Speaker 1: Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkie listener discretion is advised. Culturally,
Speaker 1: we are obsessed with the idea of women going mad.
Speaker 1: It's a theme that's pervaded literature for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1: It's a woman sometimed, young, usually beautiful, who becomes a
Speaker 1: tragic figure hold away in a gothic, decrepit mansion. The
Speaker 1: woman loses her mind and then usually her life. There
Speaker 1: are too many examples to name, the Lady of Shelot,
Speaker 1: Cathy from Weathering Heights, Bertha and Janier, Miss Havisham, and
Speaker 1: of course, perhaps most iconically, Ophelia. Feminist literary critic and
Speaker 1: Princeton professor Elaine show Walter wrote, Ophelia became the prototype
Speaker 1: not only of the deranged woman in Victorian literature and art,
Speaker 1: but also of the young female asylum patient. In fiction.
Speaker 1: The madwoman usually comes from a society of rigid gender rules.
Speaker 1: Take Ophelia again. Ophelia's madness is the thing that allows
Speaker 1: her to break free of the limitations and restrictions on
Speaker 1: women in her society. In the play, her hair that
Speaker 1: was once neatly covered and pulled back is after she
Speaker 1: goes mad, let down, wavy and untamed at its full length, and,
Speaker 1: as Elaine show Walter points out, Ophelia also breaks free
Speaker 1: of her sexual propriety. Ophelia becomes provocative, singing body songs
Speaker 1: and giving away flowers in a not so subtle allusion
Speaker 1: to her deflowering herself. That brings up another aspect of
Speaker 1: the pop culture portrayal of the woman gone mad, that
Speaker 1: madness is the inverse of proper female decorum when it
Speaker 1: comes to sexuality. A mad woman is one who wants,
Speaker 1: one who has explicit female desires. In essay on Ophelia,
Speaker 1: Emmy Harmana writes about the idea of mad women as
Speaker 1: a rado maniacs. She writes this is based on masculine
Speaker 1: assumptions that women are more inclined to go mad since
Speaker 1: they are closer to the irrational by nature, and that
Speaker 1: young women's madness is more often than not caused by
Speaker 1: sexual frustration of unrequited love. There it is the woman
Speaker 1: who goes crazy because she wants a man she cannot have.
Speaker 1: Perhaps it's even the origin of a particularly sexist modern
Speaker 1: trend of dudes telling their friends that all of their
Speaker 1: clingy x is are quote crazy. The link between sexual
Speaker 1: frustration or desire and madness or hysteria in women might
Speaker 1: also help to explain the Victorian invention of the vibrator,
Speaker 1: used to induce what doctors called paroxysms in women in
Speaker 1: order to restore their sanity. But the stories when it
Speaker 1: comes to our fictional heroines don't usually end well. Mad
Speaker 1: women get a brief chance to break free from social conventions,
Speaker 1: to scream in a society that forced them to whisper.
Speaker 1: But then these women's are disposed of. They die by
Speaker 1: beautiful suicide in flowy white gowns and water if they're
Speaker 1: beautiful like Ophelia or the Lady of lat or by
Speaker 1: fire if they're not as beautiful like Miss Havisham or
Speaker 1: Bertha in Jane Eyre, or more sinisterly, they're disposed of,
Speaker 1: deposited in a asylums or the attic, like the heroine
Speaker 1: of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman story The Yellow Wallpaper. If
Speaker 1: you've never read The Yellow Wallpaper, you absolutely should. It
Speaker 1: was written in eighteen two, and the story is framed
Speaker 1: as the diary of a young woman who suffers from
Speaker 1: what might be in modern parlance called postnatal depression, and so,
Speaker 1: after this woman gives birth, her husband decides that the
Speaker 1: best treatment for her is isolating her in an attic room.
Speaker 1: Over the course of the story, the narrator begins to hallucinate,
Speaker 1: to become as mad as her either sinister or misguided
Speaker 1: husband believed her to be. Was the narrator mad all along?
Speaker 1: Or did the prolonged period of boredom and isolation drive
Speaker 1: her crazy? That brings us to the unlucky subject of
Speaker 1: today's podcast. Want To of Castile, or as she's known
Speaker 1: more colloquially, Juana la Loca. The Juanna was technically Queen
Speaker 1: of Castile for over fifty years and of Argon for
Speaker 1: thirty of those. Her title was in name only. For
Speaker 1: the vast majority of her reign. She was imprisoned in
Speaker 1: a castle in tordisse Us, declared insane by the men
Speaker 1: in her life who wanted to rule in her place,
Speaker 1: first her husband and then her father and then her son.
Speaker 1: As a literary figure, Juanna is irresistible. Her supposed madness
Speaker 1: was brought on by her obsessive love for her husband.
Speaker 1: After his death, they say that Wanna refuse to let
Speaker 1: them bury the body so that she could continually open
Speaker 1: the casket and kiss his cold face. There maybe couldn't
Speaker 1: be a better example of an Ophelia archetype in real life,
Speaker 1: love sick over a man to the point that it
Speaker 1: destroyed her sanity. But it's impossible to note to what
Speaker 1: extent the stories are true, or whether they were just
Speaker 1: convenient propaganda for her father to use in his claim
Speaker 1: to her kingdom. There are versions of Juana's story that
Speaker 1: try to paint her as a maligned feminist of history,
Speaker 1: a woman who was perfectly in her right mind, wrongfully
Speaker 1: accused of madness on purpose by men who knew that
Speaker 1: they could have that power. But some of one's behavior
Speaker 1: was genuinely strange, and as an heir of the deeply
Speaker 1: inbred Hapsburg family, mental illness was an occupational hazard for
Speaker 1: European monarchs. By the end of Juana's imprisonment, after decades
Speaker 1: in isolation, it's irrefutable that her mental condition had collapsed,
Speaker 1: but plenty of kings ruled freely, even as they behaved
Speaker 1: in ways that were charitably called eccentric. Being a woman
Speaker 1: made it easy for Juana's rivals to dispose of her
Speaker 1: and to turn her life into easy, appealing fiction. She's
Speaker 1: the type of story about a madwoman that we can't
Speaker 1: help but want to tell over and over again. I'm
Speaker 1: Danish Schwartz, and this is noble blood. Even if you've
Speaker 1: never heard of Juana before, you've probably heard of her parents,
Speaker 1: Ferdinand and Isabella, the King and Queen of Argon and Castile, respectively,
Speaker 1: but their union meant that the pair of them ruled
Speaker 1: a dynastically united Spain. The two of them are famous
Speaker 1: for funding Christopher Columbus's exploration of what was then called
Speaker 1: the New World, and for being the Catholic monarchs that
Speaker 1: began the Spanish Inquisition, and for the conversion of all
Speaker 1: of the Jews and Muslims in Spain. You've probably also
Speaker 1: heard of Juanna's younger sister, Catherine of Aragon, who became
Speaker 1: Henry the eighth first wife. Juanna was never supposed to
Speaker 1: be a queen. She had an older brother and an
Speaker 1: older sister in line before her, but still, when she
Speaker 1: was young, she was incredibly well educated, so that one
Speaker 1: day she would be ready for an advantageous marriage. That
Speaker 1: means that she was taught all of the languages of
Speaker 1: the Iberian Peninsula, Castilian, Catalan and Galico Portuguese, as well
Speaker 1: as French and Latin to her religious parents Dismay. As
Speaker 1: she was educated, Juanna became something of a religious skeptic,
Speaker 1: but none of that mattered really When she turned sixteen
Speaker 1: and it was finally time for her to fulfill her
Speaker 1: real purpose marriage. Juanna was betrothed to Philip of Flanders,
Speaker 1: Duke of Burgundy, also known as Philip the Handsome. This
Speaker 1: is where I will say, if you are near your
Speaker 1: phone or a computer, you should absolutely google a photo
Speaker 1: of Philip the Handsome, just to get an idea of
Speaker 1: what passed for good looks in the fifteenth century. Baby
Speaker 1: bangs on men were clearly a look that worked back then,
Speaker 1: but by all accounts, Philip was quite the charmer, and
Speaker 1: the pair were married first by double proxy and then
Speaker 1: in person in four when Juana arrived in Flanders with
Speaker 1: a fleet of over one hundred ships. Their marriage was
Speaker 1: supposed to be on October, but the story goes that
Speaker 1: one arrived and met Philip in person on the and
Speaker 1: was so immediately overcome with love or lust that the
Speaker 1: pair of them begged to be married that very day
Speaker 1: that they could consummate their relationship that night. Philip's handsomeness
Speaker 1: clearly worked on Wana, and the two of them had
Speaker 1: three children while they lived in Flanders. It was during
Speaker 1: this period that something unexpected was happening to the line
Speaker 1: of succession back in Spain. A year after Juana married Philip,
Speaker 1: her brother Juan, the heir to the throne, died, But
Speaker 1: to the great relief of everyone, One's wife, Margaret of Austria,
Speaker 1: was seven months pregnant at the time, and the hope
Speaker 1: was that she would have a son and a new
Speaker 1: heir who could take his or her father's place in
Speaker 1: the line of succession. But that December, Margaret gave birth
Speaker 1: to a stillborn girl, with that line ended. Next in
Speaker 1: line was one as older sister, Isabella, the Queen of Portugal,
Speaker 1: wife of Manuel of Portugal. People in Spain were a
Speaker 1: little resisent about a female queen, but the good news
Speaker 1: for everyone was that Isabella was also pregnant and she
Speaker 1: had a son that would assuage all of those concerns.
Speaker 1: And lo and behold, a son was born, Miguel in August.
Speaker 1: But Isabella of Portugal had had a difficult pregnancy, during
Speaker 1: which she had traveled extensively and that might partly explain
Speaker 1: why hours after childbirth Isabella died. The kingdom had little Miguel,
Speaker 1: but not for long. The infant Prince of Portugal and
Speaker 1: the Spanish Kingdoms, the boy who would have united all
Speaker 1: of the Iberian kingdoms, died when he was just two
Speaker 1: years old in his grandmother Isabella's arms. So in just
Speaker 1: three years, Juana became next in line to be queen,
Speaker 1: and she was officially recognized by the legislative bodies, the Corteses.
Speaker 1: But during her time away in Flanders, rumors had already
Speaker 1: begun to spread about her mental state. Juanna, who had
Speaker 1: been madly in love with her husband Philip the Handsome
Speaker 1: since the moment she saw him, was also wildly jealous
Speaker 1: when it came to her husband's infidelities. For what it
Speaker 1: was worth, her jealousy was merited. He was a philanderer.
Speaker 1: Once Wanna caught her husband in the throes of passion
Speaker 1: with one of her ladies in waiting, a woman who
Speaker 1: was known in courts for her luscious, shiny, long hair,
Speaker 1: Wanna shared the woman's hair off herself and then left
Speaker 1: the locks on Philip's pillows. A tom Hagen horsehead maneuver
Speaker 1: centuries before the Godfather. Wanna desperately wanted her husband to
Speaker 1: love her to stop his wandering eye. She tried love
Speaker 1: potions and tonics literal snake oil, all to no effect.
Speaker 1: Wanna and Philip had wild fights. Sometimes those fights would
Speaker 1: end in Philip literally confining and locking Juana in her rooms,
Speaker 1: where she would refuse food and sleep as a tactic
Speaker 1: for control. That was a frequent strategy when Juana Tantrum
Speaker 1: in fifteen o four, her mother Isabella, was sick with
Speaker 1: a fever, and Juana went to visit her in Castile.
Speaker 1: It's unclear exactly what happened, but there was some sort
Speaker 1: of altercation there, either between Juanna and her mother or
Speaker 1: between Juanna and her husband back home in Flanders. That
Speaker 1: meant that Juanna wanted to go back home immediately through France.
Speaker 1: The problem was Castile was at war with France, and
Speaker 1: it would be incredibly dangerous for her to transport herself
Speaker 1: on land. Castile might be at war with France, Juanna declared,
Speaker 1: but I'm not. She was completely irrational in her determination,
Speaker 1: so much so that her traveling companion in Bishop Fonesca,
Speaker 1: had to physically take her horses back to the stables
Speaker 1: himself to prevent Juanna from leaving. When Wanna reached the
Speaker 1: lock stables, she screamed and shook the bars and stayed
Speaker 1: up all night, refusing the basic comforts of food or blankets.
Speaker 1: So that was one as reputation when later that year
Speaker 1: her mother, Isabella died, Argon and Castile being separate kingdoms,
Speaker 1: meant that upon her mother's death, Juana became the Queen
Speaker 1: of Castile, although Isabella had stipulated that if Juana was
Speaker 1: unfit or unwilling to rule, Juana's dad, Ferdinand, would be
Speaker 1: allowed to govern until Juana's eldest son turned twenty. But
Speaker 1: Ferdinand had been ruling a united Argon and Castile alongside
Speaker 1: his now deceased wife, and he was not willing to
Speaker 1: let that go with one and her husband still in Flanders.
Speaker 1: For Ferdinand printed coins that said fernand and Joanna King
Speaker 1: and Queen of Castile and tried to persuade the Cortes
Speaker 1: that Juanna was so ill that she would not be
Speaker 1: able to govern, which led to the Cortes appointing him
Speaker 1: Ferdinand as the kingdom's administrator and governor and as Juan
Speaker 1: as guardian. But Philip the Handsome, Juana's husband, wasn't going
Speaker 1: to take that sitting down. He wanted to rule Castile,
Speaker 1: and so he also printed coins with his and his
Speaker 1: wife's names. For her part, Juanna attempted to dispel rumors
Speaker 1: about her insanity. She wrote a letter from Brussels to
Speaker 1: a signor de vere that I haven't been able to
Speaker 1: find translated into English, but the general idea is that
Speaker 1: she acknowledges the stories about her jealous passions, but that
Speaker 1: jealousy is a trait that she inherited from her wonderful mother,
Speaker 1: whom they all acknowledge was just one of the most
Speaker 1: excellent women in the world. But Ferdinand had already gotten
Speaker 1: the Cortees to appoint him as one as guardian, and
Speaker 1: Tuana and phil the Handsome were still in Flanders, so
Speaker 1: Ferdinand moved in to try to assert his power. He
Speaker 1: was also looking to edge Juana out of succession entirely
Speaker 1: by getting married again with the intention of producing an
Speaker 1: air Ferdinand's second wife was Germaine de Foix, the niece
Speaker 1: of Louis the twelfth of France, and in classic Hapsburg fashion,
Speaker 1: Ferdinand's own grand niece. The two never produced an air,
Speaker 1: and the move actually backfired on Ferdinand, whose pro French
Speaker 1: policies only bolstered support for the husband and wife pair
Speaker 1: of Juana and Philip. With the nobles on their side,
Speaker 1: Juanna and Philip made their way to Castile to try
Speaker 1: to cement their power. Although Ferdinand and Philip were rivals here,
Speaker 1: they did put their differences aside for the mutue really
Speaker 1: beneficial arrangement, where they met secretly to declare Juanna unfit
Speaker 1: to rule because of her quote infirmities and sufferings. Ferdinand
Speaker 1: did briefly attempt to challenge Philip for Castile, but knowing
Speaker 1: a losing battle when he saw one pretty quickly, Ferdinand
Speaker 1: retreated back to our gun. So Philip the Handsome was
Speaker 1: King of Castile with all of the power that he
Speaker 1: took from his supposedly infirm wife. But he wouldn't have
Speaker 1: the power for long. Philip got sick, and though the
Speaker 1: official cause of death was typhoid, many people thought that
Speaker 1: he was poisoned, possibly on the orders of Ferdinand. Mad
Speaker 1: with love or just mad, Juanna was bereft, Philip the
Speaker 1: Handsome was just when he died. Juanna was pregnant with
Speaker 1: their sixth child. It's at the point that, if you
Speaker 1: believe the stories, Juanna had a breakdown. She refused to
Speaker 1: be parted from her husband's dead body for months. They say,
Speaker 1: she didn't leave the side of the embalmed corpse, and
Speaker 1: she frequently requested that the casket be opened over and
Speaker 1: over again so that she could gaze upon her dead
Speaker 1: husband's handsome face once more and kiss his cold and
Speaker 1: waxy lips. At least dead in his coffin, Philip the
Speaker 1: Handsome couldn't incite his wife's jealousy, or so you might think,
Speaker 1: I want to accompanied the casket to its final resting
Speaker 1: place in Granada, and she insisted that the procession only
Speaker 1: travel at night so that other women wouldn't see Philip
Speaker 1: the Handsome's body and be tempted by the corpse. It
Speaker 1: was during these travels that Juanna gave birth to a
Speaker 1: daughter named Catherine for her sister at She finally let
Speaker 1: them put Philip's body in the ground for a good
Speaker 1: Wanna returned to a castile plagued by disaster, with a
Speaker 1: literal plague first of all, but also famine. Juanna was
Speaker 1: out of her depth. On one hand, some of those
Speaker 1: problems would have been impossible for a monarch to solve,
Speaker 1: but Juanna also probably did suffer from some mental illness
Speaker 1: that was wildly exacerbated by the death of her husband.
Speaker 1: It was a loss that she would never be able
Speaker 1: to get over. For whatever reason, Juana was incapable of
Speaker 1: ruling her kingdom effectively against her will. The Cortes set
Speaker 1: up a regency council for Juana in fifteen o seven,
Speaker 1: and Juanna just didn't have the resources or the tactical
Speaker 1: ability to raise the support she would need in order
Speaker 1: to protect her right to the throne. Just as the
Speaker 1: plague and famine were finally letting up the next year,
Speaker 1: her father, Ferdinand swooped in he who was promptly placed
Speaker 1: as regent. In fifteen o nine, Ferdinand confined his daughter
Speaker 1: to the royal palace at tortoisse Us on the basis
Speaker 1: of her supposed insanity. There are rumors about her paranoia,
Speaker 1: suicidal urges, and her necrophilia with the dead body of
Speaker 1: her husband, but it's tricky to parse out exactly what's
Speaker 1: true and what isn't. It's always challenging to retroactively diagnose
Speaker 1: illness in historical figures, mental or otherwise. But it's especially
Speaker 1: tricky here because it was in Ferdinand and Philip's interest
Speaker 1: for the general public to think that Juana was so
Speaker 1: insane that they could rule in her stead, and we
Speaker 1: know for a fact that both had forged letters and
Speaker 1: documents from her at different points to suit their purposes. Ferdinand,
Speaker 1: one his father, was never able to have a new heir,
Speaker 1: and so, though he didn't like it, one as eldest son, Charles,
Speaker 1: was the heir to the thrones of Argon and Castile.
Speaker 1: Ferdinand especially hated Charles because he was raised in Flanders
Speaker 1: and Ferdinand saw his grandson as a foreigner. Fernand tried
Speaker 1: to instead put another one of juan as sons, a
Speaker 1: younger son who was raised in Castile, next in line
Speaker 1: for the throne, but it didn't Ultimately work, Charles and
Speaker 1: port Juana were left the kingdom's jointly when Ferdinand died,
Speaker 1: although for a brief period after his death, Argon was
Speaker 1: ruled by Ferdinand's illegitimate son Alonso. They say that for
Speaker 1: the rest of his life, Ferdinand only visited his daughter
Speaker 1: Juana twice while she was in prison. Young Charles inherited
Speaker 1: the kingdom and also custody of his mad mother in
Speaker 1: tord to see Us, where she was kept for the
Speaker 1: rest of her life. Charles the Fifth in Spain would
Speaker 1: go on to be the Holy Roman Emperor as Charles
Speaker 1: the First. For forty five years, Juanna remained imprisoned. There
Speaker 1: was one year where she was briefly freed by rebels
Speaker 1: against Charles, but he swiftly put an end to that
Speaker 1: and put Juana back in toward to see Us. Charles
Speaker 1: instituted a policy of isolation for his mother. Quote it
Speaker 1: seems to me that the best and most suitable thing
Speaker 1: for you to do, he wrote to her attendants, is
Speaker 1: to make sure that no person speaks with her Majesty,
Speaker 1: for no good could come of it. The longer Juana
Speaker 1: was confined, the worse her condition became. Although it's hard
Speaker 1: to pretend that being locked up and more or less
Speaker 1: ignored for a few decades wouldn't make someone well lose
Speaker 1: their mind. By the end of her life she was paranoid,
Speaker 1: but the nuns wanted to kill her. Juanna refuse to
Speaker 1: eat or sleep, or bathe or change her clothes. She
Speaker 1: died at age seventy five on Good Friday in fifteen fifty.
Speaker 1: They buried Wana in the royal chapel, beside her parents
Speaker 1: and her husband. And even though her life ended there
Speaker 1: alone and all but forgotten, all six of one as
Speaker 1: children would go on to become monarchs in their own
Speaker 1: right France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, Hungary, and Portugal.
Speaker 1: Whatever mental illness they might have inherited from their mother,
Speaker 1: they also inherited her royal blood. That's the story of
Speaker 1: Juanna la Loca. But keep listening after a brief sponsor break,
Speaker 1: to hear a little bit more about one of her
Speaker 1: most macabre relatives. I think you're gonna like this one.
Speaker 1: The part of juan a story that tends to get
Speaker 1: the most attention, perhaps justifiably, is the exhimation of her
Speaker 1: husband's corpse and her rumored necrophilia. But there's another story
Speaker 1: about a dead body in the nobility of the Iberian
Speaker 1: Peninsula that I think is worth our attention. Peter, the
Speaker 1: first King of Portugal, was a direct ancestor of Juana,
Speaker 1: albeit one almost two hundred years before she was born.
Speaker 1: He was in love with a woman named Inez de Castro,
Speaker 1: and they were forbidden to marry. And though the story
Speaker 1: of their lives are fascinating and maybe even a story
Speaker 1: for another future podcast. It's the story of Inez's death,
Speaker 1: or rather her life after death, that I think seems
Speaker 1: appropriate to talk about at the moment. Inessa had only
Speaker 1: been Peter's mistress in her lifetime, and when she died,
Speaker 1: he wanted to find a way to legitimize their children
Speaker 1: in the line of succession. He claimed that he had
Speaker 1: secretly married Annez before she died, but there was no
Speaker 1: proof of that. The Pope refused to recognize that secret
Speaker 1: marriage or the legitimacy of the children that they had,
Speaker 1: so in an attempt to force the court to recognize
Speaker 1: her as the legitimate queen, and as a show of
Speaker 1: his love for her and his power, rumor has it
Speaker 1: that Peter exhumed in as his body from her grave,
Speaker 1: dressed the body in all of the regalia of a
Speaker 1: massive coronation dress Jules robe for and crown, and held
Speaker 1: a coronation for his queen even though she was just
Speaker 1: a dead body. Peter then forced every single noble in
Speaker 1: his court to kiss the hem of his dead love's robes,
Speaker 1: and then to kiss her cold waxy hands. For what
Speaker 1: it's worth, no one ever called him Peter a loco,
Speaker 1: but for Juana, maybe it ran in the family. Noble
Speaker 1: Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm
Speaker 1: and Mild from Aaron Mankey. The show is written and
Speaker 1: hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick,
Speaker 1: Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social
Speaker 1: media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more
Speaker 1: about the show over at Noble blood Tales dot com.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I
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