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In October 1508, a letter from the bishop of Málaga reports that she ate and slept on the floor and that she did not wash herself or change her clothing.įerdinand died early in 1516, seven years after he had imprisoned his daughter. For only from this time on do we have records of the self-destructive symptoms which would never leave her. There are indications that this shock actually did bring her to the edge of madness. But as if that were not enough, she was powerless against him, since she had yielded power to him herself: she was trapped. Joan now had to recognize that her beloved father was also her worst enemy. “With that… she did not count any more for him,” Miller notes laconically. While she withdrew from the world in mourning, her country fell into anarchy.ĭuring the subsequent negotiations Joan transferred governance to her father.
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After his death, Spain again experienced a power vacuum, and again, Joan was either not willing or able to fill it. Initially, Philip seemed to be in control, but he died quite suddenly, possibly due to an infection. Moreover, the victor would have to eliminate his rival for power. Father Ferdinand on the other hand needed a “crazy” Joan to grab the power. He had only to isolate his wife and get her out of the way in order to rule Spain without interference. Two years before the death of Isabella, the Cortes (an early form of parliament) of Castile and Aragon had sworn allegiance to Joan and Philip – a situation which Philip intended from the outset to exploit.
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Joan, who was meant to fill the vacuum, had never learned to handle power with confidence, indeed, quite the contrary. Isabella’s death created a power vacuum which irresistibly attracted power-hungry men: first of all Joan’s father Ferdinand, but also husband Philip, and later son Charles. Through this provision Joan’s fate was – in effect – already sealed… Should Joan “not be willing or able” to govern, then Ferdinand should take over the reign until Joan’s son Charles came of age. In her will, Isabella named Joan as her successor. Charles, the longed-for male heir, would later rule, as Charles V., an empire “in which the sun did not set” – an empire that in fact belonged to his mother, whom he kept imprisoned for nearly 40 years in the fortress Tordesillas. Between 14 Joan gave birth to three children, Eleonore, Charles, and Isabel. The first five years of her marriage to Emperor Maximilian’s only son Philip, the Dutch heir to the Habsburg empire, were relatively quiet. Joan was the third child of the Spanish monarchs Isabella (1451-1504) and Ferdinand (1452-1516), both referred to as “the Catholic.” Information about her childhood is sparse one could not know that the two older siblings would die so early and that Joan would become heir to the throne at the age of 20. And when it seemed politically opportune to declare her unfit to govern, one could easily fall back on this early manifestation of “madness”… This led to her being labelled as suffering from a delirium of passion and jealousy, and people felt sorry for the poor husband who was married to such an insane fury. In contrast to her mother Isabella, who was generally admired as prudent, Joan did not put up with her husband’s constant philandering instead she became enraged and fought back. Joan’s story is a case in point: she was expected to tolerate the - from a contemporary and feminist perspective – unbearable, and she protested. Her son Charles would also eventually hinder her from ruling over her empire or herself.Īccording to one tenet of feminist psychology, women in patriarchal society actually have no choice but to become mad. Immediately, her husband, the Habsburg Philip the Handsome, and her father, Ferdinand, did everything possible to wrest her inheritance from her. They were the men closest to her: her father, her husband, and her eldest son.Īfter the death of her mother Queen Isabella of Castile Joan became heiress to a vast empire middle and south America with their immeasurable treasures had been discovered by Columbus and his men only 12 years earlier. There were three men whose “vital interest” required that Joan be and stay insane or at least be considered so for most of her life. Even today unwanted people can be eliminated by asserting that they are insane, or, as was the case for Joan, that they are unfit to govern. The question whether Joan the Mad “deserved” this name and was in fact mad has occupied people for almost five centuries.