One of history’s oddest royals was, Joanna of Castile, also known as Juana la Loca, or Joanna the Mad. She was the daughter of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile, Spain’s “Catholic Monarchs”. If her epithet did not already give the game away, Joanna had some mental issue.

A Family With Mental Issues

Joana of Castile (1479 – 1555 ) was born into a family with a long history of mental illnesses. She was married to a notorious lecher who cheated on her nonstop, but for whom she lusted nonstop. Already disturbed, her hubby’s infidelities drove Joanna crazy. Ghoulishly crazy, to the point that she slept with her husband’s corpse for years after his death. The macabre tale began in 1496, when a dynastic marriage was arranged to solidify an anti-French alliance between the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian.

Accordingly, Princess Joanna was sent off to marry Maximilian’s son, Philip the Handsome. It might have been an arranged marriage, but the couple hit off soon as they saw each other. Or at least they got the hots for each other. They forced a bishop in Joanna’s retinue to bless their union so they could consummate the marriage immediately. More than love, it was pure, unadulterated, nonstop erotic lust. Or at least, as seen below, it was nonstop erotic lust on Joanna’s part.

Descent Into Madness

Joanna’s passion for Philip never waned, and indeed grew to the point of obsession. Philip, by contrast, was obsessed not with Joanna, but with women in general. Indeed, he was one of his era’s most notorious lechers, and because he was not nicknamed “the Handsome” for nothing, there was no shortage of round heeled women eager to get it on with him. The couple had not been married for long before Philip’s serial infidelities started to mess with his wife’s already fragile mind.

Joanna suffered frequent bouts of depression because of her husband, but his unfaithfulness made her even more obsessed with him. The rocky royal marriage finally ended in 1506, when Philip suddenly died from typhoid fever. That was when Joanna crossed the line from crazy about her husband to plain crazy. She became inconsolably grief stricken – which was not unusual. What was unusual was that three months after Philip was buried, his widow, unable to bear the separation, ordered his corpse disinterred.

The Widow Who Slept With Her Husband’s Corpse

Joanna had her dead husband’s putrid body embalmed with lime and various unguents, and generously doused with perfumes. Then she ordered the corpse “stitched back together, and all its members bound with waxed linen bandages”. Over the next three years, the perturbed Joanna often crawled into the casket with Philip’s cadaver, or went to sleep with it in her bed. She also took the corpse with her wherever she went, to show off to everybody just how “handsome” her husband had been. Eventually the weirdness of Joanna, who by then had done more than enough to earn the epithet Juana la Loca or Joanna the Mad, became too scandalous to tolerate.

She was the heir presumptive to the crowns of Aragon and Castile, and when her mother Isabella died in 1504, Joanna became queen of Castile. A mad queen was the last thing anybody wanted, so she was declared insane and confined to a royal palace. She continued as queen in name, but power was wielded by her father, King Ferdinand II of Aragon, who proclaimed himself governor and regent of his disturbed daughter’s kingdom. When he passed away in 1516, Joanna inherited Aragon as well, but power was held by her son Charles I who became king. Joanna remained confined for the rest of her life, until she passed away in 1555 at age seventy five.

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Some Sources & Further Reading

History Halls – Bizarre Rulers: The Mad Caliph’s Mad Reign

Prawdin, Michael – The Mad Queen of Spain (1939)

Tudor Society – The Madness of Juana of Castile