Henry IV of Castile

by Townsend Miller

Out of the turbulent, shadowed histories of the various medieval kingdoms destined to become Spain looms a strange, awkward figure—Henry IV of Castile. It is ironic that Henry was born on January 5, the Eve of Epiphany—the Feast of Kings—for no man was ever less suited to be a king.

All his life he was an eccentric and a failure—the luckless veteran of futile campaigns, the bewildered victim of unending intrigue. A gentle giant who loved music and animals in an age when monarchs were generally preoccupied with conquest and slaughter, he found companionship chiefly among the lowborn. More than one young man of fair face and overweening ambition he raised to great power, only to have them rob him and betray him to his enemies.

Henry’s two marriages were disasters. They provided his scornful contemporaries with a label which is still in use five centuries later; even today, he is known to most historians as Henry the Impotent. When he died in 1474, a pathetic ruin of a man, Spain’s Middle Ages died with him. It was Henry’s successor, his young half-sister Isabel the Catholic, and her husband, Fernando of Aragon, who forged the rival realms into a unified country.

Henry IV of Castile: 1425-1474 is a personal drama: a penetrating study of the nature, psychological and sexual, of a hitherto little-known king. It is a drama played out against a vivid background of violence and war, with a cast of characters unequaled anywhere in the annals of history for their cunning and treachery.

Genres: History, Biography

306 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a surprisingly good book about an unremarkable man who has an unhappy life as an incompetent ruler of Castile just before the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. The author is a bit flowery but I enjoyed his style, made it interesting. His 20 year reign was an example in how not to rule. Spain is not united at this time. Aragon is a source of real trouble and the Muslims still rule in the south in Granada. Henry as king will have a personal guard of 300 Muslims—not exactly a way to be popular. I really can’t care less about any monarch or noble (at any time in history to now) but this guy is a great example of why you need to get rid of them. In an era of weak rulers and general unrest, Henry IV of Castile stands at the head. The future Spain does not fare well in the period:

Nowhere, admittedly, were the 1460s Europe’s finest decade. The same civil strife, the same sort of split allegiance between its rival Roses, tore England apart. France lay panting and ravaged after the Hundred Years’ War. But in the land under the Pyrenees a whole way of life, a whole epoch, was coming to an end,… these death throes of its Middle Ages are dreadful to watch….Andalucia transformed into a desert, Murcia cut off and silent, robberies and rapes in Toledo, Extremadura in the grip of outlaws, all of Galicia devastated, the fields of Medina and Valladolid and Salamanca and Zamora put to the torch. People cowered in their blackened huts. No one dared cultivate the crops—marauding gangs of soldiers, unpaid and mutinous, roamed up and down—and famine swept the land: fifteen thousand died in the south alone, that tragic year. Journeys were out of the question. Such foreigners as business or politics did oblige to venture in clung terrified together.

In Henry’s defense, he really didn’t want the role but nothing he could do to escape his position. Securing the future line is always top of the “to-do” list. Kind of a sad picture, when the future King and his future wife are betrothed. First meeting of Henry and his first wife-Blanca of Navarre:

…joined their hands and pronounced them, at least officially, man and wife. Rich presents were exchanged—rings, jeweled brooches, chains, fine horses, bolts of cut velvet and cloth of gold. They do not much catch the eye. It is the two young novatos, left alone together for a moment after the ceremony, confused and blushing, who linger most in the mind. We need not waste sentimental tears on their short age (they both were twelve); such was the universal practice, in a time when life expectancy was less than thirty everything had to be accelerated, anybody not married by sixteen was considered either a freak or a saint. Yet to one who knows the long and special torture which lay ahead of them, there is something uncommonly sad, something almost inexpressibly touching, about this glimpse across the ages of the two mute, bashful children—pale girl and knobby boy—standing in a cold field beside the silent Ebro, hand in hand.

A few years later, Henry and Blanca meet again for marriage. The nuptial march to Valladolid stops at various castles for elaborate celebrations. Some go well but others seem to preview future bad events when Henry will be king. A tournament before the wedding does not go well:

For some reason Mendoza decided to hold it in full panoply of war, a la alemana, with combat lances: no pretty games with wands, with hollow canas, here. Such murderous weapons soon took the toll which more judicious planning might have anticipated. An unlucky knight from Toro, his skull split open by a lance that pierced the eye slit of his visor, pitched from his horse and died in a wallow of blood, red as the high red town downriver to which he would never return. Another had his right arm torn off. The Count of Castro’s nephew was skewered through the pelvis, and the Admiral’s brother had his forearm snapped in two The King (this event, at least, he had deigned to attend) finally found the carnage too much. Irritably he threw down that great staff on which he had latterly been leaning—perhaps for lack of don Alvaro de Luna—and called the whole thing off.

How uncomfortable the wedding of Henry and Blanca turns out. It was a small affair and then the ritual wedding night traditions did not go as normally required:

It seems to have been a pretty thin affair. Newlyweds themselves are seldom at their best on that occasion. The toasts were not partaken of by Henry, who never in all his life touched wine his chaplain Castillo tells us—“‘absolutely never”; here, at least, the language is plain. Banquets were the last thing that interested Juan of Aragon.……But finally, the long, golden, awful afternoon had worn away and the last of the platters were gone and the tables cleared and taken up, finally the gold had faded into silver and the silver into black, finally compline had rung in San Pablo across the way and it was full night and they could be about the business.

They rose. Down vaulted corridors, with cressets, they trailed to the nuptial chamber, long prepared. Heralds stood at the door, ready to sound a fanfare when the bloodied sheets were handed out. They went past them, in. The great bed glimmered, and the three notaries required by law beside it—to attest the first moan of joy or pain that would prove the royal bride a virgin, and royally pierced —were waiting at their posts The family found all in order, then withdrew. Servants stripped Blanca of her snowy gown. They laid her on satin pillows and in turn departed. Henry, presumably, undressed himself; he disliked to be touched. Perhaps he lingered a moment on the edge of the bed, dangling the dainty feet which were such a curious contrast to his large, ungainly frame. But at last he got in and drew the curtains. The notaries took their place.

One feels sorry for those notaries as they sat on and on in the silent room upon their hard wooden bench while the torches guttered out: already by mid-September the nights on the high meseta are turning sharp. One even feels a little sorry for Juan of Aragon, pacing the drafty corridor beyond the door for hours of mounting anxiety before he finally gave up, before he went away and left the nodding trumpeters to drowse alone. For after all he had done, after all the scheming and maneuvering and waiting, all the delays and misadventures and journeys down dusty roads—nothing whatever happened in the bedroom. No spotted sheets came forth, the groom—and it is for him, of course, and for the girl who shared his desperate struggle behind the curtain, that one feels sorrier than for anybody else—had been unable to fulfill his function. There is something cold and clinical (to end a cold story) in the court chronicler’s reporting of the disaster. “The Princess’”—so he said, and, in truth, what more was there to say? “remained exactly as she had been born.’’

The first battle of Olmedo. In this period before Castile and Aragon are united by Isabella and Ferdinand, there are many attempts by Juan of Aragon to gain land and power in larger Castile. Lots of hereditary claims to various castles, cities, estates, etc. The rebel Castilian nobles along with forces from Aragon have been holed up at Olmedo, conducting feints for weeks. Suddenly, when least expected, the rebels come out to fight at the end of the day:

They came in two huge waves, all cavalry. The one on their left, to the south, was of 1,500; the Infante Henry led it, with the Admiral and Pedro de Quifiones and the Count of Benavente and Rodrigo Manrique, Count of Paredes. Juan himself, with the counts of Castro and Medinaceli, commanded the other, of 1,000. Luna’s battalion would face the first, Henry’s the second—and it is clear that both of them were outnumbered.

Luna saw that, too. But Mendoza and Alba, not far to his right, would come to his aid—just as the Master of Alcantara would join the Prince. There was nothing to do but prepare—to hold their line and rein the horses close and wait until the enemy was far enough advanced for an attack They sat there briefly, plumes fluttering. And then the trumpets sounded, the great lances came down into position, the whole line surged out.

They met the rebels just beside the hill, lance against shield and helmet, splinter, reel, fall. They drove on through. And quick behind them, with the foe still stunned, came the charge of Alba and Mendoza. All of them had been carried far past by their momentum. They swung around; so did the enemy. Once more the lances leveled, once more the gallop and crash. And this time they closed in.

Such were “los primeros golpes,’” the first blows. They had been bad enough: Luna’s right thigh was torn open, and the Infante Henry already bore a vicious wound—a gash in the left wrist and all up his inner arm. But they were far from the last. “And with the lances shattered, they drew their swords, and laid about them with stout strokes. And the ones who had fallen and could still get up stabbed at the horses of those who brought them down, and all did all they knew, and the more the blood flowed forth the more they raged.” Helmets fell off, some wrenched loose with glaived hands, some struck away by swords. The horses reared and screamed and ran about with dragging bowels. Those who were down indeed (chain mail had long gone out of style, and plate armor weighed like stone) were killed by flailing hooves—trampled and battered, ground into the roil of guts and poppies and silk and ruined wheat,

Henry was a simple person and he caroused with the common people. He felt comfortable around them. But when he becomes king, he raises his friends to high positions. Not only did he really piss off the nobles already in power, he failed to anticipate how his “friends” would react to sudden riches. It wasn’t pretty and will cause immense difficulty throughout his time:

How had he failed to foresee it? Henry asked himself, sitting again in the Alcazar at Madrid and listening to the quarrels and bicker in the anteroom outside. All he had meant to do when he brought on these new protégés was to find a little peace, a little human gratitude. One would think that people who had never had anything would not be too hard to please. Yet the more you gave them, apparently the more they wanted. In that they were already proving just about as bad as the nobles. He had simply made another of his mistakes; everything he touched seemed to go wrong, sooner or later. Well, he would have to face it. Fortunately, he still had lots of money. Perhaps with that he could content them all: sad thought, and not very conducive to self-esteem, but no other came forward.

Throughout the book, you get a sense of all the machinations around access to power and how love had nothing to do with a promise of marriage. Isabel (Isabella) is promised to several potential partners. Always with the goal of uniting the kingdoms or preventing the rise of one or the other. Maybe divine intervention or just luck prevents one marriage to a man more than twice her age and a really horrible person:

marriage contracts were hastily signed. Far to the south, the suitor gathered his might. Early in April, with an enormous host which bore not only “grand apparatus’’ for epithalamial tourneys and fiestas but crossbows at the ready and tons of cannon balls (things still might go amiss), he started forth, hot through the swelling figs and budded oleanders for his tender bride. We know nothing of the reactions of young Alfonso—upon the point of being jettisoned as this triumphant wave rolled up from Andalucia. Isabel’s, however, are famous. No fate could have filled her with greater dread than marriage to Gir6én. Anybody—even the fat Portuguese Alfonso, even tuberculous Carlos of Viana—would have been better. The familiar scenes come on. Beatriz de Bobadilla, the Infanta’s boon companion, sharpened her knife; she vowed to sink it in Gir6n’s steamy heart the moment he passed the threshold. Isabel went on her knees. For twenty-four hours, beseeching deliverance, she addressed the Celestial Ear.

It heard her. Something did go very wrong with the advancing Master—although scarcely what he might have imagined. They were up past Ciudad Real, more than halfway to their destination, when his throat began to hurt. He ignored it: the dust, no doubt. But it grew rapidly worse. By the time they reached Villarrubia de los Ojos, he could hardly swallow; he was burning with fever. They pulled him from his horse and forced him to bed. He fought to get up, to press on to his triumph. He could not; wounds the age was skilled at healing, but with viral infections they were helpless, were carried off like flies. His fever soared higher and higher; he flailed about in agony, strangling, gasping for water, cursing God. But finally, he knew he was done for. He distributed his gold and jewels among his pretty young squires. Then he went into delirium. On April 30, spewing obscenities and pus, he died.

The book concludes with the remarkable union of Isabella and Ferdinand and was worth the read just by itself. One reviewer said this book is really for aficionados of 15th century Spain but I think the book holds appeal to any interested in this time just before Spain rises to great power. Oh yeah, he provides a decent map with all the main locations for events. Win! 4 Stars

[Katrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vivid poetical prose that occasionally tips over into turgid and fervent. While loaded with the views of the author, it still manages to provide information on personalities that are usually overlooked and are seriously under-reported on.

[DeLys]

This book would only be of interest to those interested in 15th-century Spain, like me.