Isabel of Portugal and the Golden Fleece: Bruges, 10 January 1430

Around midday on Christmas Day 1429, a Portuguese fleet sailed into the harbour of Sluis, the port of Bruges on the Flemish coast. On board was Isabel, the 32-year-old daughter of King João I of Portugal, married by proxy five months earlier to Philip, Duke of Burgundy. She had left Lisbon in October. For weeks nobody in Flanders had known where she was, and rumours spread that she had come to grief on the way.1 source1 source

She came ashore the next morning, the feast of Saint Stephen, among barges hung with cloth and the noise of trumpets and minstrels. The crowd on the quay was so thick that there was hardly room to walk, and woollen cloth was laid on the ground all the way from the landing place to her lodgings.1 source1 source

Philip visited her several times. On 7 January 1430, at about six in the morning, in her lodgings at Sluis, the Bishop of Tournai said Mass and married them in person, with her brother Fernando, her nephew the Count of Ourém and the Bishop of Évora present on her side. That afternoon she went by water to Damme. The next day, a Sunday, she landed near the gates of Bruges, where Philip had a litter covered with cloth of gold waiting for her.2 sources2 sources

Days of feasting followed. Before they ended, Philip announced a new order of chivalry, the Golden Fleece. Isabel, for her part, would become one of the busiest negotiators in Burgundian politics.3 sources3 sources

Isabel was born in Évora in 1397, the sixth of eight children of João I, founder of the House of Avis, and his English queen, Philippa of Lancaster, granddaughter of Edward III. Her brothers included Duarte, the future king, Pedro, later regent, and Henrique, the prince remembered as Henry the Navigator. Luís de Camões later called them the ‘ínclita geração’, the Illustrious Generation.2 sources2 sources

Philippa died in 1415, the year Portugal took Ceuta. From then until Duarte married in 1428, Isabel was the only princess living at her father's court, and she carried out many of the duties that would normally fall to a queen. She was past thirty when she married, late for a princess, and brought experience of government and close kinship with England's Lancastrian kings.2 sources2 sources

Philip, born in 1396, had ruled Burgundy since 1419. His lands ran from the duchy of Burgundy around Dijon to the cloth towns of Flanders and lived on wool, cloth, wine and grain, though for Burgundy itself he was a vassal of the French crown. He had married twice, to Michelle of France, who died in 1422, and to Bonne of Artois, who died in 1425, and had no legitimate heir.3 sources3 sources

On 19 October 1428 Philip's embassy sailed from Sluis in two Venetian galleys. It was led by Jean, lord of Roubaix, his first chamberlain, with Baudouin de Lannoy, governor of Lille, the squire André de Toulongeon and the canon lawyer Gilles d'Escornaix. With them went the duke's valet de chambre and painter, Jan van Eyck.1 source1 source

The voyage was slow. They waited at Sandwich until 13 November for two more galleys from London, then contrary winds drove them into Plymouth and Falmouth, and only on 2 December did they head south. They reached Lisbon on 18 December, only to find the king and the princes in the Alentejo, preparing to receive Duarte's bride, Leonor of Aragon. The envoys waited at Arraiolos until 12 January 1429, when João summoned them to Avis. The next day he heard them in council with his sons and handed the negotiations to Duarte and his brothers.2 sources2 sources

Around 12 February the ambassadors sent four messengers home, two by sea and two by land, with letters and the portrait. Weale, who edited the account, concluded that there were two portraits, one for each pair of messengers, and later historians agree. Neither survives. While they waited, Roubaix, Lannoy and Toulongeon rode off on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and on to the courts of Castile and Granada.2 sources2 sources

On 4 June, at Sintra, one of the messengers came back with the duke's answer. The terms were settled there within a week. The marriage contract was signed before a notary in Lisbon on 23 July 1429, the date on the deed itself. On the Sunday morning that followed, at about seven, Roubaix took Isabel as Philip's wife by proxy in the royal castle, in front of the king and four of her brothers. The embassy's account puts the signing on the 24th and the proxy wedding on ‘Sunday the 25th’, but in 1429 the 25th fell on a Monday, so the dates in the published deed fit better.2 sources2 sources

João promised a dowry of 154,000 gold crowns, of which 100,000 were to be deposited with money-changers in Bruges and paid once the marriage was solemnised. He would also pay for her clothes, jewels and journey. A receipt for the full sum was issued on 25 October 1433.1 source1 source

Duarte gave a farewell supper for his father and sister on 26 September in Lisbon, in a hall of the royal galley yards hung with tapestries, and knights jousted in the Rua Nova for two days. On 30 September the king took his daughter aboard her ship. The other vessels were not ready, and she stayed on board, visited by her family, for more than a week.1 source1 source

On 8 October she sailed with her brother Fernando, her nephew the Count of Ourém and about 2,000 people in fourteen large ships. The voyage took eleven weeks, and storms scattered the fleet.1 source1 source

Bruges had hung its main streets with rich cloth and tapestries. When Isabel landed near the city on 8 January, the burghers came out to meet her with 164 trumpeters. Philip's sisters, the duchesses of Bedford and Cleves, were there, with the Bishop of Liège and much of the Burgundian nobility, changing their liveries each day.2 sources2 sources

The festivities lasted about eight days. The chronicler Enguerrand de Monstrelet described tables loaded with meat and wine, models of unicorns and other beasts spouting rose-water and wine, and jousting by knights and squires day after day. In his view the duke had never put on such a display at either of his earlier weddings. Monstrelet dated the solemn wedding in Bruges to 9 January; the embassy's account places the marriage itself at Sluis two days earlier.2 sources2 sources

On 10 January Philip founded the Order of the Golden Fleece. Its badge was a golden ram's fleece hanging from a collar of fire-steels and flints, Philip's personal device. The fleece recalled the one Jason and the Argonauts carried off from Colchis, a story Burgundian readers knew from the romances of Troy.3 sources3 sources

The first knights were great lords of the duke's lands, among them Roubaix and Baudouin de Lannoy, who had fetched the bride. Membership was for life and could not be inherited: when a knight died his heirs had to return the collar so that the duke could give it to someone else. A pagan hero who had broken his word to Medea sat awkwardly at the head of a Christian brotherhood, and the chancellor of the order, Jean Germain, later had the biblical Gideon put in Jason's place.4 sources4 sources

Philip's purpose was political. His lands were scattered, and their nobles owed him different loyalties. The order bound them to him personally, through oaths, ceremonies and a shared honour, and raised his standing beside the King of France and the Holy Roman Emperor. In the 1420s he had turned down the English Order of the Garter, which would have tied him to the English king by oath.2 sources2 sources

The statutes followed at the first chapter, held at Lille in November 1431. Their first article fixed the order at 31 knights, the sovereign among them, and four officers ran its business: a chancellor, a treasurer, a king of arms and a secretary. Each new knight received the collar and his own copy of the statutes, which bound him by a solemn oath.4 sources4 sources

Isabel did not wait long for responsibility. When Philip left for Dijon on 21 January 1432, she was given authority to govern the Low Countries with a council at Ghent. She was pregnant, and her first son, Antoine, was gravely ill; she was in council and could not be with him when he died. In 1433 she had another son, Charles, who was made a knight of the Golden Fleece as a baby at the chapter held at Dijon that year.1 source1 source

Her household began with 260 people to feed and reached a peak of 480 in 1445, by Monique Sommé's count from the ducal accounts; Sommé is also cited for a total of 320 people when Philip set it up in February 1430, about a third the size of his own. Many of her people were Portuguese. She signed her charters ‘Ysabel, daughter of the king of Portugal’ before her Burgundian title.2 sources2 sources

The marriage was not a romance. Philip had 33 known mistresses and 26 acknowledged illegitimate children, and Isabel took several of both into her own circle. Sommé worked out from their itineraries that the couple spent about 55 per cent of their time together, and called the relationship ‘a long friendship’.1 source1 source

Her family background made her useful in the long war between France and England. At the Congress of Arras in 1435 she held talks with the Pope's envoy, Cardinal Albergati, and then with the English envoy, her uncle Cardinal Beaufort. The treaty signed on 21 September 1435 reconciled Philip with Charles VII of France and soon brought Burgundy into open war with England.1 source1 source

The break with England brought a trade war and piracy that hurt Flanders. Philip's attack on Calais failed in 1436, and that August the rebels of Bruges stopped Isabel at the city gate, threw her baggage on the ground and held her for hours. In January 1439 she met Beaufort near Gravelines, and from July to September she mediated at a peace conference at Oye, between Gravelines and English Calais.1 source1 source

The peace talks failed, but the trade talks did not. In the autumn of 1439 envoys meeting at Calais agreed a three-year truce for trade and fishing between England, Ireland and Calais on one side and Brabant, Flanders and Mechelen on the other. Henry VI's writ ordering it proclaimed in London described it as concluded with the Duchess of Burgundy; it ran on land from 29 September and at sea from 1 November.2 sources2 sources

On 21 January 1440 the truce was extended to 1 November 1447, and a further truce with England followed on 23 April 1443. The Flemish towns paid both Beaufort and his niece handsomely for their work.1 source1 source

Isabel never stopped acting for her Portuguese family. In May 1449 her brother Pedro, the former regent, was killed fighting the forces of his nephew Afonso V at Alfarrobeira, near Alverca; his body was left unburied and his children's property seized. She had a Mass said for him and sent an embassy under Jean Jouffroy to plead with the king. When that failed she took three of Pedro's children into Burgundy: Jaime, who reached Bruges in January 1450 and became a cardinal, João and Beatriz.1 source1 source

João, styled Duke of Coimbra, received the collar of the Golden Fleece at the chapter of 1456 in The Hague and married Charlotte of Lusignan, of the royal house of Cyprus, before dying suddenly in 1457. Beatriz married Adolf of Cleves, lord of Ravenstein, a nephew of the duke, in 1453, with Isabel paying for the wedding. None of the three reached the age of 30.2 sources2 sources

From the 1450s, once Charles's education was finished, she gave more of her time to charity and religious houses. In 1457 she withdrew from political life to La Motte-au-Bois, near Cassel, where she ran a kind of hospital for poor old women and the sick. Philip died in June 1467. She still came back for the big occasions, and in 1467 she negotiated the terms of Charles's marriage to Margaret of York.3 sources3 sources

Isabel died at Aire, in Artois, on 17 December 1471, aged 74, and was buried, as the chroniclers record, in the corded habit of the Franciscans. She was laid to rest on 4 January 1472 in the Carthusian monastery of Gosnay, near Béthune. Two years later Charles had her moved to the dukes' burial place at the Charterhouse of Champmol in Dijon, beside Philip.1 source1 source

Charles the Bold was killed at the battle of Nancy in 1477. His only legitimate daughter, Mary, married Archduke Maximilian of Austria, and the sovereignty of the order passed with her to the Habsburgs. The Imperial Treasury in Vienna, the Habsburgs' old treasure house, still holds the order's fifteenth-century vestments and its only surviving early collar.3 sources3 sources

Under Charles V, Isabel's great-great-grandson, who took over the order in Brussels on 25 October 1516, the limit rose to 51 knights, and the collar went to kings across Europe, among them the kings of Portugal; Manuel I and João III were both members. Philip II moved its officers to Madrid.3 sources3 sources

When the last Spanish Habsburg, Charles II, died in 1700, both claimants to his throne, Philip V of Spain and the Habsburg Archduke Charles, later Emperor Charles VI, claimed to head the order. A treaty of 1725 tried to settle the matter, but after Charles VI died in 1740 his heirs ignored it, and the split has lasted ever since.1 source1 source

Both branches still exist. In Spain the king confers the collar; Felipe VI gave it to his daughter Leonor, heir to the throne, by royal decree of 30 October 2015. The Austrian branch is led by the head of the House of Habsburg: Otto von Habsburg until 2000, and since then his son Karl.2 sources2 sources

Isabel's story shows the Illustrious Generation at work in northern Europe as well as at sea. While Henrique sent ships down the African coast, his sister negotiated at Arras, Gravelines and Laon. The Portuguese who followed her to Burgundy served as her ladies and servants, as soldiers in Philip's army and as shipwrights for his fleet.2 sources2 sources

Portuguese writers have complained since at least 1930 that she gets too little attention at home. The fullest modern study of her, by Monique Sommé, appeared in French in 1998, and a Coimbra dissertation of 2011 noted how rarely her name appeared in Portuguese university catalogues. The order founded at her wedding has outlasted both the Burgundian state and the Habsburg empire.3 sources3 sources