Isabella of Portugal

Isabella of Portugal
Portrait of Isabella of Portugal by Titian, 1548
Holy Roman Empress Queen consort of Italy
Tenure	24 February 1530 – 1 May 1539
Queen consort of Spain Queen of the Romans Lady of the Netherlands
Tenure	10 March 1526 – 1 May 1539
Born	24 October 1503 Lisbon, Portugal
Died	1 May 1539(1539-05-01) (aged 35) Toledo, Spain
Burial	El Escorial
Spouse	Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor ​ ​ (m. 1526)​
Issue	Philip II, King of Spain Maria, Holy Roman Empress Joanna, Princess of Portugal
House	Aviz
Father	Manuel I, King of Portugal
Mother	Maria of Aragon
Religion	Roman Catholicism
Signature

Isabella of Portugal (24 October 1503 – 1 May 1539), also known as the Empress of the Carnation, was the wife of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor; as such, she was Queen of Spain and Germany, and Lady of the Netherlands, from their marriage on 10 March 1526 and Holy Roman Empress and Queen of Italy from Charles' accession as Emperor on 24 February 1530 until her death in 1539. Isabella was the regent of Spain because of her husband's constant travels through Europe, ensuring that the kingdom remained independent of imperial policies^[1] and economically healthy during her lifetime. Her personal motto was aut Caesar aut nihil ('either Caesar or nothing').

Childhood[]

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Isabella was born in Lisbon on 24 October 1503 and named after her maternal grandmother (Isabella I) as well as her aunt, who had been her father's first wife. She was the second child and first daughter of King Manuel I of Portugal and his second wife, Maria of Aragon. Isabella was second-in-line to the throne until the birth of her brother Luis in 1506. She seemed to be close with her siblings, who were punished by their mother, "when they deserved it, without pardoning any of them."

Isabella was educated under the supervision of her governess Elvira de Mendoza. Her studies presumably included politics, mathematics, the languages of Latin, Spanish and French besides her native Portuguese, as well as Renaissance classics, and the Christian doctrine.

As the eldest daughter of Manuel the Fortunate, Isabella was a rather attractive candidate for marriage. At the age of 14, her mother died. She and her sisters inherited her properties, plus the income from Viseu and Torres Vedras.

Engagement and Marriage[]

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Emperor Charles V and Empress Isabella. Peter Paul Rubens after Titian, 17th century.

Exterior of The Palace of Charles V in Granada was built upon his wedding to Isabel of Portugal in 1526.

The ideal candidate for Isabella's husband was her first cousin Charles, son of Maria's sister, Joanna of Castile and her husband Philip, Duke of Burgundy. A marriage would bring a strong alliance between the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal in accordance with the wishes of their grandparents, Isabella I of Castille and Ferdinand II of Aragón: It would facilitate to continue the exploration of the oceans without incurring clashes, as Portugal was the only naval power that could question Spain's supremacy in the Atlantic ocean. Plus as Charles was sovereign of multiple kingdoms, it was necessary that Portugal (Christendom's richest kingdom) would fall under Spain's orbit and not of France, which had happened in the War of Castilian Succession. Moreover, because Charles had been raised in Burgundy, the nobles and his Spanish subjects reportedly insisted that he marry a princess from the Iberian peninsula.

However, the 18-year-old King was in no hurry to marry and instead sent his sister, Eleanor, to marry Isabella's widowed father in 1518. Charles's Flemish advisors, especially William de Croÿ, later convinced him to relegate the Portuguese alliance to the background and replace it with an alliance with England. In 1521, Charles became engaged to his other first cousin Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, who was sixteen years younger than Charles and still a child. Their engagement sought to undo an alliance between England and France articulated by the ambitious Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Many in Portugal took their Infanta's rejection as an offence, but Isabella remained determined that she only would marry her powerful cousin or else enter a convent.

By 1525, Charles was no longer interested in an alliance with England and could wait no longer for Mary Tudor to get older because he was determined to have legitimate children. His engagement was called off, the alliance with England was abandoned, and he finally sought to marry Isabella. There were many more advantages - she was closer to him in age (she was only three years his junior), fluent in Spanish, and offered a dowry of 900,000 Portuguese cruzados or Castilian folds which was more than enough to solve many of his financial problems brought on by the recent war.^[2]

Charles wasted no time in securing a papal dispensation for first cousins and the marriage contract for an alliance with Portugal were made - Isabella would marry him and her brother, King John III of Portugal, would marry his youngest sister, Catherine of Austria. The young Emperor intended to wed and then leave his future wife as regent to govern Spain while he went to Central Europe to deal with political and religious troubles there.

In January 1526, Isabella travelled to Spain. Upon her arrival, she met the Duke of Calabria, the Archbishop of Toledo and the Duke of Béjar at the Spanish-Portuguese border. They escorted her to Seville, where she was to wait for Charles for a week. At the end, their wedding took place the very next day just after midnight on 11 March in the Palace of Alcázar of Seville.^[3][4]

Although their marriage was a political arrangement, Isabella captivated her husband, who tarried with her longer than anticipated. They honeymooned for several months at the Alhambra in Granada, where Charles ordered the seeds of a Persian flower that had never been seen before in Spain. The seeds eventually grew into the red carnation which delighted Isabella. Her husband ordered thousands more to be planted in her honour, establishing the red carnation as Spain's floral emblem.

Despite the mutual affection the royal couple shared, their marriage wasn't easy. Charles's first absence lasted from 1529 to April 1533. He remained in Spain for two years, only to depart again in December 1536. Although he came back briefly in 1538, he left almost immediately, returning in November 1539. As agreed by the nobles, their children were raised in Spain. Isabella supervised their education and taught them Portuguese. She wrote to her husband regularly, but often spent months without receiving letters.^{[citation needed]}

Regency over Spain[]

The bronze statue of Empress Isabella by Leone Leoni, 1550–1555, that was commissioned by Charles V, on display at the El Prado Museum, Madrid.

As he had planned, Charles appointed Isabella regent and governor of Spain during his absence from the peninsula to lead his military campaigns and attend the administration of his other kingdoms between 1529-33 and 1537–39. She attended meetings of the governing councils and consulted with the ministers. As time passed, the Empress took a more active role in the policy-making process, suggesting her own solutions rather than merely accepting recommendations. The Emperor considered her deliberations "very prudent and well thought out."

Economy[]

The city of Toledo served as the main revenue of the Imperial court of Charles V in Castile.^[5][6]

Isabella was a profound connoisseur of the problems of the peninsular kingdoms, intransigently defending the good common to particular interests. At the external level, her sensible actions were decisive in the defence of the coasts of the peninsula and of North Africa, those infested by piracy. This allowed the flow of precious metals and turned Spain into one of the chief sources of the Imperial treasury.^{[citation needed]}

Through her regencies, Isabella ensured that Spain remained independent of the empire's expensive military policies and thus relatively prosperous during her lifetime. However, Castile became integrated into Charles's empire and suffered from high inflation after her death. The enormous budget deficit accumulated and inflation during her husband's later reign resulted in declaring bankruptcy during the reign of their son Philip II.^{[citation needed]}

Diplomacy[]

Coat of arms of Isabella of Portugal as Empress

During her time as regent, Isabella effectively defended the royal power and the monarch's supreme authority, something essential because of the previous rebellions against the Emperor for his foreign relationships. She traveled regularly in the autumn between Toledo, Valladolid, Seville, Barcelona and Majorca. To deal with important matters of the empire, the royal couple wrote to each other more regularly.

In foreign policy, Isabella actively intervened in the negotiations of marital alliances between the French and Spanish royal families. She was concerned that her own children wouldn't be forced to wed the much older offspring of King Francis I.

Death[]

The bronze effigies of Charles and Isabella at the Basilica in El Escorial.

During several years, Isabella and the court traveled from city to city, moving in part to avoid exposure to epidemics. There is speculation that she suffered from consumption, with a contemporary describing Isabella: "The Empress is the greatest pity in the world; she is so thin as to not resemble a person". In 1539, she became pregnant for the seventh time, but contracted another fever in the third month that caused antenatal complications and gave birth to a stillborn son. Isabella died two weeks later on 1 May 1539 at the age of 35, without her husband present.^[7]

Charles was left so devastated that he couldn't bring himself to accompany her body to the Royal Chapel of Granada, the burial place of the Catholic Monarchs. He instead instructed their son Philip to accompany his mother's body with Francis Borgia, 4th Duke of Gandía. Decomposition had so disfigured it, however, that Gandía couldn't recognize the Empress and was allegedly so horrified at what death had done to her beauty that he later became a Jesuit, gaining fame as San Francisco de Borja. Charles was so grief-stricken by his wife's death that he shut himself in a monastery for two months, praying and mourning for her in solitude. Charles never recovered from her death. He wore black for the rest of his life to show his eternal mourning. He never remarried, though he had an affair only once long after Isabella's death that resulted in the birth of an illegitimate son. Charles died as a widower in 1558 while holding the same cross in his hand which Isabella held in her hand when she died. In 1574, the body of Empress Isabella was transferred by her son to the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, where she was originally interred into a small vault along with her husband directly underneath the altar of the Royal Chapel. This was done in accordance with Charles's last will and testament, in which he left a codicil asking for the establishment of a new religious foundation in which he and Isabella would be reburied together side by side, "half-body under the altar and half under the priest's feet". They remained in the Royal Chapel while the famous Basilica of the Monastery and the Royal Crypt were still under construction.

In 1654, after the Basilica and Royal Crypt were finally completed during the reign of their great-grandson Philip IV, the remains of Isabella and Charles were moved into the Royal Pantheon of Kings, which lies directly under the Basilica.^[8] On one side of the Basilica are bronze effigies of Charles and Isabella, with effigies of their daughter Maria of Austria and Charles's sisters, Eleanor of Austria and Maria of Hungary, behind them. Exactly adjacent to them on the opposite side of the Basilica are effigies of their son Philip with three of his wives and their ill-fated grandson, Carlos, Prince of Asturias.

Post-mortem tributes[]

Titian's La Gloria, one of the several paintings commissioned by Charles V in memory of his wife Isabella

In memory of his wife Isabella, Charles commissioned several tributes through art and music, beginning in 1540 when he commissioned the Flemish composer Thomas Crecquillon to compose new music in honour of the Empress. Crecquillon composed his Missa Mort m'a privé as a memorial to Isabella, which expresses the Emperor's grief and wish for a heavenly reunion with his beloved wife.^[9] Another musical tribute to Isabella is Carole cur defles Isabellam that was composed in 1545 by the Franco-Flemish composer Nicolas Payen.

In 1543, Charles commissioned his favourite painter Titian to paint posthumous portraits of Isabella by using earlier ones of her as his model. Titian painted several portraits of the Empress, which included his Portrait of The Empress Isabel of Portugal and La Gloria.^[10] He later painted a double portrait of the imperial couple together, of which there is a copy by Peter Paul Rubens. Charles kept these portraits with him whenever he travelled and after he retired to the Monastery of Yuste in 1555.^[11]

Issue[]

Name	Portrait	Lifespan	Notes
Philip II of Spain		21 May 1527 – 13 September 1598	Only surviving son, successor of his father in the Spanish crown. As grandson of Manuel I of Portugal, Phillip claimed the Portuguese throne after the death of Henry, the Cardinal-King in 1580, establishing the Iberian Union.
Maria		21 June 1528 – 26 February 1603	Married her first cousin Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor.
Ferdinand		22 November 1529 – 13 July 1530	Died in infancy.
Son		29 June 1534	Stillborn.
Joanna		26 June 1535 – 7 September 1573	Married her first cousin João Manuel, Prince of Portugal.
Juan		19 October 1537 – 20 March 1538	Died in infancy.
Son		21 April 1539	Miscarried and stillborn.

Ancestry[]

Cultural depictions[]

Isabella of Portugal is portrayed by Blanca Suárez in the TVE series Carlos, Rey Emperador.

See also[]

• Descendants of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon
• Descendants of Manuel I of Portugal

References[]

Bibliography[]

Isabella of Portugal (1503–1539)