The fair town of Castile: a walled market centre on the Duero plain whose free fairs settled the debts of half of Europe, crowned by the Castillo de la Mota begun in 1440, and the place where Isabella I signed her will on 12 October 1504 and died on 26 November.
Medina del Campo stands in the Tierra de Campos country of the Duero basin, in what is now the province of Valladolid. Originally a Berber settlement, it was repopulated after the fall of Toledo in 1085 as Christian rule spread south, and by the twelfth century the walled town was one of the larger population centres of the Kingdom of Castile.
Its geography gave it nothing but flatness and roads, and roads were enough. The town lay where the routes from the Cantabrian ports to the south and from Portugal to Aragon crossed, in the middle of the finest wool country in Europe, and it turned that position into two annual fairs that drew merchants from Genoa, Milan, Florence, Flanders, France, England and the German towns.
The crown granted Medina del Campo the right to hold ferias francas, fairs exempt from the usual tolls and taxes, and by the fifteenth century its two fairs — one in spring, one in autumn — lasted fifty days each. Merino wool from the Castilian flocks was the staple; the fairs also traded cloth, books, metalwork, spices and slaves, and gave their name to the Castilian book trade of the sixteenth century.
What made them matter beyond Castile was money rather than goods. The fairs became the clearing house of Castilian credit: letters of exchange drawn anywhere in western Europe were settled at Medina, debts were cancelled against one another at the pagos at the end of each fair, and the crown itself borrowed there. Medina was the greatest of the triangle of Castilian fairs, with Villalón and Medina de Rioseco, and the phrase that something was due at the fairs of Medina meant, for a century, that it was as good as paid.
The castle stands on a rise — the mota — outside the town, on foundations that go back to the twelfth century and probably to a Muslim fortification before that, with building work continuing through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The fortress that survives was begun in 1440 by order of John II of Castile, built under the Fonseca family and designed by Alonso Niño and Fernando Carreño, in the deep red brick of the region.
It is a soldier’s building from the age when artillery was changing everything: a great square keep, an inner curtain, a lower outer wall laid out for guns, a moat and a drawbridge. The Catholic Monarchs strengthened it further and used it as an arsenal and a prison; its most famous inmate, Cesare Borgia, was held there and escaped in 1506.
The lordship of Medina del Campo belonged in the early fifteenth century to Ferdinand of Antequera, regent of Castile and later king of Aragon, who enlarged the royal palace on the main square; the Catholic Monarchs extended it again. A town with money, a strong castle and good roads was a convenient place to govern from, and the crown held courts, councils and negotiations there repeatedly.
The best remembered of them is the Treaty of Medina del Campo, concluded on 27 March 1489 between Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile on one side and Henry VII of England on the other. It bound the two crowns against France, lowered tariffs between them, and arranged the marriage of their daughter Catherine of Aragon to Arthur, Prince of Wales — the match that, after Arthur’s death and Catherine’s remarriage to his brother, would eventually break England from Rome.
Isabella I came to Medina del Campo in her last illness. On 12 October 1504 she signed her will in the royal palace, and added a codicil on 23 November; the will settled the crown of Castile on her daughter Joanna, provided for Ferdinand to govern if Joanna could not, and famously charged her successors to treat the peoples of the newly reached Indies well and not to permit their enslavement.
She died in the palace on 26 November 1504, aged fifty-three, and was carried to Granada for burial as she had directed. Her death opened exactly the succession crisis the will had tried to forestall, between Ferdinand and her son-in-law Philip of Burgundy, with Joanna’s capacity to rule the point of contention.
The town’s fortunes were tied to Castilian credit, and both failed together. The royal bankruptcies of the later sixteenth century broke the settlement system the fairs existed to serve, and Medina never recovered its position; the sack of the town during the revolt of the Comuneros in 1520 had already destroyed a great part of it, including much of its merchandise.
The Castillo de la Mota survives, restored in the twentieth century, along with the collegiate church of San Antolín and the arcaded main square where the palace stood. The palace itself is gone; a plaque marks where a queen signed away an empire she had barely begun to understand.