Today, I break from posting chronologically about events depicted in Columbus and Caonabó: 1493–1498 Retold to discuss the weddings and marriages of three couples—Spain’s Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, the Taíno chieftain Caonabó and Anacaona, and Columbus and his Portuguese wife, Filipa Moniz Perestrelo. As dramatized in my books, all three 15th century marriages were conceived for political, strategic, or career purposes, although love followed to varying degrees. Happy Valentine’s Day!
In 1469, disguised as a muleteer, Ferdinand snuck into Castile to marry Isabella in Valladolid, Spain, when both were teenagers, defying Castile’s King Enrique IV (Isabella’s half-brother). As presented in Encounters Unforeseen: 1492 Retold, the marriage and Ferdinand’s stature as heir to Aragón’s throne assisted Isabella in her struggle against Enrique to assume the Castilian throne upon Enrique’s death in 1474. Ferdinand then also had a claim to Castile’s throne, and their marriage had some rocky moments in 1474 and 1475 when Isabella crowned herself without notice to him when he wasn’t present. Columbus and Caonabó relates Columbus’s conquest of “Española” on the couple’s behalf—including their governance instructions and initial decisions, jointly rendered, regarding enslavement of indigenous Caribbean peoples. It contains copies of the portrait of Isabella hanging in Madrid’s Royal Palace and of Ferdinand in the collection of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, shown below.
Caonabó’s marriage to Anacaona—perhaps in the early 1480s—allied Caonabó’s chiefdom of Maguana (in the modern Dominican Republic) with the chiefdom ruled by Anacaona’s family, Xaraguá (in the modern Haiti). As presented in Encounters Unforeseen, Xaraguá was the island’s most powerful chiefdom and Anacaona was hailed as a poet and the island’s most beautiful woman, so the competition among the island’s chieftains to wed her was intense. The Taíno chieftains were polygamous; Caonabó would have had over half-a-dozen wives when they were married, similarly chosen to cement his influence in subordinate chiefdoms, and Anacaona was a later wife, perhaps twenty years his junior. Columbus and Caonabó recounts the couple’s desperate years of joint struggle against Isabella, Ferdinand, and Columbus’s invasion and includes newly drawn sketches of both (by the Dominican illustrator Boris De Los Santos), shown below.
Likely in autumn 1479, a twenty-eight-year-old Columbus married Filipa Moniz Perestrelo, then perhaps twenty-six (old for a woman’s marriage in the 15th century), at a convent and church where he’d met and courted her in Lisbon, Portugal, while working in the city as a shipping agent and map maker. As depicted in Encounters Unforeseen, Filipa was of minor nobility—her father and family held hereditary governorship of the Portuguese Atlantic Island of Porto Santo (near Madeira)—and the family’s stature assisted Columbus in presenting his proposal for his first voyage to Portugal’s King Joâo II (1483 or 1484), which Joâo rejected. Filipa died by 1485, after which Columbus departed for Spain, where he would have affairs with two Spanish women, one for several years with a commoner, the other briefly with a noblewoman who was governess to another Atlantic Island, Gomera (Canary Islands). As explored in Columbus and Caonabó, Columbus had little time (or perhaps use) for potential marriages or these affairs after his appointment by Isabella in 1493 to conquer the “Indies” for Castile.