JOANNA “LA BELTRANEJA”
FROM SITGES’ “ENRIQUE IV, Y LA EXCELENTE SEÑORA.”
Circumstances thus urged peace; and Alfonso, bowing to necessity, consented to negotiations which ended in the treaty of Lisbon, signed on September 24, 1479. The sovereigns on either side renounced the titles they had usurped; the King of Portugal bound himself by oath never to marry with his niece; Isabel and Ferdinand agreed to pardon their rebellious subjects. For Joanna there was a choice of three things: either to wed the little Prince of Asturias, sixteen years her junior, when he should have reached a marriageable age; or else to enter a convent of the Order of Santa Clara; failing these, to leave Portugal and its dominions for ever.
Joanna had been given six months, within which to make her decision. She had suffered much in her troubled life from suitors who had asked her hand for their own ends and for the same reason repudiated her. She had found in her mother’s land her only refuge. These remembrances may have coloured her choice, for in the following year she entered the convent of Santa Clara at Coimbra; two ambassadors from Castile being present.
One of these, Isabel’s confessor Fra Fernando de Talavera, while making her a last offer of the hand of the Prince of Asturias, assured her that she had chosen the better part, from which no true friend or adviser would tempt her to turn aside. To this the Princess answered that her decision had been given willingly and without reward; and thus passed for the time being from the pages of history.
CHAPTER V
ORGANIZATION AND REFORM
Isabel and Ferdinand had emerged victorious from the Portuguese war; but the wounds their power had received were to be long in healing; and one at least, the poverty of their exchequer, remained a constant sore and vexation.
A certain Canon of Toledo, in an oration made to the Catholic sovereigns at the height of their power, recalls the opening of their reign:
You received your sceptre [he said] from the hands of the Most High God ... at a time when the flames of civil war burned fiercely and the rights of the community were well-nigh lost. Then were our swords employed, not to defend the boundaries of Christendom, but to rip up the entrails of our country. Enemies at home drank greedily the blood of our citizens; he was the most esteemed among us who was the strongest in violence; justice and peace were far removed.
Murder, rape, and robbery! These, according to the Sicilian historian Lucio Marineo, were hourly crimes, perpetrated without fear of punishment by the marauding bands, who haunted the highways, and even commandeered royal fortresses and strongholds as bases of operations for their raids.