January 5, 2021 • 26 mins
Depending on which stories you read, Juana of Castile is either a woman who went mad after the death of her husband, or a maligned figure who was manipulated by the men in her life so they could rule Spain in her place. Her life is a perfect example of the stories we like to tell about women who go mad. [Support Noble Blood via our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales. Noble Blood merch is available here: https://store.dftba.com/collections/noble-blood]
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkie listener discretion is advised. Culturally,
we are obsessed with the idea of women going mad.
It's a theme that's pervaded literature for hundreds of years.
(00:23):
It's a woman sometimed, young, usually beautiful, who becomes a
tragic figure hold away in a gothic, decrepit mansion. The
woman loses her mind and then usually her life. There
are too many examples to name, the Lady of Shelot,
Cathy from Weathering Heights, Bertha and Janier, Miss Havisham, and
(00:49):
of course, perhaps most iconically, Ophelia. Feminist literary critic and
Princeton professor Elaine show Walter wrote, Ophelia became the prototype
not only of the deranged woman in Victorian literature and art,
but also of the young female asylum patient. In fiction.
(01:10):
The madwoman usually comes from a society of rigid gender rules.
Take Ophelia again. Ophelia's madness is the thing that allows
her to break free of the limitations and restrictions on
women in her society. In the play, her hair that
was once neatly covered and pulled back is after she
(01:31):
goes mad, let down, wavy and untamed at its full length, and,
as Elaine show Walter points out, Ophelia also breaks free
of her sexual propriety. Ophelia becomes provocative, singing body songs
and giving away flowers in a not so subtle allusion
to her deflowering herself. That brings up another aspect of
(01:56):
the pop culture portrayal of the woman gone mad, that
madness is the inverse of proper female decorum when it
comes to sexuality. A mad woman is one who wants,
one who has explicit female desires. In essay on Ophelia,
(02:17):
Emmy Harmana writes about the idea of mad women as
a rado maniacs. She writes this is based on masculine
assumptions that women are more inclined to go mad since
they are closer to the irrational by nature, and that
young women's madness is more often than not caused by
sexual frustration of unrequited love. There it is the woman
(02:42):
who goes crazy because she wants a man she cannot have.
Perhaps it's even the origin of a particularly sexist modern
trend of dudes telling their friends that all of their
clingy x is are quote crazy. The link between sexual
frustration or desire and madness or hysteria in women might
(03:06):
also help to explain the Victorian invention of the vibrator,
used to induce what doctors called paroxysms in women in
order to restore their sanity. But the stories when it
comes to our fictional heroines don't usually end well. Mad
(03:26):
women get a brief chance to break free from social conventions,
to scream in a society that forced them to whisper.
But then these women's are disposed of. They die by
beautiful suicide in flowy white gowns and water if they're
beautiful like Ophelia or the Lady of lat or by
(03:49):
fire if they're not as beautiful like Miss Havisham or
Bertha in Jane Eyre, or more sinisterly, they're disposed of,
deposited in a asylums or the attic, like the heroine
of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman story The Yellow Wallpaper. If
you've never read The Yellow Wallpaper, you absolutely should. It
(04:12):
was written in eighteen two, and the story is framed
as the diary of a young woman who suffers from
what might be in modern parlance called postnatal depression, and so,
after this woman gives birth, her husband decides that the
best treatment for her is isolating her in an attic room.
(04:33):
Over the course of the story, the narrator begins to hallucinate,
to become as mad as her either sinister or misguided
husband believed her to be. Was the narrator mad all along?
Or did the prolonged period of boredom and isolation drive
her crazy? That brings us to the unlucky subject of
(04:57):
today's podcast. Want To of Castile, or as she's known
more colloquially, Juana la Loca. The Juanna was technically Queen
of Castile for over fifty years and of Argon for
thirty of those. Her title was in name only. For
the vast majority of her reign. She was imprisoned in
(05:18):
a castle in tordisse Us, declared insane by the men
in her life who wanted to rule in her place,
first her husband and then her father and then her son.
As a literary figure, Juanna is irresistible. Her supposed madness
was brought on by her obsessive love for her husband.
(05:41):
After his death, they say that Wanna refuse to let
them bury the body so that she could continually open
the casket and kiss his cold face. There maybe couldn't
be a better example of an Ophelia archetype in real life,
love sick over a man to the point that it
destroyed her sanity. But it's impossible to note to what
(06:04):
extent the stories are true, or whether they were just
convenient propaganda for her father to use in his claim
to her kingdom. There are versions of Juana's story that
try to paint her as a maligned feminist of history,
a woman who was perfectly in her right mind, wrongfully
accused of madness on purpose by men who knew that
(06:27):
they could have that power. But some of one's behavior
was genuinely strange, and as an heir of the deeply
inbred Hapsburg family, mental illness was an occupational hazard for
European monarchs. By the end of Juana's imprisonment, after decades
in isolation, it's irrefutable that her mental condition had collapsed,
(06:51):
but plenty of kings ruled freely, even as they behaved
in ways that were charitably called eccentric. Being a woman
made it easy for Juana's rivals to dispose of her
and to turn her life into easy, appealing fiction. She's
the type of story about a madwoman that we can't
(07:12):
help but want to tell over and over again. I'm
Danish Schwartz, and this is noble blood. Even if you've
never heard of Juana before, you've probably heard of her parents,
(07:35):
Ferdinand and Isabella, the King and Queen of Argon and Castile, respectively,
but their union meant that the pair of them ruled
a dynastically united Spain. The two of them are famous
for funding Christopher Columbus's exploration of what was then called
the New World, and for being the Catholic monarchs that
(07:57):
began the Spanish Inquisition, and for the conversion of all
of the Jews and Muslims in Spain. You've probably also
heard of Juanna's younger sister, Catherine of Aragon, who became
Henry the eighth first wife. Juanna was never supposed to
be a queen. She had an older brother and an
older sister in line before her, but still, when she
(08:20):
was young, she was incredibly well educated, so that one
day she would be ready for an advantageous marriage. That
means that she was taught all of the languages of
the Iberian Peninsula, Castilian, Catalan and Galico Portuguese, as well
as French and Latin to her religious parents Dismay. As
(08:41):
she was educated, Juanna became something of a religious skeptic,
but none of that mattered really When she turned sixteen
and it was finally time for her to fulfill her
real purpose marriage. Juanna was betrothed to Philip of Flanders,
Duke of Burgundy, also known as Philip the Handsome. This
(09:01):
is where I will say, if you are near your
phone or a computer, you should absolutely google a photo
of Philip the Handsome, just to get an idea of
what passed for good looks in the fifteenth century. Baby
bangs on men were clearly a look that worked back then,
but by all accounts, Philip was quite the charmer, and
(09:24):
the pair were married first by double proxy and then
in person in four when Juana arrived in Flanders with
a fleet of over one hundred ships. Their marriage was
supposed to be on October, but the story goes that
one arrived and met Philip in person on the and
(09:47):
was so immediately overcome with love or lust that the
pair of them begged to be married that very day
that they could consummate their relationship that night. Philip's handsomeness
clearly worked on Wana, and the two of them had
three children while they lived in Flanders. It was during
this period that something unexpected was happening to the line
(10:11):
of succession back in Spain. A year after Juana married Philip,
her brother Juan, the heir to the throne, died, But
to the great relief of everyone, One's wife, Margaret of Austria,
was seven months pregnant at the time, and the hope
was that she would have a son and a new
heir who could take his or her father's place in
(10:33):
the line of succession. But that December, Margaret gave birth
to a stillborn girl, with that line ended. Next in
line was one as older sister, Isabella, the Queen of Portugal,
wife of Manuel of Portugal. People in Spain were a
little resisent about a female queen, but the good news
(10:55):
for everyone was that Isabella was also pregnant and she
had a son that would assuage all of those concerns.
And lo and behold, a son was born, Miguel in August.
But Isabella of Portugal had had a difficult pregnancy, during
which she had traveled extensively and that might partly explain
(11:20):
why hours after childbirth Isabella died. The kingdom had little Miguel,
but not for long. The infant Prince of Portugal and
the Spanish Kingdoms, the boy who would have united all
of the Iberian kingdoms, died when he was just two
years old in his grandmother Isabella's arms. So in just
(11:47):
three years, Juana became next in line to be queen,
and she was officially recognized by the legislative bodies, the Corteses.
But during her time away in Flanders, rumors had already
begun to spread about her mental state. Juanna, who had
been madly in love with her husband Philip the Handsome
(12:07):
since the moment she saw him, was also wildly jealous
when it came to her husband's infidelities. For what it
was worth, her jealousy was merited. He was a philanderer.
Once Wanna caught her husband in the throes of passion
with one of her ladies in waiting, a woman who
was known in courts for her luscious, shiny, long hair,
(12:31):
Wanna shared the woman's hair off herself and then left
the locks on Philip's pillows. A tom Hagen horsehead maneuver
centuries before the Godfather. Wanna desperately wanted her husband to
love her to stop his wandering eye. She tried love
potions and tonics literal snake oil, all to no effect.
(12:57):
Wanna and Philip had wild fights. Sometimes those fights would
end in Philip literally confining and locking Juana in her rooms,
where she would refuse food and sleep as a tactic
for control. That was a frequent strategy when Juana Tantrum
in fifteen o four, her mother Isabella, was sick with
(13:19):
a fever, and Juana went to visit her in Castile.
It's unclear exactly what happened, but there was some sort
of altercation there, either between Juanna and her mother or
between Juanna and her husband back home in Flanders. That
meant that Juanna wanted to go back home immediately through France.
(13:41):
The problem was Castile was at war with France, and
it would be incredibly dangerous for her to transport herself
on land. Castile might be at war with France, Juanna declared,
but I'm not. She was completely irrational in her determination,
so much so that her traveling companion in Bishop Fonesca,
(14:01):
had to physically take her horses back to the stables
himself to prevent Juanna from leaving. When Wanna reached the
lock stables, she screamed and shook the bars and stayed
up all night, refusing the basic comforts of food or blankets.
So that was one as reputation when later that year
(14:23):
her mother, Isabella died, Argon and Castile being separate kingdoms,
meant that upon her mother's death, Juana became the Queen
of Castile, although Isabella had stipulated that if Juana was
unfit or unwilling to rule, Juana's dad, Ferdinand, would be
allowed to govern until Juana's eldest son turned twenty. But
(14:47):
Ferdinand had been ruling a united Argon and Castile alongside
his now deceased wife, and he was not willing to
let that go with one and her husband still in Flanders.
For Ferdinand printed coins that said fernand and Joanna King
and Queen of Castile and tried to persuade the Cortes
(15:07):
that Juanna was so ill that she would not be
able to govern, which led to the Cortes appointing him
Ferdinand as the kingdom's administrator and governor and as Juan
as guardian. But Philip the Handsome, Juana's husband, wasn't going
to take that sitting down. He wanted to rule Castile,
(15:29):
and so he also printed coins with his and his
wife's names. For her part, Juanna attempted to dispel rumors
about her insanity. She wrote a letter from Brussels to
a signor de vere that I haven't been able to
find translated into English, but the general idea is that
she acknowledges the stories about her jealous passions, but that
(15:53):
jealousy is a trait that she inherited from her wonderful mother,
whom they all acknowledge was just one of the most
excellent women in the world. But Ferdinand had already gotten
the Cortees to appoint him as one as guardian, and
Tuana and phil the Handsome were still in Flanders, so
Ferdinand moved in to try to assert his power. He
(16:15):
was also looking to edge Juana out of succession entirely
by getting married again with the intention of producing an
air Ferdinand's second wife was Germaine de Foix, the niece
of Louis the twelfth of France, and in classic Hapsburg fashion,
Ferdinand's own grand niece. The two never produced an air,
(16:36):
and the move actually backfired on Ferdinand, whose pro French
policies only bolstered support for the husband and wife pair
of Juana and Philip. With the nobles on their side,
Juanna and Philip made their way to Castile to try
to cement their power. Although Ferdinand and Philip were rivals here,
(16:57):
they did put their differences aside for the mutue really
beneficial arrangement, where they met secretly to declare Juanna unfit
to rule because of her quote infirmities and sufferings. Ferdinand
did briefly attempt to challenge Philip for Castile, but knowing
a losing battle when he saw one pretty quickly, Ferdinand
(17:17):
retreated back to our gun. So Philip the Handsome was
King of Castile with all of the power that he
took from his supposedly infirm wife. But he wouldn't have
the power for long. Philip got sick, and though the
official cause of death was typhoid, many people thought that
(17:41):
he was poisoned, possibly on the orders of Ferdinand. Mad
with love or just mad, Juanna was bereft, Philip the
Handsome was just when he died. Juanna was pregnant with
their sixth child. It's at the point that, if you
(18:01):
believe the stories, Juanna had a breakdown. She refused to
be parted from her husband's dead body for months. They say,
she didn't leave the side of the embalmed corpse, and
she frequently requested that the casket be opened over and
over again so that she could gaze upon her dead
(18:22):
husband's handsome face once more and kiss his cold and
waxy lips. At least dead in his coffin, Philip the
Handsome couldn't incite his wife's jealousy, or so you might think,
I want to accompanied the casket to its final resting
place in Granada, and she insisted that the procession only
(18:43):
travel at night so that other women wouldn't see Philip
the Handsome's body and be tempted by the corpse. It
was during these travels that Juanna gave birth to a
daughter named Catherine for her sister at She finally let
them put Philip's body in the ground for a good
(19:04):
Wanna returned to a castile plagued by disaster, with a
literal plague first of all, but also famine. Juanna was
out of her depth. On one hand, some of those
problems would have been impossible for a monarch to solve,
but Juanna also probably did suffer from some mental illness
(19:24):
that was wildly exacerbated by the death of her husband.
It was a loss that she would never be able
to get over. For whatever reason, Juana was incapable of
ruling her kingdom effectively against her will. The Cortes set
up a regency council for Juana in fifteen o seven,
and Juanna just didn't have the resources or the tactical
(19:46):
ability to raise the support she would need in order
to protect her right to the throne. Just as the
plague and famine were finally letting up the next year,
her father, Ferdinand swooped in he who was promptly placed
as regent. In fifteen o nine, Ferdinand confined his daughter
(20:08):
to the royal palace at tortoisse Us on the basis
of her supposed insanity. There are rumors about her paranoia,
suicidal urges, and her necrophilia with the dead body of
her husband, but it's tricky to parse out exactly what's
true and what isn't. It's always challenging to retroactively diagnose
(20:31):
illness in historical figures, mental or otherwise. But it's especially
tricky here because it was in Ferdinand and Philip's interest
for the general public to think that Juana was so
insane that they could rule in her stead, and we
know for a fact that both had forged letters and
documents from her at different points to suit their purposes. Ferdinand,
(20:56):
one his father, was never able to have a new heir,
and so, though he didn't like it, one as eldest son, Charles,
was the heir to the thrones of Argon and Castile.
Ferdinand especially hated Charles because he was raised in Flanders
and Ferdinand saw his grandson as a foreigner. Fernand tried
to instead put another one of juan as sons, a
(21:19):
younger son who was raised in Castile, next in line
for the throne, but it didn't Ultimately work, Charles and
port Juana were left the kingdom's jointly when Ferdinand died,
although for a brief period after his death, Argon was
ruled by Ferdinand's illegitimate son Alonso. They say that for
(21:39):
the rest of his life, Ferdinand only visited his daughter
Juana twice while she was in prison. Young Charles inherited
the kingdom and also custody of his mad mother in
tord to see Us, where she was kept for the
rest of her life. Charles the Fifth in Spain would
go on to be the Holy Roman Emperor as Charles
(22:02):
the First. For forty five years, Juanna remained imprisoned. There
was one year where she was briefly freed by rebels
against Charles, but he swiftly put an end to that
and put Juana back in toward to see Us. Charles
instituted a policy of isolation for his mother. Quote it
(22:22):
seems to me that the best and most suitable thing
for you to do, he wrote to her attendants, is
to make sure that no person speaks with her Majesty,
for no good could come of it. The longer Juana
was confined, the worse her condition became. Although it's hard
to pretend that being locked up and more or less
(22:42):
ignored for a few decades wouldn't make someone well lose
their mind. By the end of her life she was paranoid,
but the nuns wanted to kill her. Juanna refuse to
eat or sleep, or bathe or change her clothes. She
died at age seventy five on Good Friday in fifteen fifty.
(23:04):
They buried Wana in the royal chapel, beside her parents
and her husband. And even though her life ended there
alone and all but forgotten, all six of one as
children would go on to become monarchs in their own
right France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, and Portugal.
Whatever mental illness they might have inherited from their mother,
(23:27):
they also inherited her royal blood. That's the story of
Juanna la Loca. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break,
to hear a little bit more about one of her
most macabre relatives. I think you're gonna like this one.
(23:54):
The part of juan a story that tends to get
the most attention, perhaps justifiably, is the exhimation of her
husband's corpse and her rumored necrophilia. But there's another story
about a dead body in the nobility of the Iberian
Peninsula that I think is worth our attention. Peter, the
(24:14):
first King of Portugal, was a direct ancestor of Juana,
albeit one almost two hundred years before she was born.
He was in love with a woman named Inez de Castro,
and they were forbidden to marry. And though the story
of their lives are fascinating and maybe even a story
for another future podcast. It's the story of Inez's death,
(24:37):
or rather her life after death, that I think seems
appropriate to talk about at the moment. Inessa had only
been Peter's mistress in her lifetime, and when she died,
he wanted to find a way to legitimize their children
in the line of succession. He claimed that he had
secretly married Annez before she died, but there was no
(24:59):
proof of that. The Pope refused to recognize that secret
marriage or the legitimacy of the children that they had,
so in an attempt to force the court to recognize
her as the legitimate queen, and as a show of
his love for her and his power, rumor has it
that Peter exhumed in as his body from her grave,
(25:20):
dressed the body in all of the regalia of a
massive coronation dress Jules robe for and crown, and held
a coronation for his queen even though she was just
a dead body. Peter then forced every single noble in
his court to kiss the hem of his dead love's robes,
(25:43):
and then to kiss her cold waxy hands. For what
it's worth, no one ever called him Peter a loco,
but for Juana, maybe it ran in the family. Noble
Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm
(26:05):
and Mild from Aaron Mankey. The show is written and
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Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social
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For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(26:28):
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkie listener discretion is advised. Culturally,
we are obsessed with the idea of women going mad.
It's a theme that's pervaded literature for hundreds of years.
(00:23):
It's a woman sometimed, young, usually beautiful, who becomes a
tragic figure hold away in a gothic, decrepit mansion. The
woman loses her mind and then usually her life. There
are too many examples to name, the Lady of Shelot,
Cathy from Weathering Heights, Bertha and Janier, Miss Havisham, and
(00:49):
of course, perhaps most iconically, Ophelia. Feminist literary critic and
Princeton professor Elaine show Walter wrote, Ophelia became the prototype
not only of the deranged woman in Victorian literature and art,
but also of the young female asylum patient. In fiction.
(01:10):
The madwoman usually comes from a society of rigid gender rules.
Take Ophelia again. Ophelia's madness is the thing that allows
her to break free of the limitations and restrictions on
women in her society. In the play, her hair that
was once neatly covered and pulled back is after she
(01:31):
goes mad, let down, wavy and untamed at its full length, and,
as Elaine show Walter points out, Ophelia also breaks free
of her sexual propriety. Ophelia becomes provocative, singing body songs
and giving away flowers in a not so subtle allusion
to her deflowering herself. That brings up another aspect of
(01:56):
the pop culture portrayal of the woman gone mad, that
madness is the inverse of proper female decorum when it
comes to sexuality. A mad woman is one who wants,
one who has explicit female desires. In essay on Ophelia,
(02:17):
Emmy Harmana writes about the idea of mad women as
a rado maniacs. She writes this is based on masculine
assumptions that women are more inclined to go mad since
they are closer to the irrational by nature, and that
young women's madness is more often than not caused by
sexual frustration of unrequited love. There it is the woman
(02:42):
who goes crazy because she wants a man she cannot have.
Perhaps it's even the origin of a particularly sexist modern
trend of dudes telling their friends that all of their
clingy x is are quote crazy. The link between sexual
frustration or desire and madness or hysteria in women might
(03:06):
also help to explain the Victorian invention of the vibrator,
used to induce what doctors called paroxysms in women in
order to restore their sanity. But the stories when it
comes to our fictional heroines don't usually end well. Mad
(03:26):
women get a brief chance to break free from social conventions,
to scream in a society that forced them to whisper.
But then these women's are disposed of. They die by
beautiful suicide in flowy white gowns and water if they're
beautiful like Ophelia or the Lady of lat or by
(03:49):
fire if they're not as beautiful like Miss Havisham or
Bertha in Jane Eyre, or more sinisterly, they're disposed of,
deposited in a asylums or the attic, like the heroine
of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman story The Yellow Wallpaper. If
you've never read The Yellow Wallpaper, you absolutely should. It
(04:12):
was written in eighteen two, and the story is framed
as the diary of a young woman who suffers from
what might be in modern parlance called postnatal depression, and so,
after this woman gives birth, her husband decides that the
best treatment for her is isolating her in an attic room.
(04:33):
Over the course of the story, the narrator begins to hallucinate,
to become as mad as her either sinister or misguided
husband believed her to be. Was the narrator mad all along?
Or did the prolonged period of boredom and isolation drive
her crazy? That brings us to the unlucky subject of
(04:57):
today's podcast. Want To of Castile, or as she's known
more colloquially, Juana la Loca. The Juanna was technically Queen
of Castile for over fifty years and of Argon for
thirty of those. Her title was in name only. For
the vast majority of her reign. She was imprisoned in
(05:18):
a castle in tordisse Us, declared insane by the men
in her life who wanted to rule in her place,
first her husband and then her father and then her son.
As a literary figure, Juanna is irresistible. Her supposed madness
was brought on by her obsessive love for her husband.
(05:41):
After his death, they say that Wanna refuse to let
them bury the body so that she could continually open
the casket and kiss his cold face. There maybe couldn't
be a better example of an Ophelia archetype in real life,
love sick over a man to the point that it
destroyed her sanity. But it's impossible to note to what
(06:04):
extent the stories are true, or whether they were just
convenient propaganda for her father to use in his claim
to her kingdom. There are versions of Juana's story that
try to paint her as a maligned feminist of history,
a woman who was perfectly in her right mind, wrongfully
accused of madness on purpose by men who knew that
(06:27):
they could have that power. But some of one's behavior
was genuinely strange, and as an heir of the deeply
inbred Hapsburg family, mental illness was an occupational hazard for
European monarchs. By the end of Juana's imprisonment, after decades
in isolation, it's irrefutable that her mental condition had collapsed,
(06:51):
but plenty of kings ruled freely, even as they behaved
in ways that were charitably called eccentric. Being a woman
made it easy for Juana's rivals to dispose of her
and to turn her life into easy, appealing fiction. She's
the type of story about a madwoman that we can't
(07:12):
help but want to tell over and over again. I'm
Danish Schwartz, and this is noble blood. Even if you've
never heard of Juana before, you've probably heard of her parents,
(07:35):
Ferdinand and Isabella, the King and Queen of Argon and Castile, respectively,
but their union meant that the pair of them ruled
a dynastically united Spain. The two of them are famous
for funding Christopher Columbus's exploration of what was then called
the New World, and for being the Catholic monarchs that
(07:57):
began the Spanish Inquisition, and for the conversion of all
of the Jews and Muslims in Spain. You've probably also
heard of Juanna's younger sister, Catherine of Aragon, who became
Henry the eighth first wife. Juanna was never supposed to
be a queen. She had an older brother and an
older sister in line before her, but still, when she
(08:20):
was young, she was incredibly well educated, so that one
day she would be ready for an advantageous marriage. That
means that she was taught all of the languages of
the Iberian Peninsula, Castilian, Catalan and Galico Portuguese, as well
as French and Latin to her religious parents Dismay. As
(08:41):
she was educated, Juanna became something of a religious skeptic,
but none of that mattered really When she turned sixteen
and it was finally time for her to fulfill her
real purpose marriage. Juanna was betrothed to Philip of Flanders,
Duke of Burgundy, also known as Philip the Handsome. This
(09:01):
is where I will say, if you are near your
phone or a computer, you should absolutely google a photo
of Philip the Handsome, just to get an idea of
what passed for good looks in the fifteenth century. Baby
bangs on men were clearly a look that worked back then,
but by all accounts, Philip was quite the charmer, and
(09:24):
the pair were married first by double proxy and then
in person in four when Juana arrived in Flanders with
a fleet of over one hundred ships. Their marriage was
supposed to be on October, but the story goes that
one arrived and met Philip in person on the and
(09:47):
was so immediately overcome with love or lust that the
pair of them begged to be married that very day
that they could consummate their relationship that night. Philip's handsomeness
clearly worked on Wana, and the two of them had
three children while they lived in Flanders. It was during
this period that something unexpected was happening to the line
(10:11):
of succession back in Spain. A year after Juana married Philip,
her brother Juan, the heir to the throne, died, But
to the great relief of everyone, One's wife, Margaret of Austria,
was seven months pregnant at the time, and the hope
was that she would have a son and a new
heir who could take his or her father's place in
(10:33):
the line of succession. But that December, Margaret gave birth
to a stillborn girl, with that line ended. Next in
line was one as older sister, Isabella, the Queen of Portugal,
wife of Manuel of Portugal. People in Spain were a
little resisent about a female queen, but the good news
(10:55):
for everyone was that Isabella was also pregnant and she
had a son that would assuage all of those concerns.
And lo and behold, a son was born, Miguel in August.
But Isabella of Portugal had had a difficult pregnancy, during
which she had traveled extensively and that might partly explain
(11:20):
why hours after childbirth Isabella died. The kingdom had little Miguel,
but not for long. The infant Prince of Portugal and
the Spanish Kingdoms, the boy who would have united all
of the Iberian kingdoms, died when he was just two
years old in his grandmother Isabella's arms. So in just
(11:47):
three years, Juana became next in line to be queen,
and she was officially recognized by the legislative bodies, the Corteses.
But during her time away in Flanders, rumors had already
begun to spread about her mental state. Juanna, who had
been madly in love with her husband Philip the Handsome
(12:07):
since the moment she saw him, was also wildly jealous
when it came to her husband's infidelities. For what it
was worth, her jealousy was merited. He was a philanderer.
Once Wanna caught her husband in the throes of passion
with one of her ladies in waiting, a woman who
was known in courts for her luscious, shiny, long hair,
(12:31):
Wanna shared the woman's hair off herself and then left
the locks on Philip's pillows. A tom Hagen horsehead maneuver
centuries before the Godfather. Wanna desperately wanted her husband to
love her to stop his wandering eye. She tried love
potions and tonics literal snake oil, all to no effect.
(12:57):
Wanna and Philip had wild fights. Sometimes those fights would
end in Philip literally confining and locking Juana in her rooms,
where she would refuse food and sleep as a tactic
for control. That was a frequent strategy when Juana Tantrum
in fifteen o four, her mother Isabella, was sick with
(13:19):
a fever, and Juana went to visit her in Castile.
It's unclear exactly what happened, but there was some sort
of altercation there, either between Juanna and her mother or
between Juanna and her husband back home in Flanders. That
meant that Juanna wanted to go back home immediately through France.
(13:41):
The problem was Castile was at war with France, and
it would be incredibly dangerous for her to transport herself
on land. Castile might be at war with France, Juanna declared,
but I'm not. She was completely irrational in her determination,
so much so that her traveling companion in Bishop Fonesca,
(14:01):
had to physically take her horses back to the stables
himself to prevent Juanna from leaving. When Wanna reached the
lock stables, she screamed and shook the bars and stayed
up all night, refusing the basic comforts of food or blankets.
So that was one as reputation when later that year
(14:23):
her mother, Isabella died, Argon and Castile being separate kingdoms,
meant that upon her mother's death, Juana became the Queen
of Castile, although Isabella had stipulated that if Juana was
unfit or unwilling to rule, Juana's dad, Ferdinand, would be
allowed to govern until Juana's eldest son turned twenty. But
(14:47):
Ferdinand had been ruling a united Argon and Castile alongside
his now deceased wife, and he was not willing to
let that go with one and her husband still in Flanders.
For Ferdinand printed coins that said fernand and Joanna King
and Queen of Castile and tried to persuade the Cortes
(15:07):
that Juanna was so ill that she would not be
able to govern, which led to the Cortes appointing him
Ferdinand as the kingdom's administrator and governor and as Juan
as guardian. But Philip the Handsome, Juana's husband, wasn't going
to take that sitting down. He wanted to rule Castile,
(15:29):
and so he also printed coins with his and his
wife's names. For her part, Juanna attempted to dispel rumors
about her insanity. She wrote a letter from Brussels to
a signor de vere that I haven't been able to
find translated into English, but the general idea is that
she acknowledges the stories about her jealous passions, but that
(15:53):
jealousy is a trait that she inherited from her wonderful mother,
whom they all acknowledge was just one of the most
excellent women in the world. But Ferdinand had already gotten
the Cortees to appoint him as one as guardian, and
Tuana and phil the Handsome were still in Flanders, so
Ferdinand moved in to try to assert his power. He
(16:15):
was also looking to edge Juana out of succession entirely
by getting married again with the intention of producing an
air Ferdinand's second wife was Germaine de Foix, the niece
of Louis the twelfth of France, and in classic Hapsburg fashion,
Ferdinand's own grand niece. The two never produced an air,
(16:36):
and the move actually backfired on Ferdinand, whose pro French
policies only bolstered support for the husband and wife pair
of Juana and Philip. With the nobles on their side,
Juanna and Philip made their way to Castile to try
to cement their power. Although Ferdinand and Philip were rivals here,
(16:57):
they did put their differences aside for the mutue really
beneficial arrangement, where they met secretly to declare Juanna unfit
to rule because of her quote infirmities and sufferings. Ferdinand
did briefly attempt to challenge Philip for Castile, but knowing
a losing battle when he saw one pretty quickly, Ferdinand
(17:17):
retreated back to our gun. So Philip the Handsome was
King of Castile with all of the power that he
took from his supposedly infirm wife. But he wouldn't have
the power for long. Philip got sick, and though the
official cause of death was typhoid, many people thought that
(17:41):
he was poisoned, possibly on the orders of Ferdinand. Mad
with love or just mad, Juanna was bereft, Philip the
Handsome was just when he died. Juanna was pregnant with
their sixth child. It's at the point that, if you
(18:01):
believe the stories, Juanna had a breakdown. She refused to
be parted from her husband's dead body for months. They say,
she didn't leave the side of the embalmed corpse, and
she frequently requested that the casket be opened over and
over again so that she could gaze upon her dead
(18:22):
husband's handsome face once more and kiss his cold and
waxy lips. At least dead in his coffin, Philip the
Handsome couldn't incite his wife's jealousy, or so you might think,
I want to accompanied the casket to its final resting
place in Granada, and she insisted that the procession only
(18:43):
travel at night so that other women wouldn't see Philip
the Handsome's body and be tempted by the corpse. It
was during these travels that Juanna gave birth to a
daughter named Catherine for her sister at She finally let
them put Philip's body in the ground for a good
(19:04):
Wanna returned to a castile plagued by disaster, with a
literal plague first of all, but also famine. Juanna was
out of her depth. On one hand, some of those
problems would have been impossible for a monarch to solve,
but Juanna also probably did suffer from some mental illness
(19:24):
that was wildly exacerbated by the death of her husband.
It was a loss that she would never be able
to get over. For whatever reason, Juana was incapable of
ruling her kingdom effectively against her will. The Cortes set
up a regency council for Juana in fifteen o seven,
and Juanna just didn't have the resources or the tactical
(19:46):
ability to raise the support she would need in order
to protect her right to the throne. Just as the
plague and famine were finally letting up the next year,
her father, Ferdinand swooped in he who was promptly placed
as regent. In fifteen o nine, Ferdinand confined his daughter
(20:08):
to the royal palace at tortoisse Us on the basis
of her supposed insanity. There are rumors about her paranoia,
suicidal urges, and her necrophilia with the dead body of
her husband, but it's tricky to parse out exactly what's
true and what isn't. It's always challenging to retroactively diagnose
(20:31):
illness in historical figures, mental or otherwise. But it's especially
tricky here because it was in Ferdinand and Philip's interest
for the general public to think that Juana was so
insane that they could rule in her stead, and we
know for a fact that both had forged letters and
documents from her at different points to suit their purposes. Ferdinand,
(20:56):
one his father, was never able to have a new heir,
and so, though he didn't like it, one as eldest son, Charles,
was the heir to the thrones of Argon and Castile.
Ferdinand especially hated Charles because he was raised in Flanders
and Ferdinand saw his grandson as a foreigner. Fernand tried
to instead put another one of juan as sons, a
(21:19):
younger son who was raised in Castile, next in line
for the throne, but it didn't Ultimately work, Charles and
port Juana were left the kingdom's jointly when Ferdinand died,
although for a brief period after his death, Argon was
ruled by Ferdinand's illegitimate son Alonso. They say that for
(21:39):
the rest of his life, Ferdinand only visited his daughter
Juana twice while she was in prison. Young Charles inherited
the kingdom and also custody of his mad mother in
tord to see Us, where she was kept for the
rest of her life. Charles the Fifth in Spain would
go on to be the Holy Roman Emperor as Charles
(22:02):
the First. For forty five years, Juanna remained imprisoned. There
was one year where she was briefly freed by rebels
against Charles, but he swiftly put an end to that
and put Juana back in toward to see Us. Charles
instituted a policy of isolation for his mother. Quote it
(22:22):
seems to me that the best and most suitable thing
for you to do, he wrote to her attendants, is
to make sure that no person speaks with her Majesty,
for no good could come of it. The longer Juana
was confined, the worse her condition became. Although it's hard
to pretend that being locked up and more or less
(22:42):
ignored for a few decades wouldn't make someone well lose
their mind. By the end of her life she was paranoid,
but the nuns wanted to kill her. Juanna refuse to
eat or sleep, or bathe or change her clothes. She
died at age seventy five on Good Friday in fifteen fifty.
(23:04):
They buried Wana in the royal chapel, beside her parents
and her husband. And even though her life ended there
alone and all but forgotten, all six of one as
children would go on to become monarchs in their own
right France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, and Portugal.
Whatever mental illness they might have inherited from their mother,
(23:27):
they also inherited her royal blood. That's the story of
Juanna la Loca. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break,
to hear a little bit more about one of her
most macabre relatives. I think you're gonna like this one.
(23:54):
The part of juan a story that tends to get
the most attention, perhaps justifiably, is the exhimation of her
husband's corpse and her rumored necrophilia. But there's another story
about a dead body in the nobility of the Iberian
Peninsula that I think is worth our attention. Peter, the
(24:14):
first King of Portugal, was a direct ancestor of Juana,
albeit one almost two hundred years before she was born.
He was in love with a woman named Inez de Castro,
and they were forbidden to marry. And though the story
of their lives are fascinating and maybe even a story
for another future podcast. It's the story of Inez's death,
(24:37):
or rather her life after death, that I think seems
appropriate to talk about at the moment. Inessa had only
been Peter's mistress in her lifetime, and when she died,
he wanted to find a way to legitimize their children
in the line of succession. He claimed that he had
secretly married Annez before she died, but there was no
(24:59):
proof of that. The Pope refused to recognize that secret
marriage or the legitimacy of the children that they had,
so in an attempt to force the court to recognize
her as the legitimate queen, and as a show of
his love for her and his power, rumor has it
that Peter exhumed in as his body from her grave,
(25:20):
dressed the body in all of the regalia of a
massive coronation dress Jules robe for and crown, and held
a coronation for his queen even though she was just
a dead body. Peter then forced every single noble in
his court to kiss the hem of his dead love's robes,
(25:43):
and then to kiss her cold waxy hands. For what
it's worth, no one ever called him Peter a loco,
but for Juana, maybe it ran in the family. Noble
Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm
(26:05):
and Mild from Aaron Mankey. The show is written and
hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick,
Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social
media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more
about the show over at Noble blood Tales dot com.
For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
(26:28):
your favorite shows.
Host
Dana Schwartz
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