Everything about Joanna The Mad totally explained
Joanna (
November 6,
1479 –
April 12,
1555), called
Joanna the Mad (
Juana La Loca), was
Queen regnant of Castile and
Aragon jointly with her son the
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. She was the second daughter of
Ferdinand II of Aragon, and
Isabella of Castile, and was born at
Toledo.
The Castilian version of her name was Juana. In Germanic countries, she's usually known by the Latin form of her name,
Joanna. Other English equivalents of the name include
Jane and
Joan.
Life
In
1496 at
Lier, just north of Brussels, Joanna was married to the Archduke
Philip the Handsome, son of the Holy Roman Emperor
Maximilian I. Between 1498 and 1507 she gave birth to six children, two emperors and four queens. Arguably the most important one was
Charles V in 1500.
The death of her only brother
John, Prince of Asturias, her eldest sister
Isabella of Asturias, Queen of
Portugal, and then of the latter's infant son
Miguel, Prince of Asturias, made Joanna the heiress of the Spanish kingdoms. Her only living siblings were
Maria of Aragon and
Catherine of Aragon, three and six years younger than Joanna. In
1502 the Castilian
Cortes of Toro recognized Joanna as legitimate heiress to the Castilian throne, and Philip as her legitimate consort. She was then named
Princess of Asturias, the title traditionally given to the heir of Castile.. Also, in
1502, the Aragonese
Cortes gathered in Saragossa, alleged oath to Joanna as heiress, but the Archbishop of Saragossa expressed firmly that this oath couldn't establish jurisprudence, that's to say, without modifying the right of the succession, but by virtue of a formal agreement between the
Cortes and the King.
Joanna was said to pine day and night for her husband while he was overseas, and when she eventually joined Philip in
Flanders, her passionate jealousy and constant suspicion of him made her notorious, if not necessarily beloved, in the local court.
Upon the death of Isabella of Castile in November 1504, Joanna became Queen regnant of Castile, and her husband
jure uxoris King; Joanna's father, Ferdinand, lost his title of 'King of Castile', although his wife's will permitted him to govern the country in Joanna's absence, or, if Joanna was unwilling to rule it herself, until Charles reached the age of 20. Ferdinand refused to accept this: he minted Castilian coins in the name of "Ferdinand and Juana, King and Queen of Castile, Léon and Aragon", and in early 1505 persuaded the Cortes that Joanna's "illness...is such that the said Queen Doña Juana our Lady can't govern"; the Cortes then appointed Ferdinand as Joanna's guardian, and as administrator and governor of the kingdom. However, Philip the Handsome was unwilling to accept any threat to his own chances of ruling Castile, and this way, he also coined coins in name of "Philip and Joanna, King and Queen of Castile, Léon and Archdukes of Austria, etc". In response Ferdinand embarked upon a pro-French policy, marrying
Germaine de Foix, the niece of
Louis XII of France (and his own great-niece), in the hope that she'd produce a son to inherit Aragon, and perhaps Castile.
Ferdinand's remarriage merely strengthened support for Philip and Joanna in Castile, and in late 1505 the pair decided to travel to Castile. Leaving Flanders on
10 January 1506, their ships were wrecked on the English coast and the couple became guests of
Henry VII at
Windsor Castle. They were only able to leave on
21 April, by which time civil war was looming in Castile: Philip apparently considered landing in Andalusia and summoning the nobles to take up arms against Ferdinand. Instead, he and Joanna landed at
Coruña on
26 April, upon which the Castilian nobility abandoned Ferdinand
en masse. Ferdinand then met with Philip at Villafafila on 20 June 1506, and handed over the government of Castile to his "most beloved children", promising to retire to Aragon. Philip and Ferdinand then signed a second treaty, agreeing that Joanna's mental instability made her incapable of rule, and promising to exclude her from government. Ferdinand then proceeded to repudiate the agreement on the same afternoon, declaring that Joanna should never be deprived of her rights as Queen Proprietress of Castile. A fortnight later, having come to no fresh agreement with Philip, and thus effectively retaining his right to interfere if he considered his daughter's rights to be infringed, he abandoned Castile, leaving Philip to govern in Joanna's stead.
By virtue of the agreement of Villafáfila, the procurators of
Cortes met in Valladolid on
9 July. On
12 July, they swore Philip and Juana together as kings, and their son
Charles as their inheritor.
This arrangement didn't last long. On
25 September 1506 Philip died suddenly of
typhus fever in Burgos. Joanna, pregnant with her sixth child, then made attempts to secure her rights to rule alone, in her own name; however, her arrogance and coldness towards important figures of the kingdom, the rumours of her mental instability and the unwillingness of the men around her to accept her rights doomed the endeavour. By
20 December 1506, she'd quietly abandoned Burgos, heading for the village of Torquemada. By now, she was being characterised as "lost, without any sense", although her Secretary, Juan Lopez, declared her "more sane than her mother". She refused to trust Spanish women, even going so far as sending for a midwife from Flanders to assist in her delivery, and was characterised as refusing to abandon her dead husband's corpse. Meanwhile, the country fell into disorder. Her heir, Charles, was a six-year old child being raised in his aunt's care in far-off Flanders; her father, Ferdinand, remained in his own dominions, allowing the crisis to reach a head. A regency council under Archbishop Cisneros was set up (against the Queen's orders) but it was unable to manage the growing public disorder; plague and famine devastated the kingdom, with supposedly half the population perishing of one or the other; and the Queen was unable to secure the funds she required to shore up her power. In the face of this, Ferdinand returned to Castile in July 1507: a coincidental remission of the plague and famine quieted the instability, but left an impression that the health of the Kingdom had been restored by the return of Ferdinand.
Ferdinand and Joanna met at Hornillos on 30 July 1507; Ferdinand then constrained her to yield up power to himself. On 17 August she summoned three members of the royal council and ordered them to inform the grandees, in her name, of Ferdinand's return: "That they should go to receive his highness and serve him as [theywould] her person and more." She refused to sign the instructions: a last gesture of defiance, and a statement that she didn't as Queen regnant endorse the surrender of her own royal power. Nonetheless, she was thereafter Queen only in name, and all documents, though issued in her name, were signed with Ferdinand's signature, "I the King". He would be named administrator of the kingdom by the Cortes of Castile in 1510, although he'd entrust the government mainly to Cisneros. Joanna he'd eventually install in
Tordesillas, near
Valladolid, in February 1509, after having dismissed all of her faithful servants and appointing a small retinue faithful to him alone. By this time, she'd appear to have been almost completely mad: some accounts claim that she took her husband's corpse with her to Tordesillas, to keep it close to her.
Ferdinand would die in 1516, an embittered man: his second wife, Germaine, had failed to provide him with a male heir, leaving his daughter as his heiress. Ferdinand resented that Aragon and - in theory on the death of Joanna, in reality upon his own death - Castile would pass to this foreign grandchild, to whom he'd transferred his hatred of Philip; instead, he nurtured hopes that his younger grandson and namesake,
Ferdinand, who had been born and raised in Spain, could succeed, even naming Ferdinand as his heir in his will before being persuaded to revoke it and name Charles as his heir instead. When he died, Aragon and its associated crowns passed to Joanna, being governed in his absence by Ferdinand's bastard son, Alonso de Aragon. Castile, still nominally subject to Joanna, continued to be governed by Cisneros due to the Queen's continuing insanity, although a group of nobles, led by the Duke of Infantado, attempted to proclaim the Infante Ferdinand as King of Castile. The attempt failed, and in October 1517, Charles arrived in Asturias. On 4 November, he and his sister
Eleanor met Joanna at Tordesillas – there they secured from her the necessary authorization to allow Charles to rule as her co-King in Castile. Despite her acquiescence to his wishes, her imprisonment would continue; although the Castilian Cortes, meeting in Valladolid, would spite Charles by addressing him only as
Su Alteza ("Your Highness") and reserving
Magestad ("Majesty") for Joanna, no-one seriously considered rule by Joanna a real proposition.
In 1520, the
Revolt of the Comuneros (1520–1522), a revolt against the harsh royal control over Castile, broke out. The rebel leaders demanded that Castile be governed in accordance with the supposed practices of the Catholic Kings; in an attempt to legitimise their rebellion, the rebels turned to Joanna: as theoretical sovereign monarch, if she gave written approval of the rebellion, it would be legalised and would triumph. In an attempt to prevent this, Don Antonia de Rojas, Bishop of Mallorca, led a delegation of royal councilors to Tordesillas, asking her to sign a document denouncing the Comuneros; she demurred, requesting that he present her specific provisions. Before this could be done, the Comuneros in turn stormed the palace and requested her support (prompting
Adrian of Utrecht, the regent appointed by Charles, to declare that the emperor would lose Castile if she did so). Persuaded by Ochoa de Landa and her confessor, Fray Juan de Avila, she showed sympathy to the comuneros, but refused to sign: to do so, she was persuaded, would cause irreparable damage to her kingdom and to her son's rights. Charles repaid her loyalty to him when he quelled the uprising, having her locked up for the rest of her life in a windowless room in the castle of Tordesillas. She died on Good Friday, April 12, 1555.
Most historians believe she suffered from
schizophrenia and she was kept locked away and imprisoned. Needed to legitimize the claims of her father and son to the throne, Joanna only nominally remained Queen regnant of Castile until her death.
She is entombed in the
Capilla Real of
Granada, alongside her parents, her husband, and her nephew Miguel.
Ancestry and descent
Ancestors
Issue
Joanna in literature, art, music, and film
The figure of Queen Joanna attracted authors, composers, and artists of the
romanticist movement, due to her characteristics of
unrequited love, obsessive
jealousy, and undying
fidelity. Many later authors have followed this trend of portraying Joanna as a lovesick, and later griefstricken, woman, preferring to focus on her love for her husband than on her mental illness. An incomplete list of these works follows:
Biographies
W. H. Prescott, Hist. of Ferdinand and Isabella (1854)
Rosier, Johanna die Wahnsinnige (Vienna, 1890)
H. Tighe, A Queen of Unrest (1907).
R. Villa, La Reina doña Juana la Loca (Madrid, 1892)
Bethany Aram, "Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe" (2005)Further Information
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