Juana la Loca

Juana la Loca , was born on November 6, 1479, in Toledo, Spain and died on April 11, 1555, in Tordesillas, Spain. She was the queen of Castile from 1504 and of Aragon from 1516, although her husband, Felipe I, her father, Fernando II, and her son, Emperor Carlos V, better known as Carlos I of Spain, were in charge of exercising power. for her. The great mental instability from which the ambition of her father and her husband suffered the most , did not allow her to rule the country, and in reality, with the exception of her mother, no one wanted to allow her to do so.

Biography of Juana la Loca

Juana, was nicknamed ” La Loca “ and was the daughter of the Catholic Monarchs Fernando II of Aragon and Isabel I of Castile. He was born in the city of Toledo, the capital of the Kingdom of Castile . During her adolescence, Joanna was an attractive student , she had a fair complexion, blue eyes and the color of her hair was between reddish blond and reddish brown, like her mother and sister Catherine, she was also very intelligent as she was fluent in the main Romance languages ​​of the Iberian Peninsula , as well as French and Latin because he was very intelligent. In the year 1496, at the age of 16, Joanna married Philip the Fair who was the Dukefrom Burgundy and moved to Flanders to live with him. There, she had three children. One of them was Charles, who would later become the first Spanish emperor. While she was still in Flanders, Joanna’s older brothers and sisters passed away and the Cortes of Castile recognized her as the heir to the throne .

Queen of Castile

When Juana arrived in the Netherlands, her husband was different and neither was her situation at the Flemish court, which led to a series of fights with Felipe, who grew tired of her behavior and avoided the company of his wife. Despite the sick love that Juana felt, she felt a terrible humiliation that she was not counted on when making an important decision. She suffered fits of anger against her husband’s favorite and important court figures who dared to contradict her orders. The attacks of rage exhausted the Archduke’s patience, who decided to confine Juana to his chambers. Completely isolated, the princess’s behavior became more and more irregular, she refused to eat food, she refused to shower or, on the contrary, she did not stop doing it and her physical and mental deterioration was increasingly evident . On January 8, 1506, she left the Netherlands and left her husband and children. After a while she returned when her husband was ill, and although it was a hard blow for Juana, she did not shed a single tear when he died.

Death of Juana la Loca

Juana spent 46 years locked up by order of her father and her son Carlos I. She spent the first 20 years with her youngest daughter, but then her daughter married the prince of Portugal and left Tordesillas never to return. In Tordesillas , Juana la Loca lived a real ordeal; she was humiliated , forced to serve her guardians, and even sexually raped . His depression worsened to the point that he suffered from psychosis , severe melancholy and schizophrenia . The December as April as 1555 at 75 years Juana died in total anonymity, alone and with no one by her side.

Family of Juana la Loca

Her own maternal grandmother was better known as La Loca de Arévalo and ended her days confined in that castle. The madness in the Spanish Habsburg dynasty did not have its origin only in Juana or in her grandmother Isabel . Juana came from a family in which inbreeding had been practiced repeatedly , both by maternal and paternal branch . His maternal grandparents, Isabel de Portugal and Juan II de Castilla parents of Isabel la Católica , mother of Juana, were first cousins. On the other hand, his paternal grandfather, Juan II of Aragón , had also married Juana Enríquez, and the parents of Fernando de Aragón, the Catholic King , were first cousins ​​of Juan II of Castile , both of the Trastamara dynasty . Isabel de Castilla and Fernando de Aragón were second cousins. Thus, in Juana’s inheritance two factors that could have contributed to her madness intervene: the inheritance of her grandmother Isabel de Portugal, on the one hand, and on the other, the inbreeding of the Trastamara.

Why did they call her Juana la Loca

It is said that her madness began with her husband’s infidelities . When he died, Juana la Loca thought that he had been poisoned and entered a state of severe depression . She insisted until she managed to take her husband’s body in a caravan on a three-year trip to Granada. Among the ideas that Juana had and that made her look crazy, she asked the procession to travel alone at night, she stayed in convents of friars , but not of nuns so that no woman would see her husband. She did not like to bathe and she always dressed in black , she was dirty and her ideas were driving her more and more crazy.