for farthingales; there were hats; there were fur-lined cloaks. Even the mules that they rode were equipped with silk and brocade to adorn saddles and girths. Every luxury that money could buy was lavished upon the children. An awareness of human tribulation and the importance of repentance and redemption did not preclude parental indulgence.
And it certainly did not preclude the need for ostentatious display. Later in her life, the queen was comfortable in the coarse habit of the Franciscans, and indeed asked to be buried wearing one, but this was not how she would have appeared in public. When Roger Machado, one of a group of envoys from Henry VII, met her in 1489, he wrote that “the Queen was all dressed in cloth of gold, she wore a headdress of gold-thread, and a fine necklace adorned with large pearls, and large and very fine diamonds in the centre.” On another occasion, Machado said that the rubies in her headdress were the “size of pigeon’s eggs.” Isabella knew exactly when it was politic to impress an audience: her simple, much-used bead rosary can still be seen, but so can her elegant, regal silver crown. And as she appeared before her people, so did her children. “It was a beautiful sight,” wrote Machado enthusiastically, “to see the richness of their dresses.” Yet this was despite Isabella’s once protesting to her confessor that “all excess is distasteful to me.”
Even as children, Katherine and Juana had understood that their gender determined their future. It was their brother, Juan, who was destined to govern their parents’ kingdoms; their role was to marry foreign princes and bear children, preferably sons. When they became wives, Katherine and Juana were led to believe, they should dedicate their lives to the service of God and act as ambassadors for their homeland. If they were lucky, the man they married might be young, handsome, chivalrous, and charming, but he might be as old as their father; marriage could bring them joy or despair. Although Ferdinand and Isabella would never have deliberately prejudiced their daughters’ happiness, neither could they afford to take that into account. What mattered was that the girls should cement useful alliances with foreign powers to benefit Spain, for adept and shrewd queen consorts could wield considerable influence over their spouses. It was for such marriages that they were born and it was with this in mind that Isabella planned their upbringing. She wanted to equip her son with the knowledge needed to run his domains and her daughters with the skills and accomplishments that would make them desirable and respected wives and mothers.
Isabella approached this task with characteristic practicality. Acutely aware of her own educational deficiencies, she determined that her children would not suffer from the same limitations. The queen’s religious ideals were certainly shaped by the early years she had spent in her mother’s highly devout household at Arévalo, but other than that she was instructed in housewifely crafts like spinning, weaving, sewing, and baking, we know very little of her education. While she was certainly taught to be literate, a formal classical training was considered unnecessary, as no one dreamed that she would one day rule Castile in her own right.
After becoming queen, Isabella had worked to fill the gaps in her own knowledge. While fighting the Moors she found time to study Latin, the international language of diplomacy and culture, soon considering herself sufficiently expert as to correct pronunciation she thought inaccurate, and both she and Ferdinand were keen to promote learning within their dominions. Isabella’s championing of educational achievement not only meant giving tacit approval to erudite women such as Doña Lucia Medrano, who lectured publicly at Salamanca, it earned accolades for herself.
Using the works she had inherited from the existing royal library at Segovia as a basis, Isabella built up an extensive collection of books and manuscripts. While most of them were in her native Castilian, she also had several in Latin or in translations from the Latin. With her passionate religious faith, the fact that many were Bibles, prayer books, homilies, or general religious tracts is unsurprising, but she went very much further than that. There were chronicles of Spanish history; a copy of Caesar’s Commentaries; works on how princes should be educated; books on the law; volumes of Aristotle and on moral philosophy; Virgil’s poems and Aesop’s fables; Boccaccio’s Decameron; and works on chivalry and romance such as those about King Arthur. Isabella was indeed the Catholic Monarch, but her interests were more eclectic than that title suggests. And it was not just Juana and Katherine but her other three children who would reap the benefit of the queen’s love of learning.
Of all of them, the eldest daughter, another Isabella, was probably the most similar to her mother in her intense piety. The queen’s first child, she was born in 1470, just a year after her parents married. She grew into a serious-minded girl, emotionally close to her mother and always conscious of her duty to Spain and to God. Until her brother, Juan, was born in Seville seven years later, Princess Isabella was the Catholic Monarchs’ only heir. She was given the title of Princess “of the Asturias” to signify this special status, the title being the Spanish equivalent of “Prince of Wales” in England or “Dauphin” in France. Clearly, though, the king and queen yearned for a male heir: the long gap following her first daughter’s birth had worried Isabella so much that she had asked her doctors’ advice.
The sheer jubilation and delight that greeted Juan’s arrival was tangible proof that a boy was always more welcome than a girl. And even Isabella felt this way. Despite being the epitome of successful female monarchy, she knew that it was her duty to produce future kings. It was Juan, whom she called her “angel,” who was her main pride and joy.
The child was baptized when he was ten days old. In an age when infant mortality was common and could strike rich and poor alike, babies needed to be given God’s protection very quickly if they were to avoid any risk of a perpetual afterlife in Limbo, the terrible nothingness awaiting those who died before being received into the Church. Crowds, braving the searing heat, had lined the streets of Seville on July 9, 1477, as the procession wound its way to the cathedral for the baptism, the baby in the arms of his nurse and accompanied by the most important figures of the court and the city. No expense was spared. This was, after all, the first glimpse the people would have of the boy destined for kingship. Isabella did not attend. As was the custom, she would have to wait until being ritually purified of the corruption of childbirth, a ceremony which usually took place about a month later, before returning to normal religious life.
Isabella was to be disappointed in her hopes for a second son. When she gave birth again, in 1482, it was to a third daughter, Maria. Like Juana, her second daughter, Maria was a healthy baby, but her birth was tinged with sadness for Isabella since Maria was one of twins and the other child did not survive. Three years later the queen bore Katherine, her last child.
As soon as they were old enough, the children’s education began. Most effort, of course, was devoted to Juan, the son and heir, for he needed to be equipped for government, although the Catholic Monarchs had earlier lavished particular care on the upbringing of their eldest daughter, Isabella, going so far as to let her participate in state occasions. Her position, naturally, was transformed by Juan’s birth, but even then she was kept involved in political affairs, for infant mortality was an ever-present worry. With the succession in the forefront of their minds, Ferdinand and Isabella ensured that doctors saw Juan every day to check on his general health.
The prince’s daily routine was carefully programmed. He fitted in fixed periods of study with his tutor, Diego Deza, with ample time for prayers and for the music that he very much enjoyed. Determined that their son should be as cultured as any monarch in Europe, Ferdinand and Isabella arranged for him to have music lessons, gave him instruments, provided him with his own musicians, and no doubt listened proudly as he sang in his pleasant tenor voice. In addition, they did their best to prepare him to rule, encouraging him to sit with them as they discussed matters of state, just as they had done with Princess Isabella. It was Deza who supervised Juan’s intellectual development. A Dominican friar who lectured in theology at Salamanca, he was himself an outstanding Latin scholar. His orthodoxy was beyond question, so the queen was confident that he could instill the basic tenets of the Catholic faith while giving Juan a grounding in the new humanist, classical learning of the Renaissance. It was important to keep up to date.
As for Juana, as soon as she was seven, her parents appointed Andres de Miranda her first tutor. It was his task to teach her Latin, a language in which she became proficient, and Catholic doctrine—essential skills that Deza also taught to Juan. Records of some of the little girl’s possessions have survived, so we know that she was given a special box in which to carry letters, a lavishly decorated book of hours, prayer books, and various Latin texts including poetry. She was taught to ride, she was taught music and dancing, she learned how to behave in public. And, just like her own mother, Juana learned housewifely tasks like baking, spinning, weaving, and sewing.
Her sister Maria was taught alongside her for a while, and then it was Katherine’s turn. Katherine too was instructed in the female arts like spinning and sewing, skills in which she was particularly talented, for later in life she took considerable pride in making and mending her husband’s shirts herself. Music and dancing lessons were also arranged for her. Dancing was something that Katherine particularly enjoyed. She did so in the Spanish tradition, which involved women dancing alone or with other women.
Then, like her sisters, Katherine was nurtured in the classics, her parents engaging two remarkable humanist scholars, Antonio Geraldini and his brother Alessandro (who stepped in when Antonio died) as teachers. Alessandro, who took his duties very seriously, wrote a book on the education of girls. The book has long since disappeared, but it clearly remained in Katherine’s memory, for she was to commission a similar work for her own daughter. Perhaps thanks to Alessandro, Katherine’s Latin was excellent. Both she and Juana were able to speak it fluently, a very useful asset. Katherine would also have had access to her mother’s extensive library, although her reading was carefully monitored. She was introduced to the Christian poets, to history, to law, to the lives of the saints, and to religious works such as the writings of Saint Augustine, as well as to carefully vetted classical authors like Seneca. Religion and morals were, of course, central to everything with which the girls were allowed to come into contact. Aesop’s fables would have been allowed because they were a perfect way to teach moral precepts, and for yet lighter relief, there were always Isabella’s copies of Arthurian romances and chivalric tales.
Ever mindful of her own experiences, the queen was determined to give her girls the best start available, and by the standards of her time, she did. Her daughters were not the only educated noble women among the European aristocracy but they were certainly better educated than most women of their era. There was one omission, though: the study of foreign languages, surely useful for girls destined to marry foreign princes, was largely neglected. Latin might be fine in the diplomatic sphere, but it hardly allowed for spontaneous chatter in the bedroom.
And what happened in the bedroom was crucial, because the carefree years of youth were ending: marriage negotiations were under way almost before the sisters could walk, let alone open a book. Katherine and Juana would soon face futures far removed from the gently playing fountains of the Alhambra.