Joanna of Castile

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Joanna (Spanish: Juana de Castilla) (November 6, 1479 – April 12, 1555), called Joanna the Mad (Juana La Loca), was Queen regnant of Castile and mother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. She was the second daughter of Ferdinand II of Aragon, and Isabella of Castile, and was born at Toledo.

The Castilian version of her name was Juana. In Germanic countries, she is usually known by the Latin form of her name, Joanna. Other English equivalents of the name include Jane and Joan.

[edit] Life

In 1496 at Lille, Joanna was married to the Archduke Philip the Handsome, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, and at Ghent in February 1500, she gave birth to future emperor Charles V.

The death of her only brother John, Prince of Asturias, her eldest sister Isabella of Asturias, queen of Portugal, and then of the latter's infant son Miguel, Prince of Asturias, made Joanna the heiress of the Spanish kingdoms. Her only living siblings were Maria of Aragon and Catherine of Aragon, three and six years younger than Joanna. In 1502 the Castilian Cortes of Toro recognized herself as proprietary heiress to the Castilian throne, Charles as her successor, and Philip as her legitimate consort. She was then named Princess of Asturias, the title traditionally given to the heir of Castile.^[1]

Joanna was said to pine day and night for her husband while he was overseas, and when she eventually joined Philip in Flanders, her passionate jealousy and constant suspicion of him made her notorious, if not necessarily beloved, in the local court.

Upon the death of Isabella of Castile in November 1504, Joanna became Queen regnant of Castile, and her husband King consort; Joanna's father, Ferdinand, lost his title of 'King of Castile', although his wife's will permitted him to govern the country in Joanna's absence, or, if Joanna was unwilling to rule it herself, until Charles reached the age of 20. Ferdinand refused to accept this: he minted Castilian coins in the name of "Ferdinand and Juana, King and Queen of Castile, Léon and Aragon", and in early 1505 persuaded the Cortes that Joanna's "illness...is such that the said Queen Doña Juana our Lady cannot govern"; the Cortes then appointed Ferdinand as Joanna's guardian, and as administrator and governor of the kingdom. However, Philip the Handsome was unwilling to accept any threat to his own chances of ruling Castile, and in response Ferdinand embarked upon a pro-French policy, marrying Germaine de Foix, the niece of Louis XII of France (and his own great-niece), in the hope that she would produce a son to inherit Aragon, and perhaps Castile. ^[2]

Ferdinand's remarriage merely strengthened support for Philip and Joanna in Castile, and the pair decided to travel to Castile in late 1505. Leaving Flanders on 10 January 1506, their ships were wrecked on the English coast and the couple became guests of Henry VII at Windsor Castle. They were only able to leave on 21 April, by which time civil war was looming in Castile: Philip apparently considered landing in Andalusia and summoning the nobles to take up arms against Ferdinand. Instead, he and Joanna landed at Coruña on 26 April, upon which the Castilian nobility abandoned Ferdinand en masse. Ferdinand then met with Philip at Villafafila on 20 June 1506, and handed over the government of Castile to his "most beloved children", promising to retire to Aragon. Philip and Ferdinand then signed a second treaty, agreeing that Joanna's mental instability made her incapable of rule, and promising to exclude her from government. Ferdinand then proceeded to repudiate the agreement on the same afternoon, declaring that Joanna should never be deprived of her rights as Queen Proprietress of Castile. A fortnight later, having come to no fresh agreement with Philip, and thus effectively retaining his right to interfere if he considered his daughter's rights to be infringed, he abandoned Castile, leaving Philip to govern in Joanna's stead.^[3]

This arrangement did not last long. On 25 September 1506 Philip died suddenly of typhus fever in Burgos. Joanna, pregnant with her sixth child, then made attempts to secure her rights to rule alone, in her own name; however, her arrogance and coldness towards important figures of the kingdom, the rumours of her mental instability and the unwillingness of the men around her to accept her rights doomed the endeavour. By 20 December 1506, she had quietly abandoned Burgos, heading for the village of Torquemada. By now, she was being characterised as "lost, without any sense", although her Secretary, Juan Lopez, declared her "more sane than her mother". She refused to trust Spanish women, even going so far as sending for a midwife from Flanders to assist in her delivery, and was characterised as refusing to abandon her dead husband's corpse. Meanwhile, the country fell into disorder. Her heir, Charles, was a six-year old child being raised in his aunt's care in far-off Flanders; her father, Ferdinand, remained in his own dominions, allowing the crisis to reach a head. A regency council under Archbishop Cisneros was set up (against the Queen's orders) but it was unable to manage the growing public disorder; plague and famine devastated the kingdom, with supposedly half the population perishing of one or the other; and the Queen was unable to secure the funds she required to shore up her power. In the face of this, Ferdinand returned to Castile in July 1507: a coincidental remission of the plague and famine quieted the instability, but left an impression that the health of the Kingdom had been restored by the return of Ferdinand.^[4]

Ferdinand and Joanna met at Hornillos on 30 July 1507; Ferdinand then constrained her to yield up power to himself. On 17 August she summoned three members of the royal council and ordered them to inform the grandees, in her name, of Ferdinand's return: "That they should go to receive his highness and serve him as [they would] her person and more." She refused to sign the instructions: a last gesture of defiance, and a statement that she did not as Queen regnant endorse the surrender of her own royal power. Nonetheless, she was thereafter Queen only in name, and all documents, though issued in her name, were signed with Ferdinand's signature, "I the King". He would be named administrator of the kingdom by the Cortes of Castile in 1510, although he would entrust the government mainly to Cisneros. Joanna he would eventually install in Tordesillas, near Valladolid, in February 1509, after having dismissed all of her faithful servants and appointing a small retinue faithful to him alone. ^[5] By this time, she would appear to have been almost completely mad: some accounts claim that she took her husband's corpse with her to Tordesillas, to keep it close to her.^[6]

Ferdinand would die in 1516, an embittered man: his second wife, Germaine, had failed to provide him with a male heir, leaving his eldest grandson, the Flemish-raised Charles of Ghent, as his heir. Ferdinand resented that Aragon and - in theory on the death of Joanna, in reality upon his own death - Castile would pass to this foreign grandchild, to whom he had transferred his hatred of Philip; instead, he nurtured hopes that his younger grandson and namesake, Ferdinand, who had been born and raised in Spain, could succeed, even naming Ferdinand as his heir in his will before being persuaded to revoke it and name Charles as his heir instead. When he died, Aragon - which based the succession upon a semi-salic convention, forbidding succession of females but allowing the succession of males descended through females - and its associated crowns thus passed not to Joanna but to Charles, being governed in his absence by Ferdinand's bastard son, Alonso de Aragon. Castile, still nominally subject to Joanna, continued to be governed by Cisneros due to the Queen's continuing insanity, although a group of nobles, led by the Duke of Infantado, attempted to proclaim the Infante Ferdinand as King of Castile. The attempt failed, and in October 1517, Charles arrived in Asturias. On 4 November, he and his sister Eleanor met Joanna at Tordesillas – there they secured from her the necessary authorisation to allow Charles to rule as her co-King in Castile. Despite her acquiescence to his wishes, her imprisonment would continue; although the Castilian Cortes, meeting in Valladolid, would spite Charles by addressing him only as Su Alteza ("Your Highness") and reserving Megestad ("Majesty") for Joanna, no-one seriously considered rule by Joanna a real proposition.^[7]

In 1520, the Revolt of the Comuneros (1520–1522), a revolt against the harsh royal control over Castile broke out. The rebel leaders demanded that Castile be governed in accordance with the supposed practices of the Catholic Kings; in an attempt to legitimise their rebellion, the rebels turned to Joanna: as theoretical sovereign monarch, if she gave written approval of the rebellion, it would be legalised and would triumph. In an attempt to prevent this, Don Antonia de Rojas, Bishop of Mallorca, led a delegation of royal councilors to Tordesillas, asking her to sign a document denouncing the Comuneros; she demurred, requesting that he present her specific provisions. Before this could be done, the Comuneros in turn stormed the palace and requested her support (prompting Adrian of Utrecht, the regent appointed by Charles, to declare that the emperor would lose Castile if she did so). Persuaded by Ochoa de Landa and her confessor, Fray Juan de Avila, she showed sympathy to the comuneros, but refused to sign: to do so, she was persuaded, would cause irreparable damage to her kingdom and to her son's rights. Charles repaid her loyalty to him when he quelled the uprising, having her locked up for the rest of her life in a windowless room in the castle of Tordesillas. She died on Good Friday, April 12, 1555.^[8]

Most historians believe she suffered from schizophrenia and she was kept locked away and imprisoned. Needed to legitimize the claims of her father and son to the throne, Joanna only nominally remained Queen regnant of Castile until her death.

She is entombed in the Capilla Real of Granada, alongside her parents, her husband, and her nephew Miguel.

Her niece was Mary I of England, known as Bloody Mary.

[edit] Ancestry and descent

[edit] Ancestors

[edit] Issue

[edit] Joanna in literature, art, music, and film

The figure of Queen Joanna attracted authors, composers, and artists of the romanticist movement, due to her characteristics of unrequited love, obsessive jealousy, and undying fidelity. Many later authors have followed this trend of portraying Joanna as a lovesick, and later griefstricken, woman, preferring to focus on her love for her husband than on her mental illness. An incomplete list of these works follows:

• Felipe el Hermoso (1845) — Eusebio Asquerino and Gregorio Romero. A play in four acts.
• La Locura de Amor (1855) — Manuel Tamayo y Baus. Play
• Doña Juana la Loca (late 19th Cent.) — Emilio Serrano. Opera.
• Juana la Loca (1877) — Francisco Pradilla. Painting (shown above). Currently in the Prado museum of Madrid, Spain.
• Locura de amor (1948) — Juan de Orduña. Film.
• La Loca (1979) — Gian Carlo Menotti. Opera.
• Juana la Loca (2001) — directed by Vicente Aranda and starring Pilar Lopez de Ayala as Joanna, was nominated for 12 Goya Awards, and was released in the US as Mad Love. Based on La Locura de Amor by Manuel Tamayo y Baus.
• El Pergamino de la Seducción (2005) — Gioconda Belli. Novel in Spanish.
• The Last Queen (2007) — C.W. Gortner. Novel in English and Spanish

[edit] Biographies

• W. H. Prescott, Hist. of Ferdinand and Isabella (1854)
• Rosier, Johanna die Wahnsinnige (Vienna, 1890)
• H. Tighe, A Queen of Unrest (1907).
• R. Villa, La Reina doña Juana la Loca (Madrid, 1892)
• Bethany Aram, "Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe" (2005)

[edit] References

[edit] Sources

• Miller T: The Castles and the Crown. Coward-McCann, New York, 1963
• Aram, Bethany, "Juana "the Mad's" Signature: The Problem of Invoking Royal Authority, 1505- 1507", Sixteenth Century Journal
• Elliott, J.H., Imperial Spain, 1469-1716

[edit] External links

• Biography of Juana the Mad of Castile (1479–1555)
• Juana of Castile at Find-A-Grave

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