Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (34 page)

We hear of the Moors craning their necks over the walls of the city in order to catch a glimpse of the legendary Queen. They must have felt shock as well as curiosity. Certainly Isabella in her mail (‘No bad personification of chivalry’ in this attire, Prescott called her) constituted a very different feminine image to that of the bewitching Sultana Soraya, Boabdil’s mother. Although originally a Christian captive, Soraya had accepted the rich opportunities for intrigue and influence – but not for overt warfare – presented by the world of the royal harem. ‘Weep for it like a woman, since you have failed to defend it like a man’, Boabdil was told by the Sultana when he finally left Granada and turned back for one last melancholy look towards the lost Paradise.
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But the woman at whom the Moors gaped from the walls of Baza did not weep; on the contrary, she passed her whole army in review mounted on a spirited Andalusian horse with a flowing mane. The cry which sprang from the lips of her soldiers will come as no surprise to those who have followed the fortunes of Tamara, King of Kartli: ‘Castile, Castile, for our King Isabella!’
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And so the Christian campaign moved forward inexorably to the final siege of the city of Granada late in 1491. For this siege that celebrated camp – as it was then – of Santa Fe, to which Columbus would repair, was specifically created. To the last Isabella maintained the traditionally double role of a Warrior Queen: on the one hand she continued to plot the final strategy to secure Granada with Ferdinand, and has sometimes been credited with the idea of encirclement which proved so successful. On the other hand she maintained her figurehead’s role: the chivalrous ‘Queen’s Skirmish’ took place when Isabella was spied aloft with her children, out to view the exotic palace of the
Alhambra (curiosity was not all on the Moorish side). A javelin with an insulting message ‘for the Queen of Castile’ affixed to it had been hurled in the direction of her quarters; single combat between the Moorish champion Yarfe and the Christian Garcilaso de la Vega, which the Christian won, was held to settle the matter.

Boabdil formally surrendered on 2 January 1492. Four days later, on the feast of the Epiphany, Ferdinand and Isabella entered the city of Granada in triumph. By this time – in a gesture which was both symbolic and practical – the principal mosque had been reconsecrated as a church; here Mass could be celebrated and thanks for the great victory could be given. After that the two ‘kings’ processed to the Alhambra and in the
Mexuar
or presence chamber in another symbolic gesture possessed themselves of the seats of the Moorish rulers of Granada. Soon the flag of St James, Christian patron of the crusade, would fly above the town: and the traditional cry of ‘Santiago! Santiago!’ would join the universal acclamation: ‘Granada, Granada, for the illustrious kings of Castile!’ An eye-witness termed it ‘the most distinguished and blessed day there has ever been in Spain’.
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The imperialist energies of the ‘Catholic kings’ (the Pope gave them the title following the Reconquista) were naturally released by the end of the military engagements which had preoccupied them for the last eighteen years. On the one hand Columbus was sponsored in his western venture. On the other hand Ferdinand began to look elsewhere in Europe; not only towards neighbouring Navarre, but to the south of Italy. Here he desired to establish the kingdom of Naples as an appurtenance to that of Aragon, much as Isabella had added Granada to Castile. In so doing, he introduced the influence of Spain into that mess of duchies, despotisms, cardinals and
condottieri
which constituted late-fifteenth-century Italy. One of the duchies was the Sforza duchy of Milan. When Ludovico Sforza invoked the aid of the French King to bolster up his doubtful claim to rule it, he did more than
merely add to that general central Italian turmoil. For France – the House of Anjou – as well as Spain, had its pretensions towards the debatable kingdom of Naples.

The story of Ludovico’s niece, Caterina Sforza, bold and tragic, both virago and victim, provides a melancholy footnote to these Spanish endeavours, which were ultimately successful and went towards establishing the vast Habsburg Empire, including Spain, Spanish America and Naples, which was ruled over by Isabella’s grandson Charles v.
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In a sense the fortunes of Isabella the Catholic and Caterina Sforza are as much a counterpoint to each other as were those of Matilda of Tuscany and the Empress Maud. Unlike the latter pair, Isabella and Caterina were in effect contemporaries. But Caterina, subject throughout her life to convenient scorn on the ground of her sex by her political enemies, ended by being violated at the hands of her conqueror. Isabella, as has been noted, was not only a possible early candidate for canonization soon after her death but remained one.

As with Matilda and the Empress Maud, it was religious purpose which was the apparent difference. To Isabella in August 1492 the Borgia Pope Alexander VI could write: ‘Your serenity, as greatly befits a monarch, from whom others must copy the example of virtuous living, desires to protect and defend the Catholic faith …’
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This was not the language which the Pope felt inclined to use towards Caterina Sforza, who ruled Forli and Imola, part of the territory stretching from Ravenna through the Romagna over which the Pope claimed overlordship. Caterina was on the contrary in one papal bull ‘the daughter of iniquity’ and in another communication ‘the daughter of perdition’. But it was not in fact the relative morality of the two ladies (far apart as that might be) which was at issue. The truth was more cynical, or perhaps one should say more political.

Alexander VI (by birth from Valencia and thus a subject of Ferdinand) passionately needed the support of the ‘Catholic kings’ in his papal campaigns and intrigues: Spain was finally part of the Holy League including the Pope and the Emperor which would drive the French out of Naples and establish Ferdinand’s claim to southern Italy. On the other hand Alexander’s son, Cesare Borgia, needed those lands ruled over by Caterina on behalf of her young son in order to form a powerful central Italian bloc. The sexual freedom of choice which Caterina Sforza determinedly exercised gave useful ammunition to those opposed to her for quite different reasons; here was a Warrior Queen whose lustfulness could be denounced to good effect. For Isabella there was the Warrior Queen’s other potential reward of the halo.

Caterina Sforza was born in 1462, the illegitimate daughter of Galeazza Maria Sforza, later Duke of Milan, and his mistress.
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She was brought up by her grandmother Bianca Visconti-Sforza. Her father was assassinated by the Viscontis in 1474, the year in which Isabella ascended the throne of Castile. Three years later, Caterina was married off by proxy to Girolamo Riario, nephew of the then Pope Sixtus IV.

Caterina was well educated according to the humanist tradition, and even in youth was said to have been fascinated by the deeds of famous men and women. The Tomboy Syndrome is here seen at work. Unlike Isabella, Caterina is said to have excelled at boisterous athletic sports: she was obsessed by hunting and dogs – big dogs such as bloodhounds, setters and greyhounds. (And unlike Isabella, Caterina was beautiful.) Her earliest soldiering was in 1483 when she defended her husband’s territory of Forlì from the Venetian threat. From the first Caterina relished such martial activity as she had once relished hunting; she maintained an iron discipline, not always without the aid of cruel punishments. The death of the Pope, her husband’s uncle (and the fear of the decline in the Riario cause), found Caterina, riding at the gallop with a cry of ‘Duca, duca, Girolamo! Girolamo!’, to hold the fortress of Sant’ Angelo until it could be
handed over to the legal successor of Sixtus. Significantly, Caterina, once inside the fortress, invoked the name of Galeazza Maria Sforza – the nearest strong male figure – to illustrate her defiance. She had as much brains as her father, she shouted to those who wished her to admit a plenipotentiary to negotiate.

Caterina was seven months pregnant at the time and in her gold satin gown with a vast train, a huge velvet hat with long plumes, a contemporary wrote that ‘only her belt with the curved sword and bag of gold ducats hanging down from it was masculine’. He might have added: that and the free cursing towards the soldiers in which Caterina on that occasion and many others indulged.

The illness of Girolamo Riario meant that Caterina effectively ruled Forli; his death in 1488, slaughtered by the Orsi, meant that she ruled it entirely, if nominally for their son. For the next twelve years, she led a life of extreme turbulence as she attempted to maintain her independence in the light of neighbourly oppression, papal claims and finally the arrival of the French forces. Her refusal to surrender the fortress of Ravaldino stands in general for her attitude towards her own rights – theoretically those of her family, but in fact one detects in her a more personal stubborn refusal to be consigned to the female world of submission. (Not that she was above invoking the image of Only-a-Weak-Woman like many other Warrior Queens when it was to her advantage: ‘nobody believes me … being just a lady and timid too’, she wrote to her uncle Ludovico Sforza concerning the Venetian threat to Marradi which she had persistently predicted.)

When Caterina’s large family of children were held hostages for the surrender, she is supposed to have shouted – in a famous story related in a series of versions of increasing coarseness: ‘Do you think, you fools, that I haven’t the stuff to make others?’ And so saying, she scornfully lifted up her skirt. (In the version which Caterina Sforza’s biographer, Ernst Breisach, thinks the most likely, Caterina pointed out that she was already pregnant with another child when her existing children were threatened, adding
that even if she wasn’t she could always remarry and have another family.)
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As for her bloodthirstiness, Caterina’s treatment of the Orsi family who were the assassins of her husband recalls the vengeance of Boadicea against the wreckers of her daughters: in both cases the details justify that primitive fear concerning the virago unloosed as being deadlier than the male. There were public executions and secret stranglings, followed by the frightful death of the eighty-year-old Andrea Orsi. Dressed in a vest, shirt and one sock, with his hands tied, the patriarch was first of all condemned to watch his house being pillaged and demolished. Then he was dragged round a square tied to a board at a horse’s tail; finally his heart was cut out and his aged body dismembered, the pieces thrown to the crowd.

‘Oh glorious Madonna, be merciful with a miserable sinner’, pleaded Simone Fionni, another potential victim. But Caterina replied: ‘Let vengeance rule, not pity. I shall let the dogs tear you to pieces.’ (In the event he was spared and managed to escape.)

Then there were the lovers, increasingly young, continuously virile: placing Caterina within the Voracity Syndrome may have been politically expedient for her enemies, but it was not exactly unjust. The vengeance which Caterina would take in 1495 upon another family responsible for the death of her beloved castellan Giacomo Feo (he who transported her into ‘the heaven of Venus and Mars’) would rival that exacted upon the Orsi. The assassin was killed, his wife and sons flung down a well and left to die. But on the other hand Giacomo himself, probably with the connivance of Caterina’s legitimate sons, had been speared and then horribly mutilated before he was killed.

The sufferings of the Jews, Muslims and suspect Christians at the hands of the Inquisition in distant Spain were inflicted on the orders of Isabella’s religious confessors, not her own; Isabella herself disliked the shedding of blood (including, incidentally, bullfighting). Once again it was easier to be the pious Isabella at her prayers than Caterina, who on certain occasions could hear the sound of the tortures she had ordered in her own chamber.
Yet the Orsi and the murderers of Giacomo had personally bereaved and insulted Caterina; the victims of Isabella the Catholic died for a principle – a principle of religious unity. But in the judgement of history where a Warrior Queen is concerned, it seems to be better to be associated with religious principle than with personal vengeance.

First of the lovers was Mario Ordelaffi, with whom Caterina was probably in love, in an idyll which lasted through the summer of 1489. Then the Pope took the opportunity to announce that because of ‘Caterina’s disorderly life’ he intended to award Forlì to his own son, Francescolotto Gibo, whose life was quite as dissolute. The trap lying in wait for a Warrior Queen (who could not be compared to ‘the new Eve’, like Isabella the Catholic) becomes apparent.

Caterina’s recipe book shows herself obsessed by the preservation of her beauty, in the most traditionally feminine manner: Queen Elizabeth I could not have done more, and in fact where teeth were concerned did less. Lotions of nettle-seed, cinnabar, ivy leaves, saffron and sulphur were applied to maintain the fairness of her celebrated blonde locks. Other lotions removed unwanted hair from her wonderfully white skin. Pearly teeth were guaranteed by daily applications of charcoaled rosemary stems, pulverized marble and coral cuttlebone. There was rose-water to bathe famously blue eyes, and cream for her white breasts. These appurtenances and practices of a Renaissance beauty were all very well; but when Caterina fought a long battle – masculine by the standards of the time – to hang on to her beloved territories of Forlì against the Pope’s desire to grant them elsewhere, she found that her very femininity was gleefully turned against her.

In 1497, for example, Venice expressed itself shocked by her ‘boundless sensual appetite’, when the real problem was that of Florentine aggression, which it was believed that Forlì might encourage. It hardly needs saying that a ‘boundless sensual appetite’ was if anything the mark of a Renaissance prince. But Caterina was not born a ‘prince’ – nor had she established herself
as such in the minds of her people, once again unlike Queen Isabella.