With the possible exception of the dazzlingly perverse Borgia popes and the women who surrounded them, I am not sure any family in history has quite the dark and dastardly reputation as the Spanish Habsburgs.
I have written at length about my own attachment to the dark legend of Queen Isabella.
Even after reading--and really appreciating-- the fair portrayal of Queen Isabella in Giles Tremblett's Isabella of Castille, I must be honest and confess that I am stubbornly sticking to my image of her as the psychopathic religious fanatic and power hungry queen that I have long imagined her to be-- as portrayed so memorably by Salman Rushdie in his wonderful short story that appeared in the New Yorker way back in 1991, called Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship, Santa Fe, January, 1492. ( Download The-New-Yorker-Jun-17-1991)
Rushdie is such a genius. In just a few short pages, he somehow evokes the most unforgettable picture of Columbus and Isabella; for this so perfectly captures just how I have always imagined them:
….he bowed over her olive hand and, with his lips a breath away from the great ring of her power, murmured a single, dangerous word. 'Consummation.' — These unspeakable foreigners! The nerve! 'Consummation', indeed! And then following in her footsteps, month after month, as if he stood a chance. His coarse epistles, his tuneless serenades beneath her casement windows, obliging her to have them closed, shutting out the cooling breeze….”
And so she plays with him! At luncheons she promises him everything he wants and cuts him dead later in the afternoon, looking through him as if he were a veil.”
He wonders if she is tormenting him for fun alone…!
Isabel la Católica~~
Love her or hate her (she is my own personal arch enemy), her religious fanaticism takes center stage in most books about her. Our British tour guide in Seville referred to Isabella and Ferdinand as "the psychopaths"~~ for indeed, everyone knew who he was referring to.
Her daughters don't fare much better either... In The Noble, Tragic Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana, Queen of Castile, author Julia Fox very courageously sets the record straight on these two much-maligned women. Just leaving aside Catherine for now and looking at Juana... Juana, is the stuff of dark Spanish legend. So passionately in love was she with her husband (otherwise known as Philip the Gorgeous from Burgundy), she went stark raving mad after his death. The story goes that she, despite being pregnant, insisted on traveling with the corpse of her dead husband from Burgos to Granada (they never made it that far), where she had wanted to have him buried. It is said that she would not allow any women near the body, so jealous was she in his death as much as in his life and that she opened the coffin on several occasions to kiss his hands and feet-- and lips. Julia Fox does a wonderful job poking holes in the legend and explaining that it was probably her father who was the "mad" one and by locking her up in a nunnery was able to take the rulership of Castille for himself.
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Henry Kamen, in his wonderful book on the Escorial, has perhaps the hardest legend of all to right: that of Philip II and the building of the Escorial. Probably no one quite captures the black legend on Philip II as Carlos Fuentes does in in 1975 novel, Terra Nostra. This is from a Kirkus review:
It is like a movie by Bunuel unreeling marvels, cruelties, compulsions--a Buneul, who had been given unlimited funds by some mad mogul. Fuentes' labyrinth starts in Paris in 1999, when the Seine is boiling, the Louvre has turned to crystal and the Eiffel Tower to sand. Flagellants parade the streets. On a bridge a man meets a woman with tattooed lips; he falls into the river; the story shifts back to Spain on the eve of the New World's discovery, it is a Spain of blood, torture, religious and sexual obsessions, ruled by El Senor, who hates life (God's greatest sin was the creation of man) and has immured himself in a necropolis. His mother consorts with the cadaver of her husband."
In the novel, Juana la Loca is Philip's mother, instead of his grandmother, but you recognize the consorting... and she is not the only necrophiliac as Philip II has long been portrayed as a cross between a religious fanatic and necrophiliac. In the novel, for example, we find him engaging in self- flagellation (wildly whipping himself as he prays prostrate on the cold marble floor of the basilica at el Escorial. They say he was unusual for a king in his avoidance of most pleasures and indeed, in the novel, he is depicted as entertaining some very strange religious ideas.
The Black Legend
The Black Legend itself has its roots in the aftermath of the failed Armada but really more than anything it is a product of the Protestant Reformation, which as part of its cultural wake, saw Catholic countries (especially Spain) portrayed as extremely backward--with religious superstition and fanaticism holding the country back in ways not seen in more enlightened Protestant countries. And so we have the inbred Hapsburgs with their courts filled with incredible art (from Bosch to Valesquez) their many dwarfs; religious sects and the dreadful Spanish Inquisition. It was a world embodied by black-clad aristocrats, in women strictly hidden away in their palaces and Byzantine religious practiced that had a strong hold on everything.
Philip II in particular was seen as monomaniacal in his building of the tremendously expensive Escorial. It didn't help that the monastery-palace itself was constructed on top of a hill in a rather remote and harsh location and built in an unadorned and cold-feeling classical style. It appeared harsh and authoritarian and was much loathed by Europeans of the time... And did I mention that this monastery-palace was also a pantheon? Philip had designed what later writers described as a necropolis-- a place of burial for the Spanish royals.
There must be other places like this somewhere in the world but for the life of me, I can't think of any. Basically, when the building was completed, bodies were taken out of their mausoleums and brought to el Escorial for their final interment. Royalty who died after the building's construction first had to be reduced to bones before being interred so fresh cadavers were first laid to rest in the “El Pudridero” (aka the rotting room).
You can read all about it here (since pictures are not allowed inside, I didn't get any of my own).
This project dominated Philip II's mature years as he spent enormous resources and energy in designing the huge complex and bringing artists from Italy over to adorn it.
Much was made of this in other parts of Europe--especially in lands prone to discriminating against the Spanish in the first place. But in all fairness, the Spanish themselves did much to spread the memes about their dark and morbid king Philip II.
In the book, Kamen addresses every single trope. His book is less a history of the building of el Escorial as much as it is a revisionist history of the life of Philip II (with special attention to his latter years). It is really stimulating reading--especially if you have read a lot of Spanish history. Kamen pays close attention to art--from the many Titian portraits to the opera by Verdi (based on Friedrich Schiller’s play about Philip and his son, the Don Carlo of the title):
I will sleep alone in my royal mantle
When my day has come to evening
I will sleep alone beneath the black
vault
There in the depths of the Escorial.
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Kamen's book is a dazzling tour through the life of Philip II. But as he tackles each different element in the myth surrounding Philip II, you will probably be left clinging to the Black Legend despite Kamen's best efforts since; well, where there is smoke there is fire. And the Expulsions did happen and women were very much hidden away and in some ways Spain was indeed as "backward" as people said until fairly modern times (If you look up how long the Spanish Inquisition was continued down to modern times, you might be surprised).
As Ingrid Rowland's fabulous review to the book states:
Kamen notes that the king attended “only” four autos-da-fé in person, and that none of them involved burnings at the stake. But surely it is incontrovertible that Spanish colonial rule, the Spanish Inquisition, and Spanish pressures on the Catholic church caused the world untold misery. The legacy of Philip II and the Escorial is as mixed and ambiguous as their eclectic heritage.
HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS ONE!
Ingrid Rowland: The Fortunate Journey in the New Republic
