#trastamara

After Queen Isabel’s death in 1504, Juana inherited the throne of Castile. However, her mental health—or at least the perception of it—became a major issue. She was described as melancholic, obsessive, and prone to deep grief, especially after the death of her husband Philip the Handsome in 1506. Her father, Fernando, and later her son, Carlos V, used her supposed instability to control Castile politically, effectively confining her in the palace at Tordesillas for decades.

In his dispatches to Emperor Carlos V, Eustace Chapuys recorded that Katherine often asked after her sister’s health and situation in Tordesillas. He added that Katherine “loved her sister tenderly, and mourned her misfortunes as if they were her own.”

Daughters of the House of Trastámara

“Having done so, the King settled to serenely eat where the grand master lay dead”

Peter I of Castile and his half-brother Fadrique. Technically Fadrique met his end with multiple blows to the head with maces and crossbow bolts after he fell to finish him off, and after the fact Peter ate in the same room inside the Alcazar of Seville without a care in the world 💀gag it, king. All historical inaccuracies are mine. I LOVE PEDRO I he’s my historical fixation

An English Princess for Castile

Constanza of Castile and her daughter Catherine of Lancaster were in Bordeaux in early 1388, where they watched five members of Gaunt’s household jousting against five men of Charles VI of France’s allegiance, who were members of the marshal of France’s household, over three days in the square in front of the cathedral. After this event, Duchess Constanza began preparing to travel to Castile to arrange and attend Catherine’s wedding to her second cousin Enrique of Castile, King Juan’s son.

John of Gaunt, Constanza and Catherine travelled from Bordeaux to Bayonne, then mother and daughter went on to Dax, while the duke of Lancaster returned to Bordeaux. Constanza and Catherine spent two days at Dax, then travelled through the Basque country, over the Pyrenees via the pass at Roncesvalles and on to Pamplona, where the king and queen of Navarre ‘received them grandly and honourably’ because Queen Leonor of Navarre was the sister of the king of Castile, and Constanza’s first cousin. Constanza and Catherine stayed for over a month in the kingdom of Navarre with the king and queen, and finally crossed the border into Castile.

All the important people of Castile, Galicia, Seville, Cordoba and Toledo came to see them enter the kingdom, in order to see the young half-Castilian, half-English girl, Catherine of Lancaster, who would marry their king’s son and would one day become their queen, while King Juan himself met them at Burgos. Duchess Constanza then went to Montiel, where her father King Pedro had been defeated in battle by her uncle Enrique of Trastámara in 1369. Pedro was buried in Montiel after Trastámara stabbed him to death in the aftermath of the battle, and the chronicler Jean Froissart states that Constanza exhumed his remains and took his body to Seville where she had him ‘richly and honourably’ reinterred in the great cathedral there. King Juan attended the funeral of the man his father had killed, as did his son Enrique and Catherine. Afterwards, Constanza went to Medina del Campo, thirty miles from Valladolid, and stayed there for a while with her retinue.

Jean Froissart gives no details of the subsequent wedding of young Enrique of Castile and Catherine of Lancaster, though no doubt it was a magnificent and well-attended state occasion, held in the cathedral of San Antolín in Palencia on 17 September 1388. A Spanish chronicler states that there were many jousts, feasts and ‘very big celebrations’, and that King Juan gave gifts of jewels to the English knights who were present. John of Gaunt remained in Bordeaux and did not attend his daughter’s wedding in person, though sent King Juan a very beautiful gold crown, with which the duke had once hoped to be crowned king of Castile and Leon himself.

Despite the age difference between Enrique and Catherine of seven years -at the time of the marriage, he was 8 years old and she was 15- Enrique was to address his wife a few years later as ‘the one I love as well as my own heart’. It seems highly likely that Catherine had been taught her mother’s native Castilian while growing up in England, and communication with her new husband and her Spanish relatives was surely not a problem. This marriage reconciled the two branches of the family and ended Constanza’s active claim to the throne. The duchess of Lancaster had a good relationship with her cousin Juan I of Castile, especially in political terms.

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Juana of Castile and the Lutheran Myth

The claim that Juana of Castile secretly embraced Lutheranism is a persistent but entirely unfounded myth. It surfaced long after her death and reflects political, religious, and romanticized readings of her life rather than any credible historical evidence.

To begin with, Juana’s adult life unfolded decades before the Protestant Reformation became a defined doctrinal movement. Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses were posted in 1517, when Juana had already been confined in Tordesillas for eight years under the authority of her father Fernando II of Aragon, and later her son Carlos V.  This confinement severely restricted her access to books, political correspondence, and external influence—Catholic or Protestant.

Surviving archival material shows no sign of interest in Lutheran doctrine, nor even exposure to it. Reports from ambassadors and clerical visitors repeatedly describe her as a Catholic queen who participated in rites when permitted and who neither requested Protestant texts nor discussed reformist theology. In fact, her custodians explicitly prevented the circulation of unapproved materials in Tordesillas, a policy that intensified as Carlos V led imperial campaigns against emerging Protestant states.

The myth of a “Lutheran Juana” seems to arise from three later interpretive trends. First, Enlightenment and Romantic writers recast her as a tragic heroine resisting dynastic oppression; some loosely associated her isolation with ideological dissent, including Protestant sympathies, despite the lack of evidence. Second, the political propaganda of the 16th century sometimes framed her alleged “madness” as religious obstinacy—yet none accused her of Lutheranism. Third, modern attempts to reinterpret her life through revisionist psychology occasionally blurred the distinction between political confinement and theological identity.

Crucially, contemporary Spanish Inquisition records—extraordinarily alert to the spread of heresy—never opened proceedings against Juana, a telling sign that she was not suspected of heterodoxy. Had a queen of Castile manifested even a trace of Lutheran inclination, inquisitorial action would have been immediate, intense, and thoroughly documented.

Although raised in the intensely Catholic courts of Fernando and Isabel, Juana displayed a form of piety that contemporaries sometimes interpreted as distant or restrained. Her devotions were consistent and orthodox, yet lacking the public emotionality expected of a royal woman in early sixteenth-century Iberia. Some chroniclers, shaped by the devotional standards of the time, even mistook this internalized spirituality for indifference or spiritual coldness.

This perception of her aloofness intersected with another powerful current in the political imagination of her age: the belief that she was the victim of enchantment. Many contemporaries—including nobles, courtiers, and even foreign observers—explained her psychological instability through the vocabulary of hechizo (bewitchment). The idea that Juana was “enchanted” served both as a culturally plausible explanation for her erratic behavior and as a political instrument that justified the control exercised over her by her father, husband, and later her son. The notion of supernatural interference fit comfortably within a society where madness, grief, and emotional excess were readily interpreted through spiritual or magical frameworks.

Crucially, the posthumous inventories of Juana’s possessions provide a tangible window into her religious world. These documents list numerous Catholic devotional objects: rosaries, crucifixes, reliquaries, carved images of the Virgin, and richly illuminated books of prayer. Their preservation in her personal environment demonstrates that Juana not only remained within the bounds of Catholic orthodoxy but also surrounded herself with items deeply embedded in the traditional devotional culture of late medieval Spain. Far from suggesting indifference, these objects attest to a continued attachment to the forms of worship she had learned in her youth.

Sources

Joseph F. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain (Cornell University Press, 1975)

Bethany Aram, Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)

Geoffrey Parker, Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale University Press, 2019)

Manuel Fernández Álvarez, Juana la Loca: La cautiva de Tordesillas (Espasa, 2001)

Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (Yale University Press, 1998)

Kamen, Henry. Spain 1469–1714: A Society of Conflict. London: Pearson, 2005.

Gómez, María del Carmen. “Locura, hechizo y poder: La percepción de Juana de Castilla en la historiografía del siglo XVI.” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 42, no. 1 (2012)

Reign | The Spanish Princess

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Source: Wikimedia Foundation

1. A portrait by an unknown artist, the sitter is believed to be Infanta María of Aragon.