On a winter night in 1507, somewhere on the dark and desolate roads of Castile, a queen opened a heavy wooden coffin and leaned down to kiss the cold, deteriorating feet of her dead husband. He had been dead for four months. The crude embalming techniques of the early sixteenth century were a product of their primitive era, and the face she was kissing was no longer the handsome face she had fallen so deeply in love with. The flesh had begun to succumb to the inescapable reality of time, altered by chemistry, dampness, and decay. Yet Joanna of Castile, unbothered by the macabre reality before her, closed the lid, climbed back onto her horse, and commanded the somber procession to move forward into the freezing dark.
The very next night, as the cold wind howled across the barren Castilian plains, she ordered the march to halt once more. She opened the casket again and kissed the head of her dead husband. She repeated this exact ritual the following night, and the night after that, stretching her mourning into an endless, nocturnal pilgrimage. Nobody stepped forward to stop her. Nobody could. Joanna was the reigning queen, and from a very young age, she had been profoundly, irrevocably obsessed with death.
She was born in the historic city of Toledo in 1479, entering the world as the third child of Isabella and Ferdinand, the legendary Catholic Monarchs. She grew up within a royal court that ran on absolute, unyielding religious faith the way other European courts ran on wine. Her parents were not people who possessed a high tolerance for ambiguity, doubt, or deviation. They had just successfully completed the centuries-long Reconquista, driving the last Moorish rulers from Granada, and had established the terrifying machinery of the Spanish Inquisition to purge the realm of any perceived spiritual corruption.
In this strict, shadow-drenched environment, the young princess wandered through cold stone corridors, her mind turning inward toward the strange and the permanent. As a small child, she looked up at her governess and made a bizarre request.
“I want to try on my skeleton.“
The governess looked down at the young princess, attempting to soften the grim, macabre nature of the child’s imagination as gently as possible.
“The skeleton is already inside you.“
Upon hearing these words, realizing that the architecture of death was already built into her own living flesh, the little girl wept bitterly.
She was a princess born into a rigid world that demanded absolute conformity, yet she found herself entirely unable to stop questioning everything around her. At an early age, she began to show undeniable signs of deep religious skepticism. In the court of Isabella, this was not merely an eccentricity; it was almost entirely incomprehensible, an unforgivable flaw, especially during a time when her mother had just ordered the forced conversion or immediate exile of every single Muslim and Jewish subject within the boundaries of Spain. Instead of gracefully embracing her designated royal role as a pious instrument of the state, Joanna asked questions that were never meant to be asked aloud. The courtiers and foreign diplomats described her as sullen, moody, and deeply withdrawn. Her long, heavy silences were frequently mistaken by outsiders for a sort of regal, icy dignity. But it was not dignity at all. It was the survival mechanism of an isolated child who had come to understand, with absolute clarity, that her true, authentic self had no legitimate place in the unforgiving world that surrounded her.
What do you think happens when we ignore our true selves to fit into a mold created by others? The psychological cost is written in the dark corners of her family’s history. According to private letters penned by Ferdinand’s trusted gentleman of the bedchamber, Queen Isabella of Castile may have resorted to a shocking, physically brutal punishment to correct her daughter Joanna’s behavior.
Imagine this terrifying image: the young princess Joanna, stripped of her royal comfort, suspended high in the air by coarse hemp ropes tied around her wrists, her feet heavily weighted down by iron block restraints pulling her joints downward with agonizing force. This specific method of torture, known historically as La Cuerda, was allegedly employed behind closed doors to violently correct what Isabella deemed to be insufficient piety and willful rebellion in her daughter. Modern historians continue to argue intensely over the absolute validity of this specific account, noting that the primary source was politically compromised and deeply tied to her father’s factions. Yet the mere existence of such a rumor within the contemporary court correspondence reveals an immense amount about the toxic, volatile dynamics operating within that royal household. The widespread belief that Isabella could readily resort to such extreme physical measures paints a vivid, terrifying picture of their maternal relationship and the suffocating, violent pressures of early modern royal life.
Despite the shadows hanging over her childhood, Joanna was, by most contemporary accounts, the absolute brightest and most intellectually gifted of all her siblings. Before she had even crossed the threshold into her teenage years, she had mastered Latin grammar, civil law, mathematics, classical philosophy, and multiple foreign languages. Yet, within the halls of the palace, none of this formidable intellect was celebrated as genuine intelligence or leadership capability. It was viewed strictly as a transactional necessity, a superficial polish required to prepare her for a strategic foreign marriage that would expand her family’s global empire.
What she possessed from the very beginning, far more than academic brilliance, was an emotional intensity so raw and profound that it genuinely frightened the calculated, stoic people around her. She felt every joy, every betrayal, and every grief with an overwhelming magnitude, and she completely lacked the desire or the ability to hide it. In the strictly regimented court of the Catholic Monarchs, where every gesture was rehearsed and every emotion weaponized, that transparent intensity was already a dangerous, systemic problem.
She was just seventeen years old when she was packed away and sent across the sea to the Low Countries to fulfill her diplomatic destiny: marrying Philip of Habsburg, the Duke of Burgundy. This was not destined to be an ordinary marriage of convenience. Philip was known throughout the courts of Europe as “Philip the Handsome” for a very definitive reason. He was strikingly blonde, broad-shouldered, magnetic, and effortlessly charming. He moved through his aristocratic life with the absolute, carefree ease that only comes from a lifetime of never being told no by anyone. He laughed effortlessly, and he looked at the women of the court with a casual, predatory hunger, treating them as though they were merely a light, disposable appetizer before the main course of his day.
This is the precise point where history becomes deeply complicated. Upon her arrival, Joanna found herself completely consumed by an intense, overwhelming physical and emotional passion for her new groom. She couldn’t wait for the elaborate, weeks-long ceremonial pageantry planned by the diplomats, and she fiercely demanded to be married the exact same day they met. She literally married Philip within mere hours of their very first face-to-face meeting, and by nightfall, the young couple had violently consummated a union that the architects of Europe had intended to be a matter of cold ceremony and diplomatic restraint.
But Joanna and Philip were anything but restrained. The initial fire of their physical union quickly devolved into a psychological nightmare. Philip, true to his nature, took lovers constantly, flagrantly, and openly. He selected mistresses from among the very women Joanna was forced to look at every single day, share her daily meals with, and watch from across the crowded court reception rooms as they whispered and laughed. The emotional pain inflicted upon her was entirely unbearable.
In her desperate, raging attempts to reclaim her husband’s wandering attention, her behavior grew increasingly volatile. She ordered her servants to corner one of Philip’s prominent mistresses and physically cut all the hair off her head to humiliate her. On another occasion, consumed by a torrent of jealousy, she cornered another woman and violently scratched her face in front of the horrified courtiers. Joanna rages, weeps openly, and paces the confines of her private rooms through the dead of night, her footsteps echoing on the cold tiles. Her royal attendants, deeply alarmed by her behavior, wrote frantic letters back home to Spain, utilizing carefully chosen, heavily coded language to describe her grief, desperately trying to avoid explicitly stating that the princess was losing her mind.
Yet, through all of this domestic warfare, she kept being politically useful. She kept conceiving and bearing his children, giving birth to six children over a span of just ten years. And through it all, she kept loving Philip with a fierce, absolute love that seemed to have no bottom, a devotion that dropped and kept dropping through every single public humiliation and calculated insult he threw her way.
From her distant throne in Spain, her mother, Isabella—a resolute, hardened woman entirely unaccustomed to emotional outbursts or sentimental weakness—watched this unfolding disaster from afar and understood exactly what was happening to her daughter. She never uttered a single word regarding her daughter’s stability to the public, but within her highly confidential, private letters to Ferdinand, a specific, ominous word began to appear with increasing regularity.
Loca.
Mad.
Isabella had spent forty long years carefully choosing every single word she ever committed to paper, fully aware of the weight of her pen. When she wrote the word loca, she meant for it to stick permanently to her daughter’s legacy. Even though Joanna was still young, alive, and the rightful heir to the massive kingdom of Castile, she had already become, in the eyes of her family, something dangerous to be managed, controlled, and ultimately contained.
The screaming matches, the public outbursts, and the erratic, unpredictable behavior did not stop. As for Isabella, she did not live nearly long enough to see where this tragic path would finally terminate. Worn down by a severe fever, physical exhaustion, and a body completely broken by decades of relentless military campaigning and imperial governance, the queen died in November 1504 at Medina del Campo. This was the exact same fortified castle where she had once physically locked Joanna inside a room to stop her from desperately chasing Philip across the stormy sea to Flanders.
In her meticulously crafted final will and testament, Isabella included a highly specific, legally binding clause. If Joanna proved to be either unwilling or unable to rule the kingdom, Ferdinand was authorized to immediately step in and take her place as regent.
Unwilling or unable. The language was incredibly deliberate. Isabella had spent her entire adult life choosing her words with razor-sharp precision, and these two terms were absolutely no accident. She had intentionally left a legal door wide open for the usurpation of her daughter’s birthright. Ferdinand just needed to wait for a viable reason to walk through it.
Ferdinand, however, was not the only predator watching the throne with hunger. While the aging king watched from a calculated distance, Philip was already moving aggressively to secure his own power. He began systematically spreading the narrative throughout Europe that his wife Joanna was completely mentally unfit to hold sovereign power. A mad queen, he reasoned, could be easily sidelined from governance, leaving the vast wealth of Castile completely in his hands.
He used her desperate, obsessive love for him as a weapon, pressuring her into signing legal documents that signed away her authority, strictly restricting her physical movements within the palace, and intercepting her private correspondence back to Spain. He was actively building a psychological and political cage around her in real time, using her own devotion to him as the ultimate lock.
In September 1506, Philip met an unexpected—and perhaps, as some contemporary whispers suggested, a richly deserved—end. He was in perfect, thriving physical health. After engaging in a strenuous, exhausting game of pelota on an intensely scorching late summer day, he drank a large quantity of freezing cold water to quench his thirst. Within a single week, the robust Duke of Burgundy was completely gone.
Typhoid fever took him with terrifying, relentless swiftness. The symptoms were brutal and unyielding: a raging, burning internal fever, violent episodes of mental delirium, and the total, rapid collapse of a physical body that had previously shown absolutely no signs of weakness or distress.
Joanna, just twenty-seven years old and eight months pregnant with their final child, was forced to face an unimaginable abyss of grief. She refused to leave his bedside for a single moment, sitting silently through the heat and the stench as his life slowly slipped away from him. The moment his breathing ceased entirely, she took complete control of his remains. She immediately summoned the royal embalmers. She commanded them to treat the corpse heavily with quicklime and layers of wax, dressing him in humble Franciscan robes. She ordered the heavy wooden casket to be sealed, then opened, then sealed again in a repetitive loop of grief and denial.
Somewhere in the absolute middle of this horrific mourning period, her body went into labor, and she gave birth to her sixth child, a daughter named Catherine of Habsburg. The very moment the infant was safely delivered, Joanna turned her back on the nursery and went directly back to the side of her husband’s casket.
The legendary, harrowing funeral journey across the country began in the bitter cold of December. Philip’s final resting place was designated to be the royal chapel in Granada, and Joanna determined that she would personally escort his body across the vast, frozen terrain of Castile. She established a strict, unyielding rule for the journey: the funeral procession was forbidden from traveling during the daylight hours, moving exclusively under the cover of night.
You may wonder why a young queen would make such a bizarre, exhausting choice. The truth was rooted in her deep, manic jealousy; even though her husband was a corpse, she deeply distrusted any living woman, fearing that if the procession traveled by day, someone might cast their eyes upon his body.
The freezing, snow-slicked Castilian roads stretched endlessly ahead of them in the dark. The heavy wooden casket rested upon a creaking cart while Joanna rode her horse directly beside it through the pitch-black nights. The oppressive silence of the countryside was broken only by the soft, rhythmic chanting of accompanying monks, while terrified, bewildered villagers stood on the roadsides, staring in absolute silence at the passing spectacle of their black-clad queen.
At every single stop along the journey, Joanna issued a strict command to open the coffin. Night after night, she looked upon his remains, kissing his cold feet, holding his stiff hands, and speaking to him as if he were merely sleeping. By February of 1507, Philip the Handsome was far from handsome in any conventional sense. The crude embalming of 1506 had not held up well against the damp winter air and the constant, repetitive openings of the lid. The flesh had begun to slough away, and the smell of decay was overpowering. Yet her psychological fixation remained entirely unbroken. Years later, she would still look around her chambers and ask after him.
“Where is Philip? When is Philip coming?“
Back in the bitter winter of 1507, as the bizarre nocturnal procession crawled slowly southward, Ferdinand was watching his daughter’s descent with cold, calculated precision. He had never liked Philip; their relationship had been defined for years by bitter political conflict and a struggle for territorial dominance. Now, with Philip dead, Ferdinand faced a brand-new political dilemma. The wild story of the mad queen carting her husband’s decaying body through the frozen plains of Castile was spreading like wildfire through the populace, threatening the stability of the crown and the reputation of the dynasty. He needed to take absolute control of the kingdom.
Ferdinand abruptly halted the funeral procession at Tordesillas, a small, isolated town positioned along the steep banks of the Duero River. He ordered his soldiers to escort Joanna directly into the local palace. He forcibly removed her newborn daughter, Catherine, from her arms, seized Philip’s coffin, and utilized forged legal documents to completely strip Joanna of her sovereign power. He looked her in the eye and assured her that this arrangement was merely a temporary measure for her own protection. It was a lie.
She spent her daily existence locked away in a windowless room, completely isolated and utterly forgotten by the world outside. Her life was reduced to stark survival; meager meals of bread and cheese were left on the stone floor outside her locked door. Guards stood watch day and night, fully authorized by her father to use a heavy leather strap to beat her if she threw a tantrum or acted out. Four of her older children were permanently sent away across the sea to Flanders, completely removed from her life. Only her youngest daughter, Catherine, was permitted to remain with her in the shadows—the absolute last thread of human comfort in her bleak world.
But time stops for no one. In the year 1525, Catherine grew up, married, and walked out the palace doors to fulfill her own diplomatic duties. With her departure, Joanna was left finally, completely alone in the dark.
Ferdinand died in 1516, but his death brought no liberation for the captive queen. The reins of absolute power passed directly to Joanna’s own son, Charles. Born years earlier in a bathroom in Ghent, he had now risen to become Charles I of Spain and Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, one of the most powerful monarchs in human history. He visited his mother perhaps once or twice throughout his entire life, but despite his blood relation, he strictly enforced her continuous, unbroken confinement. He understood all too well that isolation is an incredibly powerful tool, an absolute necessity to maintain control and manipulate the geopolitical landscape without a rightful queen contesting his legitimacy.
In the year 1520, a sudden fracture appeared in her prison walls. A group of localized rebels, known as the Comuneros, seized control of Tordesillas during a widespread uprising against the crown. They bypassed the royal guards and gained direct entry to Joanna’s chambers, speaking to the forgotten queen face-to-face. After interviewing her extensively, the rebels released official reports that shocked the kingdom. They declared to the public that the queen was perfectly sane, possessing a clear intelligence, articulate speech, and sound judgment. For exactly one hundred and three days, the carefully constructed illusion of her madness nearly shatters, and the truth threatens to break through to the world. But the window of hope closes swiftly. Charles’s royal army brutally retakes the castle, the rebels are crushed, and the heavy wooden doors of her chamber are slammed shut once again.
Juana spent thirty-five uninterrupted years trapped inside the suffocating walls of the castle after Charles retook it. Imagine being confined for decades on end with absolutely no hope of escape, facing total isolation, terrifying uncertainty, and the crushing physical weight of time itself. For thirty-five years, Juana faced the slow erosion of her mind and body. By the arrival of the 1540s, her physical body began to completely fail her. Severe arthritis cripples her joints, accompanied by chronic digestive failure and a near-total loss of mobility. She can no longer move on her own accord; her specialized attendants must physically carry her frail frame from room to room.
Yet, through the haze of physical agony, her identity remains unyielding; she still firmly refers to herself as the rightful queen of Spain, and she still asks after the long-dead Philip. In her final years, she becomes completely paralyzed from the waist down, her thin legs covered in agonizing, open ulcers.
She completes forty-six total years of confinement within that single room. Her legendary episodes of rage never truly cease, prompting her captors to subject her to countless religious exorcisms throughout her decades of imprisonment. The guards remain fully authorized to use la cuerda whenever she acts out—the exact same system of ropes and heavy iron weights she had allegedly known during her childhood under Isabella’s roof. Except this time, there is absolutely no historical ambiguity or compromised sources. Her brutal jailer, Mosén Ferrer, was formally investigated immediately following Ferdinand’s death. What Cardinal Cisneros discovered during that investigation was so horrific and definitive that Ferrer was suspended from his duties without delay. This time, the state-sanctioned torture was explicitly written into the official administrative records.
In her final months on earth, her grandson Philip sent a devout Jesuit priest to her bedside. His mission was to force the dying queen back into strict Catholic orthodoxy before her soul departed. But Joanna displayed nothing but total, cold indifference to his religious pleadings. Two months prior to her passing, she suffered severe, agonizing burns across her body resulting from a hot bath. The exact circumstances of how this tragedy occurred remain entirely unknown, buried in the silence of her chamber.
On April 12, 1555, which happened to be Good Friday, Joanna finally died. She was seventy-five years old, and the official cause of her death was never recorded in any document. She had successfully outlived her husband Philip by forty-nine long years. She had spent the entirety of her adult life desperately trying to reach the city of Granada, and in the absolute end, she finally made it—though not in the manner anyone could have ever anticipated. Her coffin arrived at the royal chapel, and her body was laid to rest, finally buried directly beside Philip in the magnificent stone tomb they had both longed for.
Three distinct men throughout her life publicly labeled her as mad: her husband, who desperately needed her sidelined to protect his own ambitions; her father, who required her total erasure to seize her rightful throne; and her own son, who needed her locked away to secure his imperial crown. Every single one of them had an immense amount of political power and wealth to gain from her psychological execution.
Loca. Mad. The single, devastating word did its job flawlessly for five hundred years.
The shadow of Joanna of Castile had returned to claim her revenge, forcing her grandson to become the jailer and executioner of his own flesh and blood, just as her father and son had done to her. The narrative of royal madness, once invented to steal a queen’s birthright, had transformed into a systemic, hereditary trap that the Spanish Habsburgs could never fully escape.
Decades passed, and the empire continued to bleed its wealth into endless religious wars, yet the ghost of the lady of Tordesillas lingered in the cultural memory of Castile. Among the common people, who had never truly forgotten the queen who traveled only by night, stories began to spread of a silent figure in black who wandered the banks of the Duero River when the winter mist hung low over the water. They whispered that she was no longer searching for Philip the Handsome, but for the crown that had been torn from her hands by the men she loved.
The word loca had done its political job for five hundred years, successfully preserving the power of kings and emperors who built their thrones upon her silence. But as the centuries began to wear away the empires of Europe, the heavy doors of the Simancas archives would eventually be forced open by history. The buried letters would come to light, the iron weights of la cuerda would be uncovered in the records, and the silent, dignified resistance of the queen who refused to conform to a brutal world would finally speak over the noise of her captors. Joanna of Castile had outlived her husband, her father, and her son; in the end, her true story would outlive their empire as well.
