In 1543, seven years after Katherine’s death had left Juana as the sole surviving child of the Catholic Monarchs, her sixteen-year-old grandson, Philip, was ushered into her room at Tordesillas. He had come to ask her blessing before leaving to meet his Portuguese bride and escort her across the border and into her new homeland. Wearing a long garment with wide sleeves, the queen, now almost sixty-four, asked him about his betrothed and was delighted when he promised faithfully to bring the girl to meet her. Philip’s bride, Maria Manuel, was very special to Juana, for she was yet another grandchild, the daughter of her beloved Catalina. And Philip did indeed keep his word. When he returned to his grandmother, Maria Manuel was with him. Unfortunately, the marriage proved short-lived, but in 1554, after being prematurely widowed, Philip would come again, this time to bid his grandmother farewell before leaving Spain for a second marriage.
Seeing her close relatives brought Juana great joy. Although she had been abused by her husband and her father and neglected by her elder son, her family and her dynasty were the cornerstones of her life. She had endured much over the long years at Tordesillas because she had convinced herself that it had been Ferdinand’s wish; she had robustly defended her father and her son as she had squared off with the Communeros; no word of criticism of Charles had ever passed her lips. She never complained that his visits to her were so rare. For her, it was always so good when he was there at all.
So whenever Juana saw Charles’s son, Philip, and the other members of her family, it was a rare delight. She and Philip had first met some years previously when he had been only four and Empress Isabella, Juana’s niece, had brought him with his two-year-old sister, Maria, to visit her. As a letter from her custodian, the Marquis of Denia, to the empress proves, she had loved every moment of the meeting. She had kept on and on talking about it. She had declared herself “much satisfied” with her son’s wife and wanted to discover all she could about her. In particular, she had asked Denia to find out how she “comported” herself on horseback; image was always so crucial in a sovereign. As for the children, she had often asked how they “proceeded.” Denia had left the empress in no doubt that the visit had been a great success. “As often as her Highness has spoken to me since,” he had written, “she has inquired for your Majesty, the señor Prince and the señora Infanta.” Isabella, too, had valued the contact. When her next daughter had been born, she and Charles had named the baby Juana in the queen’s honor. Juana had been thrilled by that; she had not been forgotten by those who mattered to her.
And whenever her family visited her, she behaved impeccably. There was never a hint of the deranged woman of legend. Had there been anything worrisome, the empress would never have risked bringing her children; nor would Philip, or his sisters, or his cousins, have wanted to make the journey to Tordesillas, as several of them did over the years. While there is little or no information about what took place on each occasion, sixteen visits are recorded between 1535 and 1555.
We do know a little about a visit in 1550, however, when two more of the queen’s grandchildren came to see her, showing her pictures of their own children. She looked at each portrait carefully, asking questions about each child, but what really pleased her was that they also brought her word from her second son, Ferdinand. With his message of love and respect came a gift: a golden cross that was said to date from 1451. “In good truth, my son gives me great pleasure by remembering me and sending me such a devout and distinguished piece,” she said after examining it thoroughly and asking about its history. She was to treasure the cross until the day she died. Then it was given to Denia’s son; that she would have hated.
But while her family treated Juana with consideration and deference when in her presence, Charles, Isabella, and Philip were forever quick to help themselves to any of her possessions they fancied. “The chamberlain Ryvera takes to your Majesty the things which you saw here,” Denia had written to the empress after one of her visits. And none of her relatives ever suggested that she might like to return to court. It was perhaps too late for such a change anyway; she had probably grown beyond it, too accustomed to seclusion to venture into society even had that been mooted. She had first come to Tordesillas in 1509; she was entering her twenty-seventh year of captivity even as Katherine’s cortège wound its way toward Peterborough, and after that she still had almost another twenty years before death would release her. It was inevitable that the world was moving on without her.
It was not moving on without Charles. The days that passed so slowly for his mother were often too short for him to make much inroad into the demands of ruling his vast swaths of territory. Charles’s early rapprochement with Henry following Katherine’s death largely survived over the years—with Henry once seriously considering marrying the rather fetching Christina of Denmark, yet another of Juana’s granddaughters, although nothing came of it—yet Charles never really felt he could trust the English king. In that, he was probably right. Agreements with France came and went. The French were uneasy, slippery allies at best, dogged foes at worst. Within the Empire, Charles found himself powerless to prevent the spread of Lutheranism as the various independent princes chose one side or another of the religious divide and fierce fighting broke out among them: the emperor’s attempts to broker peace and reconciliation at the Diet of Regensburg in 1541 largely failed. He did no better against the Muslims: Turkish attacks on the eastern side of the Empire were frequent; his own assault on the Muslim stronghold of Algiers ended in ignominious failure in 1542.
Little seemed to go right for him. Yet always he battled on, despite his own failing health, taking his duties as a sacred trust, traveling from one region to another, trying desperately to hold his disparate lands together against all odds. With so many troubles, his mother could never be his main concern. His burden was grinding him down just as relentlessly as the years of imprisonment were taking their toll on her.
Juana’s bleak existence at Tordesillas continued from day to day much as it always had. Other than scanty information on her family’s occasional visits, we have little real idea of just how she passed her time. She still had her books and her religious texts, so could read or contemplate. Or she could wage war on the women set to guard her, women she was certain were enemies and spies, even witches, and whom she was constantly trying to have dismissed and sent away. And always there were the Denias, whom she had loathed virtually since Charles had appointed them way back in 1518. Her “dissatisfaction” with them was said by observers to be “discernible.” Sometimes Juana could bear neither them nor the sound of their voices. Merely catching snippets of their conversation could make her “suffer” even more than she had when her youngest daughter, Catalina, had left for Portugal. Charles knew just how much she hated them, for outsiders told him so, but he chose to do nothing. He relied upon them too much. Knowing just how valuable he found them made them bold, allowing their avaricious natures full rein.
While still with her mother, Catalina had noticed that items went missing, but when she had told her brother in the letter she smuggled out to him, he had brushed it aside as usual. Juana herself was forever trying to keep track of her personal belongings, sometimes demanding that chests be opened so that she could check their contents. She was constantly terrified that things she really prized, such as Ferdinand’s cross, would suddenly disappear.
Over the years the Denias had grabbed every chance they had to enrich their family as well as themselves. Juana was forever fascinated by the progress of her dynasty; the marquis was busily founding his own. He was never slow to ask the emperor for offices within both church and state for his brother, for his nephews, for his sons, even for his daughters. Requesting a post for his brother, Denia had pointed out forcefully, if respectfully, that the man deserved it, for he had “served very well with his person, and spent all the property he had with which he could have bought estates worth as much as what he now begs to have given him for life”; the position, then, was but a just reward. Another nephew, Denia maintained, was an ideal candidate to become Charles’s chaplain. Once, he had managed to inveigle the emperor into contributing toward one of his daughter’s dowries because he stated that he had been compelled to spend “her marriage portion in the service of your Majesty.”
To Juana’s distress, the Denias had also managed to tighten their grip on what went on within the castle by gradually filling the posts around the queen with their nominees. No position, however menial, was beyond their notice. When her laundress died, Denia had promptly sent his own messenger to Charles begging him “to appoint the person he will name” for then she would be “well served.” Even when Denia himself died, just a few months after Katherine, Juana did not escape from his family’s clutches: Charles appointed the marquis’s son in his father’s place. Jailers though they were, the Denias were as tied to Tordesillas as she was.
Religion remained the one issue that continually caused her relatives far more anxiety than any other. In total contrast to Katherine’s clear-cut adherence to traditional Catholicism, every so often Juana decided that she would not hear Mass and she would not confess. This had been her practice even when her father had been alive. But after 1523, when her confessor, Friar Juan de Avila, had been summarily dismissed, she became far more truculent, refusing to make a full confession at all. No one had been able to persuade her.
Charles had agonized over this many a time, so had his empress, and, once they were grown up, so did Philip and his second sister, the queen’s namesake, Princess Juana. All had sent confessors to try to cajole her back to the correct path; all had failed. Thus, she was putting her soul at risk, or so it seemed to them. The specter of heresy, never far from anyone’s thoughts in a society in which the Inquisition was so dominant, reared its head. Ironically, Juana’s piety, if that is indeed what was at the heart of her religious rebellion, made her particularly vulnerable.
With heresy so dominant within the Empire, the Inquisition stamped down ferociously whenever its officials sniffed anything that smacked of the slightest deviation from accepted norms; at least they could halt the spread of Lutheranism on home turf. Accepted norms meant outward compliance to Catholicism’s established rituals, but by the early 1520s, a growing number of people had begun to be attracted by a form of religious experience popularized by, among others, a Franciscan nun, Isabel de la Cruz. Her theories, which followed Burgundian ideas about mental prayer based on inner piety and intense contemplation, had not placed so much emphasis on attending Mass or confession on a rigidly routine basis as was customary. Convinced that individualism was highly dangerous, the Inquisition had stepped in, arresting Isabel and many of her adherents for heresy. By her own refusal to attend Mass or confession, Juana may well have been viewed by her relatives as linking herself to the same type of heresy.
Like so much about her, Juana’s true religious beliefs are a tantalizing puzzle. Perhaps she really did come to see contemplation and inner prayers as valid additions to, or even substitutes for, Mass and confession in the sight of God, just as her conventionally devout relatives feared. She had certainly been exposed to such concepts while in Burgundy as a young archduchess. If she did indeed choose such a path, she may even have come to consider her seclusion as a blessing, a chance to become closer to God without worldly responsibilities. Yet it is equally possible that she simply used religious defiance as one of her weapons to get her own way. For she never stopped feuding with her ladies, or being as difficult as ever with her jailers. It is impossible to be sure.
By 1555, after forty-six years of incarceration, seventy-five-year-old Juana had grown very frail. Sometimes she spent weeks at a time just lying in bed, too weak to move even for her attendants to change her soiled bed linen. Anxious that she might die outside the protection of the Church, her family made further strenuous attempts to persuade her to confess. Again it was to no avail; but just before the end finally came on April 12, 1555, it would seem that she accepted Extreme Unction from the Jesuit Francisco de Borja, who had been sent by her worried relatives for that very purpose. Even then, however, it appears that she did not make a full confession in the Spanish manner.
Obsequies were dutifully said for her throughout Charles’s lands, but signs of true grief within her family are conspicuous by their absence. Alive, she could be seen as an inconvenience; dead, she could be suitably, even magnificently, interred.
Dwarfed by the fame of her father and especially by that of her son, she is so often remembered simply as “Juana la Loca” (Juana the Mad), a woman whose key role in Spanish history can be so easily ignored. Yet, like Katherine, she has attracted defenders and apologists among historians and writers over the centuries, drawn by the speculation and mystery that inevitably surround her. Thus to Tamayo y Baus, whose play about her was published in 1855, she is a woman willing to sacrifice everything, even her own freedom and eventual sanity, for love; in Benito Perez Galdós’s work, published after the carnage of the First World War, she is a queen whose main concern was for the poor and the oppressed; in 1976, Martín Recuerdo, whose play’s central character is a sixteenth-century Spanish saint who founds a hospital in Granada, links her to social justice, to helping the victims of war, to upholding pure ideals, her own mental frailty enabling her to recognize the values of truth and goodness.
While Juana’s life can be so variously and effectively portrayed in drama or fiction, what is clear for historians is that to consider her only in terms of her mental state—about which the evidence is deeply ambiguous—is to do her just as much of an injustice as viewing Katherine solely in terms of her role as a discarded wife. And much of Juana’s character and what she stood for can be securely documented. Like Katherine, she had set out from Spain with the very best of intentions. Both sisters were strong-willed, both could be impulsive, both could be passionate in their allegiances and in their dislikes, both had raw determination and courage, both loved their children with a fierce intensity and commitment. But especially as she matured, Katherine could be detached, thoughtful, able to dissemble and scheme. She enjoyed wielding what power she could. Compared to Juana, she was by far more politically astute. Although it is true that Juana sometimes weighed situations before acting, she could also take too long to move decisively, and of the two sisters, she was far more volatile, far more subject to her emotions. It is perhaps ironic that while Katherine was a consort, Juana was a sovereign. Yet for all her steely determination, courage, and political acumen, it remains doubtful that even Katherine could have overcome the opposition that her sister had faced.
Although their mother, Isabella, had inherited Castile, she had been obliged to fight a civil war to gain control of it. Of all her family, Isabella was the one who could conjure the will to keep her independence as a sovereign ruler and had the skill to ensure that her husband remained a support rather than a threat. She had battled the Moors with the same degree of single-minded intensity that had earned her the Castilian crown.
With neither her mother’s ruthlessness not her innate ability, Juana was more easily manipulated, more easily controlled, more easily subdued. So she became an easy prey to her ambitious husband, father, and son. And this is where she faced odds that her mother had happily been spared: Isabella had to contend with external conflicts, but with the defeat of La Beltraneja, she never had to wage war within her immediate family circle.
Yet there was one area in which Juana excelled, surpassing even the great Isabella. In contrast to Katherine, who suffered miscarriage after miscarriage, she bore six healthy children: two sons and four daughters. She may have died almost forgotten at Tordesillas, but her descendants dominated Europe for at least two centuries after her death. As a woman to whom protecting and promoting her family represented her own crusade, that would have pleased her.
Her eldest son, Charles, became the most powerful monarch in Europe. Ferdinand, her second son, made his life within the Habsburg lands of the Empire and was elected Holy Roman Emperor when his brother died in 1558. His own son succeeded him.
Of Juana’s female children, Maria became queen of Hungary, although she was left a childless widow when her young husband died; she then helped Charles by acting as his regent in the Netherlands. Isabella eked out a miserable existence with the bullying and inept King Christian II of Denmark, eventually sharing his exile when his foolish political maneuverings cost him his throne.
Two of Juana’s daughters became queens of Portugal. Eleanor married Manuel I when her aunt, Maria, died. Having married two daughters of the Catholic Monarchs, Manuel was very happy to wed his own niece. When he died, Eleanor’s sister, Catalina, left Tordesillas to marry his successor, John III, while the widowed Eleanor became the wife of Francis I of France.
Gradually, a complex family web developed and grew as cousin married cousin and Juana’s descendants branched forever outward. But there was not yet even a toehold in England. That soon would change.