Joanna of Castile. A Queen Stripped of Power

Written by Marcus Renfell

Joanna of Castile was not mad – she was inconvenient. Her tragedy lay in the fact that she was born a woman in an era when a crown on one’s head meant less than male ambitions around the throne. History proclaimed her insane because it was more convenient for those who stole her power.

Political Madness

Psychiatric diagnosis in the sixteenth century served primarily political, not medical, purposes. When Joanna’s entourage began whispering about her „instability” in 1502, the queen was only a twenty-year-old woman reacting to her husband’s blatant infidelity.

Philip the Handsome demonstratively maintained mistresses at court, humiliating his wife before all of Europe. Today’s psychology would call Joanna’s reactions normal emotions of a person betrayed and degraded. Contemporary politics called them madness because a mad queen could not rule independently.

A fundamental question must be asked: who benefited from this diagnosis? The answer is brutal in its simplicity. Philip desired the power of the Castilian crown without the need to share it with his wife. Ferdinand of Aragon preferred to exercise regency rather than surrender power to his daughter. Charles V inherited from his father and grandfather the art of instrumentally treating his mother as a political phantom – a titular queen locked in a cell.

The mechanism was perfidious but effective. Emotional reactions to betrayal and humiliation were presented as symptoms of mental illness. Legitimacy to power remained formal, but practical governance passed into male hands. European political history knows few examples of such consistent deprivation of power from a person legally entitled to the throne.

The Procession with the Corpse

The scene from 1506 entered history as proof of Joanna’s madness. A pregnant widow traveling with her husband’s coffin, refusing the company of women, opening the coffin and kissing the corpse – an image ready for placement in a psychiatry textbook. Except that interpretation of this event requires viewing it through the prism of contemporary dynastic practices, not modern psychological norms.

Joanna acted consciously and deliberately. Her son Charles was the legal heir to the Castilian throne through both father and mother. Demonstratively accompanying Philip’s remains constituted a public manifestation of this right. Everyone along the procession route had to see: here is the queen legitimizing the dynastic claims of her offspring. Mourning was spectacle, but politically calculated spectacle.

The repulsive details of this journey served to discredit Joanna by political opponents. Contemporary accounts were written by people connected to Ferdinand’s court or factions hostile to the queen. Every non-normative gesture by the widow became proof of her inability to govern. History written by enemies becomes history condemning the victim, not the perpetrators.

Paradoxically, this same scene confirms Joanna’s rationality. She knew that without symbolic strengthening of her son’s position, she would be completely pushed to the margins. Her political instinct proved accurate – Charles indeed assumed power. The tragedy was that the king who owed his throne to his mother then locked her in prison for four decades.

Forty-Six Years in Prison

The castle in Tordesillas became a living tomb. From 1509 until her death in 1555, Joanna spent nearly half a century there in officially termed „health care” isolation. No court condemned her, no sentence was issued, no trial was conducted. The will of her father, and later her son, was sufficient to deprive a crowned queen of freedom for the rest of her life.

The mechanism of imprisonment reveals the hypocrisy of dynastic ambitions. Ferdinand needed his daughter alive because only through her did he legitimize his regency over Castile. A dead Joanna would mean the necessity of transferring power to a grandson whom the grandfather treated as a politically foreign tool of the Habsburgs. A living but locked-up queen constituted the ideal solution – she formally reigned but actually did not interfere.

Charles V proved that political cynicism is efficiently inherited. After Ferdinand’s death in 1516, the already twenty-year-old monarch could have freed his mother. He had full power, international recognition, a mighty empire. Joanna posed no threat to him – she was an aging woman without influence or supporters. Despite this, he kept her imprisoned for another forty years, until her natural death at age seventy-five.

This story demonstrates a painful truth for European monarchies. Dynastic rights meant less than patriarchal will to exercise power. The best-educated woman of her time, daughter of the Catholic Monarchs, legal ruler of Castile and Aragon – all of this was insufficient against the decision of the men in her family. Her tomb in the cathedral in Granada beside Philip is the final irony: she rests beside the husband who initiated her political death.

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Marcus Renfell

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Marcus Renfell is a historian driven by curiosity and passion. He refuses to accept the “safe,” polished versions of the past. Instead, he brings forgotten, overlooked, and distorted stories back to life. His work blends scholarly precision with the art of storytelling, turning historical narratives into vivid, page-turning experiences.
His mission is simple: to prove that history can be gripping, alive, and deeply personal.

His debut book: Women of Science. Stories You Were Never Told

In his first publication, Marcus Renfell shines a light on the remarkable women who shaped the world of science — both the pioneers whose names we know and the brilliant minds history forgot. It’s an inspiring journey through untold stories, groundbreaking achievements, and the resilience of women who changed our understanding of the world.

? Discover Women of Science. Stories You Were Never Toldon Amazon.com.