The courtier here permits himself to eulogize; but the compliment if insincere was yet grounded in sincerity. Peter Martyr found in his royal mistress a correspondent ready to grant his letters their due meed of appreciation, a patroness moreover eager to plant the fruits of the classical renaissance in the somewhat arid soil of Castile.
Two other Italians of note at that time in the world of scholarship, Antonio and Alessandro Geraldino, were appointed as tutors to the young princesses; and from their instructions Isabel’s daughters emerged fitting contemporaries of the famous D’Este sisters of Ferrara. It is said that Joanna, the second of the Castilian Infantas, astonished the Flemish Court by immediately replying to the Latin oration of some learned scholar in the same tongue; while the youngest, Catherine, won from the great Erasmus the comment, whether intended as praise or otherwise, that she was “egregiously learned.”
Castilian chroniclers, when recording with pride the intelligence and learning of Isabel and her daughters, make a point of showing that such ability did not entirely quench more feminine tastes. The Queen’s visits to the unruly convents of her kingdom in company with her needle and her spinning-wheel have been already mentioned; while many were the gifts of elaborate vestments and altar-cloths that she and her ladies worked for the new Cathedral of Granada, and the other churches and religious houses founded during her reign. That her share in such employment was no mere occasional easy stitch we may perhaps assume when we learn from Father Florez that “her husband never wore a shirt she herself had not woven and worked.” Ferdinand’s chivalry was hardly of the type that would suffer rough or badly-fitting clothes for sentimental reasons.
AVILA, TOMB OF PRINCE JOHN, SON OF FERDINAND AND ISABEL
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID
“With such a mother,” adds Florez, “the daughters could hardly be idle. They learned to sew, to spin, and to embroider.”
Well-brought-up mediæval princesses, indeed, could have little in common with the daughters of kings in fairy-tale romances, condemned to luxurious sloth in high-walled gardens or battlemented towers. From their earliest days they must prepare to play their part in the future destiny of the nation, to tread the matrimonial measure not according to their fancy but at the parental wish; and then, their marriage achieved, to unite with the rôle of wife and mother the arduous task of political agent, maintaining friendly relations, often at the price of nerve-racking strain, between their old home and their new.
To Ferdinand his children were veritable “olive-branches,” emblems and instruments of the web of peace that his diplomacy was slowly spreading over Europe till France his old enemy should stand defenceless before his network of alliances. The foreign policy of Spain developed naturally under his guidance on Aragonese lines; yet Castile, though absorbed into his anti-French hostility against the traditional friendship of centuries, never entirely disregarded her own ambitions. The conquest of Granada and the discovery of the New World had been mainly Castilian triumphs, the one the extension of her border southwards, the other a successful stage in her rivalry with Portugal on the high seas.
Yet a third Castilian ambition was the maintenance of the status quo with Portugal at home, an end by no means permanently achieved by the Treaty of Lisbon in 1479. By its terms Joanna “La Beltraneja” had entered a convent at Coimbra and taken vows that were to separate her for ever from the world; but she was too valuable a puppet in the hands of her mother’s people to be allowed to remain long in such seclusion. More than once she quitted her cloister for the palace at Lisbon, posing according to her own signature as “I the Queen,” though the Portuguese preferred to recognize her by the less provocative title of “the Excellent Lady.”[[6]]
[6]. She died in Lisbon in 1530 in her sixty-ninth year.