Free 1492: The Year Our World Began by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

The monarchs learned from Burgundy, and from the northern artists they employed at court, the importance of rich and impressive display in affairs of state and the usefulness of pageant that emphasized symbolically the preeminence of the king. Large numbers of observers detailed the apparel the monarchs wore on every occasion, because every gold stitch was significant. Isabella felt guilty about the opulence of her garb and liked to stress its relative simplicity. “I wore only a simple dress of silk with three gold hem bands,” she protested on one occasion in a letter to her confessor. Her affectations of austerity deceived no one.
    Her biggest expenditure was on clothing and furnishings. Prodigious quantities of black velvet were used for mourning clothes, fordeath was a frequent visitor to the family and the court. Jewels, especially those of a sacred nature, figure largely. From 1488 Isabella’s chapel must have been a veritable thesaurus of jeweled golden crosses, encrusted as they were with diamonds and rubies. Political expenditure thrust its way into these intimate ledgers. When Granada was conquered, Isabella contributed to the campaign for forcible acculturation of the Moors by providing cash for them to be reclothed in Castilian fashion. When the son of the king of Granada was a prisoner in 1488, she equipped him with the right clothes. She gave fat tips—bribes, in effect—to foreign ambassadors. She paid to rebuild the walls of the town of Antequera. And seven of those bolts of black velvet went to the messenger who brought news that Ferdinand had captured the Moorish town of Loja in 1486.
    Alongside this sort of expenditure one finds the record of purchases of sweets for the children, wages for the masters who taught them Latin, and the upkeep of a painter to do their portraits. The monarchs liked to keep Christmas as a family occasion. They would stock up with quince jelly well in advance and buy presents to exchange at the end of the holiday. In 1492 they gave their daughters painted dolls with changeable blouses and skirts. Prince John, who as a man child and heir to the throne was meant to be above such things, got an embroidered purse and four dozen bolts of finely spun silk. For the family generally, the king supplemented the Christmas sweetmeats with plenty of lemon preserves.
    As far as government was concerned, the most important feature of court life was mobility. The monarchs ruled not as later Spanish kings did, from a fixed central capital, but led a peripatetic existence as they crossed the country from town to town, taking the court with them like a menagerie on a lead. They were Spain’s most-traveled rulers, penetrating parts of the kingdom that had not seen the sovereign for decades. Some areas were better frequented than others, according to their importance. They spent most time in the heartlands of old Castile between the central mountain ranges and the river Duero, but they oftenvisited New Castile and Andalusia. They would go to Extremadura when Portuguese affairs were prominent, and made excursions into Aragon and Catalonia. In this way not only was the monarchs’ contact with their subjects and personal role in government maintained, but the monarchs also spread the burdensome cost of entertaining the court, which fell on the localities where the court resided or the lords who acted as hosts. However, they had to meet the cost of transporting their own cumbrous and colorful caravan. The baggage that Isabella took with her wherever she went filled sixty-two carts.
    Ferdinand and his wife were distinctly unmodern monarchs. They helped usher in the modern world by accident, as they adjusted to emergencies and reverted to traditions. Their conquests and “cleansings”—as we now say—of hated minorities were too cruel to be called Christian, but they were religious. The monarchs used credal differences to identify enemies, religious rhetoric to justify their campaigns. They