Why was Juana called "la Loca"? Part 1

Juana of Castile has gone down in history as "Juana la Loca." But Juana's mental state was likely not as bad as it seemed. Was she instead the victim of conniving relatives? In this episode, we discuss Juana's youth, her marriage and more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm deleted chalk Rewarding and today's
subject is going to be Wanta of Cass Steele. And
it's a really popular suggestion. But full disclosure, I originally

(00:24):
chose it as a Halloween topic. I feel kind of
like you a few weeks ago, where you were admitting
one of your topics was Han Dipple. Yes, John Dipple
was supposed to have been a Halloween topic, but I
believe you had a delayed book order. I did, what's
your excuse? I also I had a little bit of
a delay. I had a library book on order. Um.

(00:44):
But I also just realized it was a way more
complex story than I was anticipating. And and once I
got into the story, I realized it wasn't really a
Halloween episode at all, even though the legends surrounding it
certainly suggest of Halloween nightmarish sort of air to it.

(01:04):
I want a story that really gets dwarfed by her
more famous family members, her parents, Ferdinand and Isabella, the
Catholic monarchs who combined the powers of their respective kingdoms
Aragon and Castile, her grandson Philip the second of Armada
fame her sister Catherine of Aragon, who is the wife

(01:25):
that Henry the eighth cast aside to marry Anne Boleyn.
She's probably the most famous of all. Um. You can
see why I want to get almost lost in the mix.
So consequently, pretty much all that ever gets said about
Wanna was that she was crazy, but she rant and
raved to get her way, but she was so madly
in love with her husband she kept his dead body
on hand, opening the coffin lid, gazing at it, kissing

(01:49):
his feet. Thus we have Wanna Loloca or Joanna the mad,
and that's often the way the requests come in. They
want to know about this crazy person, and that Wanna
was crazy easy explains away the nearly fifty years that
she spent in confinement, not allowed to write, not allowed
to visit the nearby convent, and eventually kept to one room,

(02:10):
though she was in her own right Queen of Castile.
But the real story here is really so much more
interesting and raises a lot of good questions. For example,
was Wanta really mentally unbalanced? And why did the most
important people in her life, her husband, her father, or
her son, why did they allow her to be treated

(02:31):
as she was? And finally, why, when she had the
chance didn't she do the same by them? So, as
you can tell, this is a pretty massive subject with
a lot of complexities, and we're gonna take two episodes
to discuss it. Um Plus, I just think since people
have been asking for this topic since the beginning, I'm
pretty sure we need to do right by it. But

(02:53):
one of ultimate fate, which was of course being locked
up in Tordo Seas Castle, had a lot to do
with her birth and obviously because of who her parents were,
Ferdinand and Isabella, but also because of her birth order.
She was the third child, with a brother and a
sister ahead of her, so it was never expected that
she would come into the inheritance she did. Her mother

(03:16):
was Isabella of Castile, who was a woman of intense
religious conviction. I mean, hello Spanish Inquisition. That's probably the
other main association you have with one of Jannah's family members. Um.
But Isabella, as a young woman had fought really hard
to snatch her own throne from a competing family claim,
and and really had a lot of force in her

(03:36):
personality her father. Wanna's father rather, was Ferdinand the second
of Aragon, and this couple had arranged their own marriage
in fourteen sixty nine, and while the partnership didn't officially
unite their kingdoms, I mean both kingdoms even maintain their
own currencies, it did provide a certain amount of unity.

(03:58):
They were each acting as mona and consort, and it
was a very cooperative sort of marriage. The couple carried
out the reconquista together with former podcast subject and um
prevented a front, at least to their people that their
kingdoms were allied. But of course all these joint acts
of theirs, all this cooperation hinged on the both of

(04:19):
them being alive or at least uniting their kingdoms permanently
through their children. But for the first seven years that
they were married, it seemed like the air that would
have to do this was unfortunately, or unfortunately in their eyes.
A girl, a girl who was also named Isabella after
her mother. Then, miraculously, in fourteen seventy eight, fernand and

(04:39):
Isabella had a second child, a son named Juan, followed
quickly by three more daughters. Juanna, who was born in
fourteen seventy nine, then Maria and then Catherine. And while
the junior Isabella had been raised to be a possible queen,
the younger daughters were raised to be consorts because their
parents naturally assumed that their brother Juan would now inherit
their kingdoms. Which is not to say that they didn't

(05:01):
lead an unusually adventurous life for Princesses One and her sisters.
I mean, Queen Isabella was intensely interested in supervising her
children's educations and their religious instruction, and she didn't let
her multi year conflict with the more stop her from
keeping a really close eye on how things were progressing
with all of them. She took the kids on the
road with her, something that was occasionally dangerous, like when

(05:25):
the family tent caught fire, and they were even there
when Ferdinand and Isabella took control of the Alambra. Deblina
and I were talking about this beforehand. It seemed like
Ferdinand and Isabella more than your average monarchs. And you know,
we've done a lot of these sad royal childhood stories.
Now um really seemed to have raised their kids and
and I think that something important to remember going forward

(05:46):
to that these would have been role models to them,
not just from like well you are my lady, the queen,
my lord, the father, but somebody who they really knew
closely as well. But the girls were really well educated.
They learned Latin and politics, religion, music, and dancing, plus
a lot of domestic skills like baking and spinning and weaving.

(06:08):
According to Julia Fox, who wrote the book Sister Queens,
they would have been some of the best educated women
of their day. Really, with one pretty major oversight, at
least for girls who were meant to be consorts abroad,
girls who would be marrying into foreign courts to established
diplomatic relations, and that was modern languages. I mean they

(06:30):
were learning Latin that they weren't learning French, they weren't
learning English. A bit of a problem. But among this
especially close and talented family, Juana was really considered the beauty.
She had auburn hair, she had blue eyes, and she
was supposed to have really closely resembled her namesake to

(06:50):
Ferdinand's mother, Juanna Enriquez. She apparently resembled her so much
that Isabella would sometimes call her daughter mother in law.
According to the Women in World History Encyclopedia, Having a
much older sister also meant that Juanna, Maria, and Catherine
got a peek at their future as consorts when they
were still kids. So they got a glimpse at all

(07:11):
the pageantry that came with the wedding and the importance
of a political alliance, and even the responsibility that came
with it. But also they got to look at what
it meant for someone to part the family. To leave
the family, you realistically expect to never see them again
in this scenario. So when their eldest sister, Isabella left
home in fourteen ninety to marry the Portuguese king, they

(07:33):
got to see all of this. But just seven months later,
her husband was thrown from his horse and killed, so
Isabella came home and she was devastated. So this was
likely a pretty formative event and all the kids lives,
and one that showed just how fragile these really long
planned alliances could be. Eventually, though, it was of course,
the younger children's turned to marry and Ferdinand and Isabella

(07:56):
really seemed to have wrapped things up neatly and efficiently.
They of course still had the widowed Isabella on their hands,
and they wanted to remarry her. Um in this case,
to her dead husband's brother, who was the new King
of Portugal Manuel, their middle daughter, Maria, they decided to
keep in reserve, and that's because Isabella was so upset

(08:19):
being widowed that she was trying to get out of
any remarriage entirely. She wanted to perhaps even enter a convent.
So we're gonna keep Maria in hand just in case
Isabella didn't come through on that alliance. Catherine, who was
still just a very young girl at the time, would
eventually go on to marry the eldest son of Henry
the seventh of England, Prince Arthur. That's also a really

(08:41):
great story Katherine marrying Arthur and her widowhood and eventually
marrying Arthur's brother, Henry the eighth. And then finally, and
this is the part that really concerns our story, Wanna
and Juan would marry a brother and sister from Burgundy,
Philip and Margaret, who were the children of the Holy
Roman Emperor Maximilian, and this dual marriage, I mean, I

(09:04):
know it sounds kind of strange, but it was a
really good deal on both sides, at least for the
from the parents perspective. It was a double strong alliance.
For one thing, there was no need for a dowry.
And it was even convenient in terms of transportation. I mean,
at least if the kids were kind of all the
same age, like, we'll send our daughter on one ship
and you could we'll pick up yours and take her

(09:25):
back to Spain. And it was pretty efficient, pretty efficient
from from there the way that they saw thing, and
it was considered a pretty good match for sixteen year
old wanted to. For one thing, she dodged a bullet
by not having to marry the widowed Maximilian herself. His son,
Philip was just a year older than her and had
the nickname Philip the Fair or Philip the Handsome, So

(09:48):
coming from a sixteen year old girl's point of view,
that's probably a good catch, something kind of enticing. And
while she only stood to become Archduchess on her marriage,
Philip was well positioned to become the next Holy Roman
Emperor after his father, which was not an inherited position.
He had to have the right political connections essentially, So

(10:08):
Wanna left Laredo August with a fleet of one hundred ships.
Bad weather delayed her party, wrecked a ship and meant
that she missed her fiance. When she finally got to Burgundy.
She eventually met up with Philip in October, so months
months later, but a week before their planned wedding. When

(10:29):
Philip saw her, though, he was apparently so captivated by
her beauty that he ordered the priest marry them then
and there. So that seems like, I mean, it's kind
of a fairy tale princess sort of story. Right. She
marries her, her handsome prince. He's only a year older
than her, He's well positioned to become Holy Roman Emperor.

(10:53):
Good deal. Right, Maybe not so much, because while things
may have briefly been idyllic with Wanta and Philip and
love and with Wanna able to live a freer life
in Brussels, then she ever had at home with dances
parties to go to, and she got to wear these
daring Flemish stresses. But it didn't last very long. The

(11:14):
couple seemed to maintain their intense physical attraction for pretty
much their entire marriage, but Philip soon became emotionally and
possibly even physically abusive, and he wasn't exactly faithful either, which,
of course no wife wants that. But for her part,
Wanna reacted to Philip's infidelities in a way that would
have been considered unseemly for a consort of the time.

(11:37):
Fox mentions how Isabella, despite her strong marriage of equals
with Ferdinand, just kind of turned a blind eye on
his illegitimate children, but Wanna did no such thing. She
would make scenes and was intensely jealous of any woman
that Philip came in contact with. She'd starve herself in
protest or go without sleep. But Philip was also really

(12:00):
manipulative and controlling as well. He not only allowed her
no interest in governing, which I mean she might not
have expected that as a consort, but at least something
for her to do. He didn't allow her anything like that,
but he also controlled her own household and her personnel,
which was something that was a that was a very
unusual decision to do that. He also managed all her finances,

(12:22):
and I mean you might think of monarchs as like
couples with a joint checking account. That was not the case.
Queens had their own lands, their own rents, their own bills,
their own staff to handle businesses. I mean they would
bring a lot of that in perhaps with the dowry,
but also some might be gifts from their husband, but
they would manage it separately from from all of his possessions.

(12:44):
Philip didn't let want to do that, and then he
also stopped giving her the money due through their marriage agreement. Eventually, Isabella,
who was kind of she was hearing rumors about what
was going on with her daughter, kind of concerned with
her daughter's religious state and whether she was as devout
as she ought to be, but also what was going
on with the marriage. She sent an envoy called Friar

(13:06):
to Moss to investigate the situation, and he reported back
that Juanna didn't even have money for alms, and since
she couldn't pay her own servants, most of the Spanish
one's ditched or eventually and opened up space for Philip's
own picks to come in um basically endless numbers of
spies to to watch Wana's every move well and then

(13:29):
probably most ominously. Friar Thomas also reported that Wanna told
him if she complained quote, she receives a great injury
from it, so suggesting that she's being hurt in the
process as well to the world. Though these two still
seemed like a happy couple. Philip dressed her up for
public appearances and they would dine in public together. He

(13:52):
would give her costly jewelry, and they even have babies together,
eventually an air and a spare and four daughters too,
so a lot of kids. One obnoxious note about that, though,
when their first child turned out to be a girl. Disappointed,
Philip basically told Wanna, you know the expenses on you wife.
I'll pay for a boy if you have one, but

(14:13):
you can handle the daughter. Um. But back to back
to Spain. We've been catching up on all of what
was going on in Burgundy between Wanna and Philip, but
as their marriage was crumbling, her family underwent this series
of marriages and births and unexpected deaths that ultimately resulted

(14:34):
in the most unlikely of events, and that was, of course,
Wanna becoming Air to Aragon and Castile. So first of all,
we should backtrack to the double marriage between the two
brothers and sister sets. So while Wanna was sent off
to Burgundy to marry Philip, Philip seventeen year old sister
Margaret was sent to Spain to marry Juanna's older brother Juan.

(14:56):
Everybody's got all that straight This couple also experienced three
marital happiness, but in October, after only six months of marriage,
Juan suddenly sickened and died. He was only twenty years old. Um,
things got worse. Margaret turned out to be pregnant, but
she miscarried. Uh. It seemed like things were in a

(15:17):
bad state for Ferdinand and Isabella's family, and this meant
that Juana's eldest sister, Isabella was again air. She had
finally overcome her grief at her first husband's death to
marry his brother, and had only recently gone to Portugal
when the news of Juan's death came to her, and
she and her husband, King Manuel returned to Spain to
be recognized by the courtis and Assembly representing the nobility

(15:41):
and talents of the kingdom. Isabella too turned out to
be pregnant and gave birth to her son Miguel in Spain,
but she died shortly after childbirth, and ultimately her sister Maria,
the one who had sort of been held in reserve,
was sent off to Mary Manuel, making this story even
more complicated, very confusing. The family tree gets a little

(16:02):
tight in there, but um, at this point, clearly all
the hopes were on this baby boy, Miguel, whose father
even agreed for him to be raised by his grandparents
in Spain rather than Portugal. I mean, he seemed very obliging.
But little Miguel lived only two years and died in
fifteen hundred. So suddenly Juanna is the eldest of her

(16:26):
parents children, no grandchildren from the siblings above her, and
therefore heir to her parents lands, a situation that was
unimaginable to Ferdinand, to Isabella, and to Wanna herself, but
immensely attractive to her husband Philip, who, certainly, if he
wouldn't allow her to be a consort, you know, to

(16:48):
manage her own household as his consort, he certainly had
no intention of letting her rule as her own monarch,
you know, as a rule her own lands as queen
to the Catholic Martin. Though it was a disturbing situation
since Wanna was so clearly under Philip's control, as Isabella
knew from Friar Thomas's reports, and since Philip, being from Burgundy,

(17:10):
was not as unabashedly pro Spanish as they might have hoped.
In fact, on the way to Spain, Philip insisted that
they traveled by land, though it took much longer and
Wuanna was pregnant with their third child at the time,
but he wanted to do this so that they could
just kind of take a detour and swing by France.
On the way there. He betrothed their baby Charles to Louis,

(17:33):
the twelfth Daughter, something that Wanna is a good anti
French Spanish princess just hated and Wanna just an interesting
note here. Even though she was still just an archduchess.
She also didn't acknowledge the French queen as her better
and even wore only Spanish clothes at court. It's a
spunky girl who was um and that's another important thing

(17:55):
to consider, especially in the next episode. But fernand and
Isabella still hoped that the Philip problem could be sort
of ironed out, and they hoped they could do that
by keeping the couple, the young couple and their kids
ideally in Spain with them, you know, training Wanna to
become an independent monarch, as they had with their eldest
daughter Isabella when she was a girl. Teaching Philip about

(18:17):
his new country how it worked, trying to get him
to have an appreciation of it, but Philip was just
completely uninterested in this, and he was there for for
two things, essentially for the approval of the courts of
Castile and Aragon as Wanna as the heir and as
Philip as their consort. So he wanted to get that

(18:40):
stamp of approval and then go home. And even though
Wanna was by this point already pregnant with their fourth
child and couldn't travel, he left anyway. He was going
back to Burgundy with or without her, So I Wanna
had to stay in Spain for for a certain period
of time to deliver her baby. She did that the

(19:01):
second son, named Ferdinand, and then she was faced with
a decision, and it was probably the most important decision
of her life, or may have been, and that was
whether to stay in Spain with her parents and her
her new baby or returned to her husband. It's hard
to really speculate too much without indulging in all history here,

(19:23):
but Isabella was offering her daughter the chance to learn
the workings of government and to grow into an independent monarch.
Though it's it is arguable as to how much power
Wana might have had with two parents as forceful of
hers sort of leading the way, but at the very least, though,
there was this chance to get away from her abusive
husband Philip and live again in this luxurious, familiar life.

(19:49):
But manipulative Philip knew that as an unpopular foreigner, his
Spanish claim really revolved around having Wanna under his thumb,
so he was probably regretting leaving without her at this point.
I Wanna chose her husband though for some reason, whether
it was because she loved him, or maybe she missed

(20:09):
her other older children because Philip had made little Charles
write a letter to her begging her to come home,
or she simply felt it was her role to play,
to go back and to be his wife, the loyal
consort um. But Isabella wouldn't agree to it, and so
Wanna finally protested in the most effective way. She knew

(20:30):
how when she had certainly honed at her during her
time at Philip's court um and she didn't eat, and
she didn't sleep, she didn't talk. She'd stand in the
rain and man to to be let be able to
go home, and by fifteen o four Isabella finally let
her go. She convinced her to to leave baby fernand

(20:51):
behind in Spain, since he was kind of young to travel. Um.
It was clearly a fateful decision, and that's partly because
Wanna threw in her lot with Philip, but also because
she showed her mother and many other people back in
Spain that she might be a little unbalanced. All of
these uncleanly sort of protests, Um, we're disturbing to folks,

(21:14):
and it turned out to be the perfect weapon for
Philip to gain Juanna's inheritance. But we're going to stop
there and talk about what happens later, what happens with Philip,
what happens with Ferdinand, what happens with Charles, who's this
little kid at this point, um, and who ends up

(21:35):
getting to run Castile and Aragon he does. So we
will be discussing all of that in a second episode.
So what kind of listener mail do we have today, Sarah? Well,
we have one that I chose because it was pretty charming,
but it also has a Spanish reference in it, but
I'll get to that the end. It's from listener Monica,

(21:57):
and she wrote to say, I'm a fiction novel us
and I just love your podcast. When I'm writing, I
always have you guys or Josh and Chuck from stuff
you should know on in the background without knowing it.
You guys have been a huge help when I'm looking
for voices for my characters. Currently, Sarah, you give voice
to the good queen, and Dablina you give voice to

(22:19):
the heroine. When I finally published the first part of
my book series, I'll be sure to send you both
a copy. So that's very fun. You do have a
very queenly thank you. You have the voice of the heroine.
Um So. Monica does go on though to to mention
that she has a little bit of a connection to
the great Spanish hero El Sid, and suggested him as

(22:43):
a topic. Um Katie and I talked about his horse
long ago in the History's Greatest Battle Horses that's at Um,
but she thought that Elsid himself would make a pretty
excellence Objeck. So we want to go way back in
Spanish history, that would be a good place to start.
We have another email here from Shannon in Texas and

(23:04):
she says, I was so excited to see the subject
of your most recent podcast, which is a different podcast
from probably the most recent one many of you have
listened to. If you're listening in order, it's the Jim
Booie podcast that she's referring to. She says, I have
a family connection to share. My dad is really into genealogy,
and in some book read of a dispute between Jim
Booie and one of my direct ancestors. Further research found

(23:27):
that my ancestors sold Louie land that wasn't his to sell.
So there is the instance of land speculation that infuriated
Booie and showed him that a profit was to be had.
While I was in high school fifteen years ago, we
took a little trip to the basement of a parish
courthouse in Louisiana and actually held the original bill of
sale in our hands, complete with my ancestors and Booie's signatures.

(23:48):
Dad and I joked that we should have just walked
out with it. The digital picture isn't great. In the
courthouse apparently figured that they shouldn't allow just anyone to
produce their records unsupervised. Darn. Anyway, we were pretty blown
away by that story. I mean, if if it's the
same guy, the one who kicked off Bouie in the
first place, realizing that this could be a business after

(24:11):
he got cheated himself, that's pretty, pretty wild a good
ancestry story. It is so thank you guys, thank you
for suggestions for writing stories inspired by our voices. That's
always cool. Um and just sharing suggestions too. Yeah, And
if you have any more suggestions to share with us,
you can write us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com,

(24:33):
or you can look us up on Facebook. We're also
on Twitter at mist in history. And if you want
to learn a little bit more about Wanta's predicament, we
do have an article on how royalty works. You can
check that out by visiting our homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot

(24:55):
com that was named the land Named the land who