Philip and Juana were summoned to Spain to meet the people over whom it then seemed probable that they would soon be called to reign. They entered France in 1501, attended by Flemish nobles, and wherever they went was a holiday. There were weeks of splendid fêtes in honor of the progress.
When Ferdinand and Isabella heard of the arrival of Philip and Juana in Spain they hastened to Toledo to meet them. Here Philip and his Queen received the allegiance of the Cortes.
But Philip was a gay Prince, and he loved the dissipations of Flanders more than his wife or the interests of his prospective Spanish possessions. So he left his wife, and returned to Flanders.
The conduct of the handsome Prince drove Juana mad. She loved him so fondly that she thought only of him, and sat in silence day after day with her eyes fixed on the ground, as an historian says, "equally regardless of herself, her future subjects, and her afflicted parents."
She subsequently joined Philip at Burgos. Here Philip died of fever after overexertion at a game of ball. Juana never left his bedside, or shed a tear. Her grief obliterated nearly all things in life, and she was dumb. Her only happiness now, except in music, was to be with his dead body.
She removed her husband's remains to Santa Clara.
The body was placed on a magnificent car, and was accompanied in the long way to the tomb by a train of nobles and priests. Juana never left it. She would not allow it to be moved by day. She said:
"A widow who has lost the sun of her soul should never expose herself to the light of day!"
Wherever the procession halted, she ordered new funeral ceremonies. She forbade nuns to approach the body. Finding the coffin had been carried to a nunnery at a stage of the journey, she had it removed to the open fields, where she watched by it, and caused the embalmed body to be revealed to her by torches. She had a tomb made for the remains in sight of her palace windows in Santa Clara, and she watched over it in silence for forty-seven years, taking little interest in any other thing.
But as she survived Ferdinand and Isabella, her name for a time was affixed to royal commissions, and so Magellan sailed in the service of Charles under the signature of Juana, who was silently watching over her husband's tomb, in the hope that the Prince would one day rise again.