The glass broke in her own bedchamber. A drinking goblet dropped by an attendant, shattering on the floor, the pieces gathered up, one thin splinter missed. It ended up inside Margaret of Austria’s slipper, and when she put the slipper on, it cut into her foot. A trivial wound.

One you or I would rinse, curse about, and forget. She apparently did roughly that. A woman who had survived the Bay of Biscay in January was not going to summon the council over a cut foot, and her physicians, when they saw it, found nothing alarming. For a few days, nothing happened.

Then the foot began to announce itself. Warmth first, and swelling. The skin going tight and shiny and red around the cut. Pain out of all proportion to the injury, climbing from ache into throb into something that made walking impossible.

The physicians of 1530 knew exactly what they were watching. Even if they misunderstood why it happened, they had a word for it. Mortification. The death of living flesh on a living person.

We would say the wound was infected, that bacteria driven deep by the glass were killing tissue faster than her body could fight, and that in a woman of 50 with a history of leg ulcers, the infection found ideal ground. Gangrene does not stay polite. Over days, the reddened skin darkened, purple shading toward black, blisters rising and weeping. The margins of dead flesh creeping up the foot.

And dead flesh in a warm room announces itself to the nose before the eye. Everyone who entered that bedchamber in the last week of November 1530 knew the smell, and knew what it meant. The smell of the battlefield tent and the plague house. The smell of a body starting to rot before its owner has finished using it.

By the 20th of November, she was in bed with a climbing fever. The sign the physicians dreaded most: poison spreading from the limb into the whole body. They called it what it was, either way. The beginning of dying.

It was not how she had ever expected to go. At sixteen, on a ship she fully expected to sink, she had written herself a joke of an epitaph. Two lines of French verse, here lies Margo the gentle young lady who had two husbands and is still a virgin. She had sealed the paper against the water and tied it to her arm, so that when the sea finished with her and some fisherman hauled her body up onto a beach, he would at least know what he was looking at.

Drowned faces stop being faces fairly quickly. She had thought that part through. She had been sixteen. The fleet carrying her had left the Netherlands in the dead of winter, bound for Spain, and the Bay of Biscay behaved the way it always behaves in January.

The ships scattered in mountainous seas. At least one went down with everyone aboard. Her ladies knelt on the pitching floor of the cabin and howled through their prayers, and Margaret sat among them composing rhymes about her own corpse. The joke worked once you knew the background.

She had already been married once by proxy as a small child to a king of France, who then threw her away in front of all of Europe. Now she was sailing toward husband number two, the heir of Spain, still untouched. Two husbands, still a maid. If the ocean was going to take her, she wanted the record kept straight.

The ocean did not take her. Her whole life ran on that pattern. She kept surviving the spectacular catastrophes, and a tiny one finally killed her. To understand how she came to be lying in that bed in Mechelen, waiting for the saw, you have to go back further than the storm.

Back to a frozen pond outside a French town, three years before she was born, where her entire inheritance was decided by scavenging animals. Duke Charles of Burgundy, the man history calls Charles the Bold, besieged the town of Nancy in the murderous winter of 1477, gave battle against a Swiss and Lorraine army, and lost everything in the space of an afternoon. His army was annihilated. He himself vanished in the rout.

Search parties went out over the frozen ground for days before a page finally pointed them to a body wedged in the ice of a pond. It had been stripped naked by looters. The skull was split open to the teeth by a halberd blow that had gone straight through the helmet, and the face had been so thoroughly eaten by wolves or dogs, depending on which chronicler you trust, that his own physician and his valet could only identify him by old battle scars, a missing tooth, and his famously long fingernails. The most feared prince in Europe was pried out of a frozen pond, half-eaten and anonymous.

That corpse mattered enormously to a girl who did not yet exist, because Charles the Bold left behind exactly one child. Her name was Mary. She was nineteen years old, and the moment her father’s body came out of that ice, she became the wealthiest heiress alive. Burgundy at that moment was not really one place.

It was a sprawl of duchies and counties stitched together over a century, and the crown jewels of it were the Low Countries, the lands we now call Belgium and the Netherlands. Flanders, Brabant, Holland, Hainaut, Artois, Luxembourg. Cities like Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Brussels. The banking, weaving, trading heart of Northern Europe, dripping with money at a moment when most princes were drowning in debt.

The king of France, Louis XI, looked at this nineteen-year-old orphan sitting on all of that and did exactly what you would expect. His armies rolled into her territory within weeks, swallowing the Duchy of Burgundy itself and pushing into Artois, while he pressured Mary to marry his son, who at the time was six years old. Mary was besieged from the outside by French troops and from the inside by her own cities, which took the opportunity to extort privileges from her while executing several of her father’s ministers in front of her, essentially at knife point. Out of that chaos, she made the one decision that shaped the next four hundred years of European history.

She married Maximilian of Habsburg, son of the Holy Roman Emperor. A tall, athletic, chronically broke eighteen-year-old with a magnificent name and empty pockets. He rode into the Low Countries in August of 1477 with borrowed money, and by every account we have, the two of them fell for each other. It happens sometimes, even in arranged dynastic marriages.

And it happened here. They hunted together. She taught him to fly falcons. He learned enough French and Flemish to get by.

A son arrived in July of 1478, named Philip, a healthy boy. The cities of Flanders celebrated with bonfires. And on the 10th of January 1480, in Brussels, Mary gave birth to a daughter, baptized in the great church of St. Gudula.

The baby was named Margaret, after her step-grandmother Margaret of York, the English woman who had married Charles the Bold, and who would go on to be a steady presence in this little girl’s fractured childhood. So our Margaret arrived into staggering wealth and immediate danger, a French war grinding on at the borders, and a court whose splendor is hard to overstate. The Burgundian court was the model every other European court copied. Its banquets went on for days.

Its dukes had founded the Order of the Golden Fleece, the most exclusive chivalric club in existence. Its tapestries, its music, its illuminated manuscripts, its goldsmith work set the standard from Lisbon to Cracow. Margaret was born into the absolute center of European luxury, and she would spend most of her life watching the people closest to her die in it. The dying started almost immediately, in the small way these things often start.

A third child, a boy named Francis, was born in 1481 and lived only a matter of weeks before he was buried. Infant deaths were so common in this world that chronicles barely pause over them. Roughly one child in four never saw a first birthday, and even royal nurseries with their wet nurses and physicians ran on those same odds. Mary and Maximilian grieved and moved on, because a duchess had a war to manage and two healthy children in the nursery.

Nobody at the Burgundian court in the winter of 1481 could have guessed that within eighteen months the Duchess herself would be in the ground beside her infant son, and that the manner of it would be talked about for five centuries. Mary of Burgundy loved to hunt. Contemporaries mention it constantly, almost with a raised eyebrow. This young duchess who rode as hard as her men and flew her falcons in any weather.

In March of 1482, she was around three months pregnant with her fourth child, and pregnancy did not slow her down in the slightest. On a spring day, she rode out with a hunting party into the countryside near Wijnendale Castle in Flanders, hosted by a nobleman named Adolf of Cleves. She had a falcon on her wrist and the reins in her other hand, and at some point the hunt reached a freshly dug ditch or canal cutting across the ground. Her horse went at it, caught a hoof on a tree stump or stumbled at the edge, and the saddle girth snapped.

Mary went over the horse’s head into the ditch. Then the horse came down on top of her. The physics alone are terrible. A warhorse-sized animal, several hundred kilos of it, landing on a pregnant twenty-five-year-old woman lying in a ditch.

Her back was broken. Something inside her ruptured. And the internal injuries were catastrophic in an age whose medicine could offer nothing for them beyond poultices and prayer. One detail has haunted people ever since.

According to several accounts, Mary at first played the injuries down. Some versions say modesty stopped her from letting male physicians examine her properly. Others say she simply did not want to frighten Maximilian, who was away dealing with the war. So she was carried back to Bruges, put to bed, and for a while everyone told themselves she was recovering.

She was not recovering. Over the following days and weeks, she declined in a way that everyone around her eventually recognized. The pregnancy was lost somewhere in the middle of it. Internal bleeding and infection in 1482 meant fever, swelling, agony that nothing but wine and prayer could touch, and a slow slide that the finest physicians in Flanders could watch but not stop.

Mary understood before the end that she was dying, and she did what dying rulers did. She summoned the notaries. She dictated a will naming her two small children, four-year-old Philip and two-year-old Margaret, as her heirs, with Maximilian as their guardian. Then on the 27th of March 1482, some three weeks after the fall, she died in Bruges at the age of 25.

They buried her in the Church of Our Lady there, in a tomb that still exists. Margaret was two. She kept no memory of her mother. Every image she ever had of Mary came from portraits, from her grandmother Margaret of York’s stories, from the tomb effigy in Bruges with its gilded face.

And her mother’s death detonated her own childhood within months, because the cities of Flanders, Ghent above all, had no intention of letting the foreigner Maximilian rule them as regent for his son. Ghent physically took custody of little Philip, the heir, and kept him essentially a hostage of his own subjects. Civil war flickered across the provinces while the French army pressed from the south. Maximilian, outmatched and out of money, needed peace with France at almost any price.

And the price Louis XI named was sitting in the nursery. Under the Treaty of Arras, signed at the end of 1482, Margaret was betrothed to the Dauphin of France, the future Charles VIII, a sickly twelve-year-old boy. Her dowry was enormous: the counties of Artois and Franche-Comté, chunks of her mother’s inheritance carved off and handed to France. And one clause stands out even by the standards of the time.

The little girl was to be handed over immediately and raised in France, at the French court, by the French royal family. She was three years old. The French wanted her young precisely so that everything Burgundian and everything Habsburg could be washed out of her, so that by the time she married the Dauphin, she would be French to the bone. In the spring of 1483, she was taken from Ghent under armed escort, and the guard existed because everyone involved half expected her own father to try to steal her back on the road.

The handover itself says plenty about what she was to them. At the border town of Hesdin, the little girl was formally transferred, examined, and inspected like a delivered parcel, and then carried on south into a country whose language she did not speak, away from her grandmother, her brother, and every face she knew. She would not see her father again for ten years. She would never see Flanders again as a child.

At an age when most children are learning to manage a spoon, Margaret of Austria became a diplomatic instrument with a heartbeat. King Louis XI, the man who had engineered all this, was himself dying by then, and dying badly. Louis spent his final months barricaded in his castle at Plessis-lez-Tours in a state of spiraling terror about his own death, surrounded by imported relics, hermits, and physicians he paid fortunes to keep him alive a few weeks longer. He met his tiny future daughter-in-law once, by most accounts blessed her, and was dead by August of 1483.

The boy Margaret was going to marry became King Charles VIII at thirteen, and real power passed to his older sister, Anne de Beaujeu, one of the most formidable political operators of the fifteenth century, a woman their father had described as the least foolish woman in France, since in his view a wise one was not to be found. Anne took charge of the kingdom, and she also took charge of Margaret. So the girl grew up in the shadow of the Loire Valley, and here the story turns almost gentle for a while. The French did not mistreat her.

Quite the opposite. She was styled La Petite Reine, the little queen. Given her own household, her own governess, Madame de Ségré, and an education that turned out to be exceptional. She learned to speak and write beautiful French, the language she would use all her life.

She learned music and became good at it. She learned to compose verse. And sitting in the orbit of Anne de Beaujeu, she absorbed something rarer: a daily masterclass in how a woman runs a kingdom, how you manage factions, how you outlast men who assume you are decorative. Among the girls raised alongside her was one named Louise of Savoy, a few years older, sharp, ambitious, and chronically underestimated.

Remember Louise. She and Margaret would meet across a negotiating table four decades later, with the fate of Europe between them. Margaret, by every scrap of evidence we have, was a delightful child. Observers describe her as pretty and quick, with golden hair, brown eyes, a fair complexion, and a wit that surprised adults.

She was affectionate, too. She grew fond of Charles, the awkward, large-headed, unimpressive boy she had been shipped in to marry. He was her king, her future husband, the fixed point her entire small life was organized around. Every prayer she was taught, every ceremony she performed, every dress she wore repeated one message: you will be queen of France.

She believed it completely, because why would a child not believe the thing every adult around her repeated for eight years. Then France’s interests changed, and the whole thing was ripped out from under her in a single autumn. Margaret’s education at Amboise, meanwhile, was the full curriculum of a future queen. Mornings began with prayer and the mass.

Then came her letters and her French, and eventually a graceful italic hand that survives in archives across Europe, distinctive enough that scholars can spot her postscripts at a glance. She was taught embroidery and needlework, the endless default labor of royal women, and by all evidence she genuinely enjoyed it. Decades later, as one of the most powerful people on the continent, she still sat stitching through meetings while ambassadors talked, a habit at least one visitor found unnerving, since nobody could ever tell how much of their business the needle was absorbing. Music got serious attention.

She learned to sing and to play keyboard instruments, and she kept musicians close ever after. She was taught to dance well enough that when she performed at court festivals as a small girl, chroniclers bothered to write it down. Around the lessons moved the strange theater of her position. She presided at ceremonies as the little queen, a child seated under a canopy receiving bows from grown dukes.

Her betrothed Charles made a peculiar fiancé even by royal standards, an undersized, poorly educated boy with an oversized head and a passion for chivalric romances, gentle enough with her by the accounts we have. He called her his little wife. The court poets wrote verses about the pair. Meanwhile, the real government sat with Anne de Beaujeu, and the kingdom Anne was running was anything but calm.

Great nobles rose against her regency in a conflict nicknamed the Mad War. Brittany tangled in the middle of it, and Anne broke the revolt with money and precisely applied force. Margaret grew up watching that. A woman crushing a rebellion of dukes without raising her voice.

Most of what the future governor of the Netherlands would ever know about power, she learned at Amboise, from a French woman. The problem, from the French point of view, was Brittany. The duchy was still independent in 1491, ruled by a fourteen-year-old duchess named Anne, and France wanted it the way Louis XI had wanted Burgundy. Anne of Brittany, desperate to keep her duchy out of French hands, had gone and married someone by proxy to protect herself.

And in a twist so cruel it almost feels scripted, the man she married by proxy was Maximilian of Habsburg. Margaret’s own father. So for a brief window in 1490, the arrangement across Europe looked like this. Margaret was contracted to marry the king of France.

And the king of France’s greatest rival, her own father, was on paper married to the Duchess of Brittany. Charles VIII’s advisers, with Anne de Beaujeu steering, looked at the map and made a cold decision. A French army marched into Brittany, besieged the teenage duchess at Rennes, and made her an offer with soldiers standing behind it. Anne of Brittany would set aside her paper marriage to Maximilian and marry Charles VIII in person.

Brittany would come with her. So the girl at Amboise had to go. In December of 1491, Charles VIII married Anne of Brittany, and eleven-year-old Margaret, the little queen, the child who had spent eight years being groomed for this exact throne, was simply discarded. Nobody softened it for her.

Contemporary accounts say she found out and wept, raged, and refused at first to believe it. And the humiliation had layers a child could barely process. Her betrothed husband had married another woman. That woman was, on paper at least, her stepmother, since Anne had been married by proxy to Margaret’s father.

And her father had been made a laughingstock in front of every court in Europe, robbed of a bride and a duchy in one stroke, while his daughter sat stranded in the country that had done it. France did not send her home. A repudiated eleven-year-old had one remaining use, and that use was leverage. Margaret was moved out of the royal residence and held for roughly two more years at the castle of Melun and other royal houses, in a strange twilight where everyone was polite and nobody would let her leave.

She remained in name an honored guest, and functioned as collateral security against her father doing something rash. A card France kept in hand while it planned its invasion of Italy. She was thirteen before the diplomats finally settled it. Under the Treaty of Senlis in May of 1493, France, wanting its northern border quiet before marching on Naples, gave her back, along with Artois and Franche-Comté, the dowry lands.

Ten years after being carried into France as a three-year-old bride, Margaret crossed the border going the other way. Older, colder, and carrying a grudge against the house of Valois that she would nurse productively for the rest of her life. She met her father at last in the town of Mechelen, a thirteen-year-old greeting a parent she had not seen since before her memories began. By the accounts we have, the reunion went well.

Maximilian was charming when he wanted to be, and he seems to have been delighted by this sharp, wounded daughter. Her grandmother Margaret of York took her in hand and finished her education in the Burgundian style. The family she rejoined was already climbing. Maximilian became Holy Roman Emperor in 1493.

Her brother Philip, now fifteen and already nicknamed the Handsome, was taking up the government of the Low Countries. The Habsburgs were assembling something, and the something needed marriages. The grand project of the 1490s was an alliance to encircle France, and the partner Maximilian wanted was Spain. Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, the Catholic Monarchs fresh from conquering Granada and funding a Genoese sailor’s strange voyage west, had children to marry.

Maximilian proposed a double bond. His son Philip would marry their daughter Juana, and Margaret would marry their only son, Juan, Prince of the Asturias, heir to both Spanish crowns. On paper, it was a spectacular match. Juan was the most eligible bachelor in Europe, the boy on whom the entire future of a newly unified Spain rested, and by reputation he was gentle and deeply loved.

His parents called him their angel. Court observers noted in passing that the angel was also delicate, pale, slight, prone to fevers. A young man physicians watched with narrowed eyes. Nobody put that in the marriage contract.

Logistics alone were brutal. A vast fleet, over a hundred ships by some counts, carried Juana north to the Low Countries in 1496 to marry Philip. And the plan was for the same fleet to carry Margaret south to Spain on its return. Except the voyage north had been a disaster.

Ships wrecked. Hundreds of sailors and courtiers dead of cold and sickness. Bodies stitched into sailcloth and dropped over the side. And the return leg with Margaret aboard left in the worst possible season.

The fleet put out in the depths of winter. And somewhere off the coast, the storms hit. You already know what she did in that cabin. The storm went on for days.

The ships lost sight of each other in the dark. One vessel from the convoy went down, taking everyone on it into water cold enough to kill a swimmer in minutes, and those aboard Margaret’s ship fully expected to follow. Waves the height of church towers, the hull groaning like a living thing, seawater bursting through seams, and below deck a huddle of noble women convinced they were in their final hours, wailing confessions to a chaplain who could barely keep his feet. In the middle of that, a sixteen-year-old took out pen and paper and drafted a rhyming couplet about her own drowned body washing up with its two husbands and its intact virginity, then strapped it to her arm as a practical identification measure.

Her attendants were horrified. Gallows humor from a princess was not standard. But that couplet is the first time in the record we hear Margaret’s own voice. And it tells us exactly who she already was.

Someone who had learned, before she could legally marry, that fate was going to do whatever it wanted to her, and that the one thing she controlled was the commentary. Even between the storms, those weeks at sea were their own ordeal. A winter crossing in the ships of the 1490s meant high-castled wooden vessels with no heating of any sort. Passengers packed below decks alongside horses and cargo.

Everything permanently wet. The food spoiling and the water going foul in the casks. Seasickness flattened even hardened travelers. The fleet that had carried Juana north a few months earlier had lost hundreds of people to cold and disease before any wave touched them.

Margaret’s ladies, gently raised girls from the grandest court in Europe, endured week after week of that on top of the terror. And their princess’s response to the whole ordeal, as far as the record shows, was verse. The battered fleet limped into Southampton on the English coast to shelter and refit. King Henry VII sent envoys down with gifts and a message that she should rest and be as merry as if she were already in Spain.

A small courtesy she apparently never forgot. Henry will wander back into this story later, with a proposal of his own. When the weather broke, the ships put out again, and in early March of 1497, Margaret finally stepped onto Spanish soil at the port of Santander, seasick, exhausted, and very much alive. Somewhere in the crowds waiting to meet the fleet was a nineteen-year-old prince who had, by several accounts, been pacing the coast for days.

Juan and Margaret met, and something happened that dynastic marriages are not supposed to produce. The two of them fell completely, conspicuously in love. Spanish observers melted over the golden-haired archduchess, her French polish, her quick tongue, the way she charmed a famously formal court within days. The wedding itself took place in the Cathedral of Burgos on the 3rd of April 1497, an explosion of Castilian splendor.

And because the betrothal ceremonies had fallen during Lent, the couple had been made to wait to consummate the marriage, a delay that seems to have done nothing except sharpen their appetite for each other. Once the wait ended, they made up for it with an enthusiasm that became the talk of the court, and then the worry of it. This part of the story sounds like gossip. And the strange thing is that it comes straight out of the sources.

Contemporary writers, including the humanist Peter Martyr, who was physically present at court, recorded that the newlyweds were inseparable, that they spent an extraordinary amount of time in bed together, and that the prince, never robust, began visibly wasting. He grew paler. He thinned. The fevers came more often.

And the royal physicians became alarmed enough to do something almost unthinkable. They went to the king and queen and formally recommended that the couple be separated for a time, for the sake of the prince’s health. The medical thinking of the day held that excessive lovemaking drained the body’s vital heat and moisture. And to the doctors watching Juan fade, the diagnosis wrote itself.

Ferdinand seems to have been open to the idea. Isabella refused. Her recorded answer was that what God had joined, man should not put asunder. Whatever was consuming her son, she would not solve it by prying him away from a wife he adored.

Modern medicine would tell a different story about the wasting, the fevers, the decline. Most historians now suspect tuberculosis had been smoldering in Juan for years. But the people in those rooms in 1497 believed they were watching a nineteen-year-old being loved to death. And they said so, some in wonder and some in horror.

And that version traveled across Europe with the diplomatic mail. Through the summer, the court moved, celebrations continuing, and the couple were granted the city of Salamanca as part of the prince’s household. In late September, Juan arrived in Salamanca for festivities in his honor, while his parents continued toward Portugal for his sister’s wedding. Within days, he collapsed with a raging fever.

Word went up the road after the king, and Ferdinand turned around and rode hard for Salamanca, arriving to find his only son already sinking. The scene at that bedside is among the saddest in Spanish history. Ferdinand, one of the most calculating politicians who ever lived, sat by the bed telling his boy to have courage. And Juan, lucid, told his father he was ready, that he accepted death, and asked him to comfort his mother.

His old tutor, the friar Diego Deza, held him as he faded. On the 4th of October 1497, six months almost to the day after his wedding, Juan, Prince of the Asturias, died at nineteen. The chroniclers added one detail that has outlived almost everything else about him. His greyhound, Bruto, who had slept at the foot of his bed, whimpered as he died and then refused to move, keeping watch beside the coffin, and had to be coaxed away from his master’s grave.

Spain broke. Contemporaries describe mourning of a depth the kingdom had never seen. Cities draped themselves in black sackcloth for weeks. Nobles who had feuded for generations wept side by side.

Isabella, told of her son’s death, is recorded answering with the words of Job, that the Lord gave and the Lord had taken away. And observers say something in her visibly broke that never repaired. Those close to the queen dated the beginning of her own long decline to that autumn. An entire national future had been resting on one slight, gentle teenager, and the future was now a coffin traveling to Ávila.

The journey itself was staged as national theater. The prince’s body, escorted by grandees and bishops, moved south through towns hung with black, and at Ávila he was laid in the Dominican monastery of Santo Tomás, his parents’ favored foundation. The boy who was supposed to rule a united Spain lay among friars. The poet Juan del Encina poured out a long verse tragedy on the death.

Sermons compared the kingdom’s loss to biblical calamities. And for months afterward, foreign envoys describe a court that functioned in a whisper. And in the middle of all that grief stood a seventeen-year-old girl, six months a wife, now a widow in a foreign country, who had one thing left that mattered to anyone. She was pregnant.

Margaret was carrying Juan’s child. And overnight that pregnancy became the single most important object in Spain. If she delivered a healthy boy, the succession was saved. The dynasty continued.

The angel would have an heir. The Catholic Monarchs wrapped her in care. Ferdinand wrote in a letter that survives that they would look after the princess exactly as they would have looked after their son were he alive, and that she held his place in their hearts. Every physician, every midwife, every astrologer the crowns of Castile and Aragon could summon was pointed at Margaret’s belly.

A country prayed around her like a shrine. Margaret herself was shattered and physically ill. She had genuinely loved Juan, and the grief on top of the pregnancy dragged her down. The sources describe her sick, prostrate, barely functioning through the winter.

And then came the delivery. The record here splits on timing, with some accounts placing it in December and others in the spring of 1498, but all agreeing on what happened. The labor came early, around the seventh month. It was long.

It was dangerous. And at the end of it, the midwives delivered a daughter who never drew breath. Premature stillbirth in 1498 meant hours of contractions with no pain relief of any kind, attended by women working by candlelight with their hands and nothing else, in a room kept sealed and hot while the mother labored knowing, toward the end, that the movement inside her had stopped. It meant delivering the body anyway, because a dead child does not deliver itself, and every hour it remained meant fever and death for the mother too.

It meant that afterward, torn and bleeding, Margaret lay in the state that killed a horrifying share of early modern mothers, watching for the childbed fever that carried women off days after a birth, while the household around her absorbed what had happened. One Spanish courtier summed up the national mood in a single brutal line that survives in the correspondence. Instead of the longed-for offspring, she has given us a dead child. A teenager had lost her husband and nearly died delivering his dead daughter, and the verdict of the court was disappointment in her output.

Margaret knew the rules of that world better than anyone. She had been traded under them since the age of three. The stillborn girl, unnamed, was the heir of Castile and Aragon for the length of a labor. With her death, the Spanish succession lurched sideways into catastrophe.

Juan’s eldest sister, Isabella, Queen of Portugal, became heir, and within a year she was dead too, killed by childbirth in 1498 within an hour of delivering a son, Miguel. The whole succession then balanced on that infant, and Miguel died before his second birthday in 1500. Three heirs of Spain dead in three years. The inheritance finally slid to the next sister, Juana, the one who had married Margaret’s brother Philip.

If you know anything about how that turned out, you know Spain’s troubles were only beginning. Margaret stayed in Spain for another year and a half, and what she did with that time says a great deal about her. She recovered. She grew close to Isabella, who treated her with real tenderness.

And she spent long hours with the youngest daughter of the house, a serious twelve-year-old named Catherine, who was destined for England and needed to polish her French. So Margaret taught her. Catherine of Aragon, future first wife of Henry VIII, learned her courtly French from a widowed teenager who understood better than almost anyone alive what it meant to be shipped abroad as a bride and have the ground vanish under you. History does not record whether Margaret ever warned her.

One hopes somebody did. She also built a tomb. Margaret took part of her widow’s settlement and commissioned a monument for Juan at the monastery of Santo Tomás in Ávila, reviewing some twenty designs before choosing the one she wanted. White marble.

The young prince lying in armor with his face at peace. She paid for masses for his soul, and kept paying for them from the Netherlands for decades, long after Spain had any claim on her. Then in 1499 she said her goodbyes and traveled north. Nineteen years old, twice contracted, once widowed, once bereaved of a child, coming home to a country she had not seen since she was three.

On the way, news reached her that her brother Philip and his wife Juana had produced a son. Margaret arrived in Ghent in time to stand godmother at the baptism of her nephew in 1500. A fat, healthy baby the city celebrated for days. She lobbied unsuccessfully for him to be named Maximilian after her father.

The parents chose Charles instead, after Charles the Bold, the grandfather pulled half-eaten from the ice. Margaret’s whole later life would belong to that baby. Her two years back at her brother’s court, from 1499 into 1501, show what a twenty-year-old double survivor looked like up close. She was first of all chasing money.

Her Spanish marriage settlement entitled her to a substantial annual income as Juan’s widow, and Spain, in the manner of every early modern treasury, paid it late, partially, or on paper. Margaret spent years politely, relentlessly dunning the richest monarchs in Europe for what they owed her, in letters that managed to be affectionate and immovable at once. She was reconnecting with her grandmother, Margaret of York, now in her final years at Mechelen, the woman whose name she carried and whose steadiness had anchored the family through every disaster. The older Margaret would die in 1503, spared by a single year the sight of her granddaughter widowed a second time.

And she was watching her brother Philip govern, charming and easily steered by favorites, and drawing her own conclusions about how the family enterprise held together. The conclusions were unflattering to Philip, and they would matter enormously later. By 1501, her father had found her another husband, and for once in her life, the machinery of dynastic marriage dealt her a decent hand. The groom was Philibert II, Duke of Savoy, called Philibert the Handsome, and the nickname was apparently earned.

He was exactly her age, born the same year, 1480. He was athletic, cheerful, mad about hunting and tournaments. And he ruled a duchy strung across the Alps that controlled the mountain passes between France and Italy, real estate her father badly wanted friendly. The proxy ceremonies were done in the autumn of 1501, and on the 2nd of December 1501, Margaret married Philibert in person.

She was twenty-one, on her third husband by the counting she herself had joked about in the storm, and about to get the only stretch of uncomplicated happiness in her entire life. It lasted not quite three years. The couple settled mostly at the castle of Pont-d’Ain in Bresse, in the green hill country northeast of Lyon. And the picture that comes down to us is almost jarringly pleasant.

Philibert hunted. Margaret sometimes hunted with him, her mother’s daughter in the saddle, whatever that pastime had cost her family. Evenings ran to music and dancing, and the poets Margaret collected around her the way other princes collected artillery. And while her husband chased boar through the forests of Bresse, Margaret quietly took over the government of Savoy, because Philibert, lovable as he was, had no appetite whatsoever for paperwork.

One obstacle stood in the way of that takeover. Her husband’s half-brother, René, known as the Great Bastard of Savoy, an illegitimate son of the previous duke who had made himself the power behind the throne while Philibert signed whatever was put in front of him. Margaret assessed the situation and dismantled René with a patience that ought to alarm you. She gathered correspondence and assembled evidence that René was conducting his own foreign policy in secret, dealings with France that shaded into treason.

Then she took the file to her father, the emperor, and to her husband. Had René’s legitimization revoked, his offices stripped, his lands seized, and the man himself banished from the duchy. He fled to the French court. Margaret took his place at the center of Savoyard government, and the duchy’s business began flowing through the twenty-two-year-old duchess.

Every skill Anne de Beaujeu had modeled for her got its first live rehearsal in those three years, and the performance was flawless. The real production was still to come. Then came the 10th of September 1504, and one drink of cold water. Late that summer, on a scorching day, Philibert went hunting, some accounts say after boar, and ran himself into a lather in the heat.

At a halt, dripping and gasping, he did what overheated young men have always done. He took a long, greedy drink of ice-cold water. In some tellings drawn from a mountain spring at Savelbas, in others chilled wine. Within hours he was shivering.

The chill turned to fever. The fever settled into his chest, and the physicians diagnosed pleurisy, an inflammation around the lungs that in 1504 had no treatment beyond bleeding, poultices, and hope. Whether the cold water actually caused it, or whether something had been wrong in his lungs all along and the day in the sun merely lit the fuse, is a question sixteenth-century medicine could not answer and modern medicine can only shrug at from a distance of five centuries. What the record does show is the speed.

A twenty-four-year-old athlete went from hunting to deathbed in a matter of days. Margaret fought for him with everything the age had. She sent riders to distant shrines with offerings. She made vows to the Virgin.

And in a detail her early biographers loved, she took her own pearls, a fortune in themselves, and had them ground into powder for the physicians to mix into medicine, since crushed pearl was believed to strengthen a failing heart. You can take that as devotion or desperation. At the bedside, they look identical. None of it touched the fever.

On the 10th of September 1504, at nine in the morning, Philibert of Savoy died in her arms in the castle of Pont-d’Ain, in the same room where he had been born twenty-four years earlier. The chroniclers noted the symmetry, one room bracketing an entire life. And so evidently did Margaret, who was in that room for the second half of it. What happened next stripped the polish off her completely, and the accounts are hard to sit through even now.

Her screams reportedly carried through the castle. At some point in the first hours, she made for a window, and her attendants had to physically restrain her from throwing herself out of it. That scene appears in the early histories with variations, some placing it at the window, others describing her hurling herself toward the corpse, but all describing a woman beyond reason being held back by force. For days, she refused to permit the burial.

One account says six days, keeping the body with her while the household tiptoed around a grief that had turned the duchess into someone none of them recognized. When she finally surrendered him to the tomb, she did something with an Old Testament finality to it. She took shears to her famous golden hair and cut it off at the scalp, and then had the same done to her ladies-in-waiting. An entire female household shorn in mourning.

She put away colored clothing permanently. From that autumn until her death twenty-six years later, Margaret of Austria dressed only as a widow, the white linen hood and plain dark gown you see in every portrait painted of her afterward. A uniform she made so completely her own that her court painters turned it into her permanent likeness. Bernard van Orley and his workshop later produced version after version of the same composition: the governor in her white hood against a dark ground.

Copies dispatched to courts and collections across Europe. Among the most recognizable female images of her generation north of the Alps, and every copy pressed one argument. Here sits a ruler with nothing left to want for herself. One more detail from those weeks, reported in the later biographies.

She had Philibert’s heart embalmed separately, so that it could remain near her. Twenty-four years of a man reduced to a preserved organ in a casket a widow could keep in her chamber. Medieval and Renaissance people divided their dead like this routinely. Hearts in one church, entrails in another.

And the practice will be applied to Margaret’s own body before this story is over. Out of that mutilating grief, she built two things that defined the rest of her life. The first was a motto. Margaret adopted, and from then on scattered across her buildings, her books, her jewelry, and her letters, a phrase of compressed, bitter wordplay.

Fortune. Infortune. Fort une. Four words that refuse to settle into one meaning, and she surely designed them that way.

The most common unpacking runs: fortune greatly torments a woman. Fate has singled one woman out for suffering. Another arrangement of the same words yields something closer to: fortune and misfortune together make one woman strong. A third, leaning on old spelling, gives: fortune ruins everything except one woman.

Grief as grammar puzzle. She had written her own epitaph in a storm at sixteen. At twenty-four, she wrote her own thesis statement, and every version of it is about being fate’s favorite target. The second thing she built was a vow.

She declared at twenty-four that she would never marry again. And unlike almost every royal widow who ever said that under pressure, she meant it, and made it stick against emperors. Suitors came for years. The most serious was Henry VII of England, the king who had sent kind words to her storm-battered ship at Southampton.

By 1505 a widower in his late forties, actively shopping for a young royal wife. Her father and brother both liked the match. England was useful. A portrait of Margaret, already a few years old, was duly shipped to London for the king’s consideration.

Margaret refused flatly, and kept refusing through every round of family pressure. And the marriage evaporated. An archduchess telling the emperor no, and winning, tells you how formidable she had already become. Fortune could take her husbands.

Nobody was going to hand her a fourth. Her grief also turned literary, and this side of her is easy to miss under the statecraft. Margaret wrote verse in French, mostly laments in the courtly mode of her day. And while attributions from five centuries out are always slippery, several poems preserved in her own albums are widely accepted as hers.

Grieving pieces in the voice of a woman taking inventory of her losses. She kept professionals at hand as well. The poet and chronicler Jean Lemaire de Belges entered her service in these years and produced for her a strange, glittering work called the Couronne Margaritique, the crown of daisies, or of marguerites, or of pearls, since the pun sits in all three at once. An allegory in which Virtue assembles a crown of gems for the widowed duchess, each stone standing for a quality she had shown in her suffering.

Commissioned consolation, mourning made into an object a person could hold. Her device of the daisy, the marguerite, spread through everything she touched. Her name made into a flower, the flower made into an emblem, the emblem eventually carved several thousand times across a Gothic choir in Bresse. Her mourning also produced a building, the one where this story physically ends.

Philibert’s mother, Margaret of Bourbon, had once made a vow back in 1480, to found a monastery at a place called Brou, outside the town of Bourg-en-Bresse, if her husband recovered from an illness. He recovered. The monastery never got built, and Margaret of Bourbon died in 1483 with the vow hanging unfulfilled. And to the sixteenth-century mind, that was not a loose end.

It was a spiritual emergency. An unkept vow to God could hold a soul in purgatory, burning off the debt in a fire that scripture and sermon painted in very literal colors. So the widowed Margaret of Austria took her mother-in-law’s dangling promise and detonated it into one of the most extravagant building projects of the age. Beginning with a foundation stone in 1506, she poured money from her Savoyard widow’s income into a soaring church and monastery at Brou, flamboyant Gothic lacework in pale stone, built for one purpose: to house three tombs.

Philibert in the center, his mother on one side, and on the other side, one day, herself, back beside the husband fate had allowed her for less than three years. She ran the project by correspondence for a quarter of a century, hectoring architects, choosing sculptors, working her motto and her initials entwined with Philibert’s into every surface. And she never saw it. Not once.

She never traveled back to Bresse. The church rose without her, stone by stone, a monument to a marriage the builder could not bear to revisit in person. Those duties arrived in 1506, wearing black, because her family was about to hand her another catastrophe. While Margaret grieved in Savoy, her brother Philip the Handsome had gone to Spain.

Queen Isabella had died in 1504. The succession had fallen to Philip’s wife Juana, and Philip had crossed the sea to claim the crown of Castile in her name, elbowing aside his father-in-law Ferdinand in a power struggle conducted with all the warmth of a knife fight. By September of 1506, Philip was in Burgos, twenty-eight years old, king of Castile in fact if not entirely in law, handsome as ever, and celebrating. On the 17th of September, he spent a hot afternoon playing pelota, a hard ball game, worked up a heavy sweat, and drank deeply of cold water.

If that sequence sounds familiar, it should. It is almost step for step what had killed Philibert two years earlier, and the chroniclers noticed the echo too. Within a day, Philip was fevered. The illness ran about five days, and the surviving descriptions from his physician are grim.

Raging fever, pain knifing through his side, and then the king spitting blood, sliding into unconsciousness, dead on the 25th of September 1506, in the Casa del Cordón in Burgos. The official verdicts pointed to typhoid fever or some pestilential sickness. His own doctor suspected plague. Half of Europe immediately suspected something else.

Ferdinand of Aragon, the father-in-law Philip had just shoved away from a throne, was one of the most ruthless operators alive, a man Machiavelli would later hold up admiringly as a model prince, and the convenience of the timing screamed at contemporaries. Poison was whispered in every court from Lisbon to Vienna. No evidence ever surfaced, and cold water after violent exercise had just very publicly killed the Duke of Savoy without anyone crying murder. But the rumor never fully died.

For Margaret, the political meaning could wait. The human meaning was immediate. The brother she had shared a nursery with, the only other survivor of their mother’s four children, was gone at twenty-eight. She composed a Latin epitaph for him, and its final line borrows the rawest verse in the book of Lamentations.

All you who pass by, look and see if any sorrow is like my sorrow. Mother at two, husband at seventeen, child at eighteen, husband again at twenty-four, and now the last sibling at twenty-six. The motto was aging horribly well. And then the aftermath in Spain turned into something out of a nightmare, and it dragged the whole family’s name through it.

Philip’s widow, Juana, Margaret’s sister-in-law and her brother’s queen, was pregnant with their sixth child when he died, and her grief detached from every convention available to contain it. The stories that came north were lurid, and some of the most lurid are attested by people who were there. Juana refused to be parted from the body. When the coffin was moved, she moved with it on the long funeral procession toward the south, traveling by night because she reportedly could not bear other women near her dead husband.

She is said to have had the coffin opened so she could look at him and embrace what was inside. And then consider a pregnant queen pressing her face to it by torchlight in the middle of a winter field. She gave birth to her daughter Catalina in the town of Torquemada mid-procession, still refusing to release the body for burial. How much of that was madness?

How much was shattering grief? And how much was a story polished by men who profited from calling her mad? Historians still argue about it, and the profit motive was enormous and naked. Her father Ferdinand needed Juana incapable so he could rule Castile.

Later her own son would need the same thing. Some of her behavior has documentation, some floats on hostile chronicles, and running underneath all of it is the fact that Ferdinand had blocked Philip’s burial in Granada, giving Juana an entirely sane reason not to surrender the coffin. Whatever the truth of her mind, the outcome is beyond dispute. In 1509, Ferdinand confined his daughter, the reigning queen of Castile, in the fortress palace of Tordesillas.

And she stayed confined there through her father’s rule and her son’s rule, in conditions that at times crossed into documented cruelty, for forty-six years, until her death in 1555. Nearly half a century behind the same walls. Her youngest daughter, the baby born beside the coffin, lived shut in with her for years, growing up with a window for a world. That was the family Margaret came from.

And when the dust of 1506 settled, the practical situation was this. The ruler of the Low Countries was now Philip’s eldest son, Margaret’s godson, Charles, aged six. His mother was in no condition to govern and locked a kingdom away. His grandfather Maximilian was buried in German politics and could not sit in Brussels.

Someone had to raise the boy and mind his three sisters and run the richest, most fractious provinces in Europe in his name. Someone competent, trustworthy, and expendable enough to be recalled if needed. Maximilian looked around the family and found exactly one person matching the description. And she was a twenty-six-year-old double widow in Savoy who had already governed a duchy, dismantled a bastard prince, and told the king of England no.

In 1507, the emperor formally appointed his daughter Margaret of Austria as governor of the Habsburg Netherlands and guardian of the children. No woman had ever held that office. She packed her mourning clothes, left the road to Brou behind her, and went north to become, in everything but title, a head of state. By that summer, Margaret had installed herself in the city of Mechelen, roughly halfway between Brussels and Antwerp, in a residence that came to be called the Court of Savoy, a name she chose herself, and a small permanent flag planted for a dead husband.

She rebuilt the place over the following years into something new for Northern Europe, one of the first Renaissance palaces in the Low Countries, brick and stone galleries around garden courtyards. And she filled it with what became one of the most remarkable households on the continent. Because alongside governing a country, Margaret was running an orphanage for the most valuable children alive. Four of them to start.

Charles, the heir of everything, seven years old when she took charge. A pale, quiet boy with the jutting Habsburg jaw already asserting itself, a jaw so pronounced he would grow up unable to fully close his mouth, chewing with difficulty, mocked behind hands his whole life. His sisters came with him. Eleanor, the eldest, beautiful and warm.

Isabella, the middle girl. And Mary, the baby, quick-tempered and clever. Their mother was alive behind the walls of Tordesillas and would remain alive for decades, a fact the children carried like a stone. Their father was a tomb in Spain.

The younger brother, Ferdinand, was being raised separately by his grandfather in Spain, a stranger to his siblings for years. What the four in Mechelen had was their aunt. The girls came to call her something that survives in their letters: Ta a bonare, aunt and good mother. The woman whose only child never took a breath spent two decades as the working mother of four royal orphans.

And by every account she did it with real warmth, supervising their Latin and their music, their manners and their marriages, scolding and spoiling in roughly the proportions you would want. Daily life inside the Court of Savoy is unusually well documented, and the documents describe a very grand, very strange boarding school. The children had their own wing and their own miniature court, complete with tutors and chaplain, and a schedule Margaret supervised personally. Mass in the morning, then Latin, French, and history, music with the finest masters in the north, riding and archery, and for Charles the hunting he loved beyond anything academic.

His tutors despaired of his Latin and said so. The boy was slow with books, obsessive about hawks, hounds, and mechanical contraptions, and fully capable of digging in like a mule. Margaret’s letters about him swing between exasperation and fierce protectiveness in a register any parent of a twelve-year-old will recognize. She dressed the children well and fed them better.

Household accounts survive, recording the parrot she was fond of, the little dogs underfoot in the galleries, sweets bought for the young ladies, payments to minstrels for the children’s dances. She also watched their health with real anxiety, and no wonder, given what a fever had done to every branch of her family. A runny nose in that nursery got the full attention of the state. Her household became a finishing school for half the aristocracy, and one of the girls who passed through it went on to bend all of English history.

In 1513, a diplomat’s daughter arrived from England to serve among Margaret’s maids of honor, a dark-eyed girl of about twelve, named Anne Boleyn. Margaret was delighted with her and wrote to the girl’s father that Anne was so presentable and so pleasant for her young age that she was more beholden to him for sending her than he could be to Margaret for receiving her. Anne spent over a year at Mechelen, soaking up French manners, courtly conversation, and, in the most sophisticated female-run court in Europe, a daily demonstration that a clever woman could hold power in her own right. She carried all of it to the French court next, and eventually home to England, where it caught the eye of Henry VIII and rearranged a kingdom.

The scaffold on Tower Green is a long way from Margaret’s garden galleries, but the road runs through them. The court around those children glittered. Erasmus came through Mechelen. So did the scholar who would become Pope Adrian VI, hired by Margaret’s circle to tutor young Charles in between the boy’s preferred subjects, hunting and war.

The occultist and physician Cornelius Agrippa dedicated to Margaret an entire treatise arguing for the nobility and superiority of women. And whatever you make of Agrippa, he knew his audience. Painters worked in her galleries, musicians in her chapel. Her chapel choir and her house composer Pierre de la Rue made Mechelen one of the musical capitals of Europe, and Margaret kept albums of songs, some of whose grieving texts scholars suspect she wrote herself.

She turned even her music into a mausoleum. Running the country itself was a harder instrument to play. The Low Countries were seventeen-odd provinces of prickly, rich, self-regarding cities that had rebelled against her father within living memory and held her brother hostage as a child, and they did not roll over for an archduchess. Margaret managed them with stubborn charm and an unusually sharp grasp of economics.

She understood, in a way many princes never did, that her provinces lived on trade, on English wool moving through Antwerp and Baltic grain moving through Amsterdam, and she bent her diplomacy around keeping those arteries open. She restored and protected the great commercial treaty with England. Years later, she pushed through a grain agreement with Denmark to keep her cities fed. At one point, she openly defied instructions from Charles himself when his war plans threatened the food supply, and got away with it.

Audit her whole career, and that thread keeps surfacing. The men around her thought in armies and honor. Margaret counted ships and bread. Her first great diplomatic performance came in 1508 at Cambrai, where she negotiated on her father’s behalf and helped assemble the League of Cambrai, a grand coalition that pointed France’s aggression away from her borders and down into Italy at Venice.

Cynically speaking, she exported a war. The Low Countries got peace and commerce. Italy got the armies. She had learned diplomacy in the French court that betrayed her, and she now practiced it against France with visible relish.

European statesmen who had expected a decorative widow found themselves outmaneuvered by her with a regularity that becomes almost comic in the correspondence. An ambassador could charm her, dine wonderfully at her table, be teased by her, and go home having conceded everything. The job also came with a war she could never quite kill. The Duchy of Guelders on her northeastern flank was held by Charles of Egmond, a wily, implacable soldier-prince bankrolled by France, precisely because he made the Habsburg provinces bleed.

For the entire span of Margaret’s government, his raiders burned across the borderlands, sacking towns and extorting ransoms, at one point pushing deep into Holland and threatening Amsterdam itself. Fighting him cost money, and money meant the Estates. And the Estates of her provinces guarded their purses with a stubbornness that drove every Habsburg ruler before and after her to fury. Margaret spent half her working life in that squeeze, cajoling assemblies of merchants and burghers for grants they resented, and patching truces with a man who broke them as a matter of policy.

Her letters about Guelders run from icy to openly exhausted. No glorious victory ever ended it in her lifetime. She contained it year upon year, the way you manage a chronic disease. And containment, unglamorous and unending, was most of what governing was.

None of it made her immune to the oldest hazard of her position: the boy growing up down the hall. In 1515, Charles turned fifteen, and the nobles around him, chief among them his ambitious tutor and chamberlain, the Lord of Chièvres, arranged for him to be declared of age and to take the government into his own hands. Margaret was dismissed. The decision was announced to her rather than discussed with her, after eight years of holding the country together, and her hurt bled straight into her letters.

She wrote that since her services were evidently no longer required, she would henceforth meddle in nothing. The boy she had mothered had, in the manner of fifteen-year-old boys everywhere, decided he needed no mother. And the men steering him found the aunt inconveniently capable. She withdrew to her palace, kept her court, kept her collections, and waited in what turned out to be the shrewdest sulk of the sixteenth century.

The wait ended because everyone else kept dying, and the survivor kept being Margaret. Her road back from the 1515 dismissal ran fittingly through other people’s mistakes. The men who had elbowed her aside governed indifferently and tilted policy toward France, and their standing sagged as hers steadily recovered. In 1517, Charles sailed for Spain to claim the crowns of his dead grandfather Ferdinand.

A nerve-shredding voyage into a kingdom he had never seen, whose language he did not speak, trailing Flemish courtiers the Spaniards immediately loathed. On the way to his coronations, the seventeen-year-old did something almost nobody talks about. He stopped at Tordesillas and, for the first time since early childhood, stood in front of his mother. What passed between Juana and the son who ruled in her name went unrecorded in any detail, and the arrangement that emerged speaks for itself.

Juana remained confined. The fiction of her joint rule was maintained, and her name stayed silently on every Castilian decree for the rest of her long life, while her son wore the power. Margaret back in Mechelen was drawn step by step into the vacuum Charles left behind. Formally seated on the council, then consulted, then indispensable, so that by the time the next crisis arrived, she was already in practice, if not yet in title, running the country again.

The next crisis arrived in January. Her father Maximilian died that January of 1519, and even his exit was strange. The old emperor had spent his final years in a deepening penitential gloom, and for the last four of them he traveled everywhere with his own coffin in the baggage train, a plain box riding along behind the imperial splendor as a standing reminder of where the whole procession was headed. His instructions for his own corpse, recorded by contemporaries, went further than almost any prince before him.

After death, his hair was to be shorn, his teeth broken out and burned, and his body scourged, covered in lime and ash, wrapped in linen, and displayed. A self-ordered humiliation of the flesh from the most image-obsessed ruler of his age. He asked to be buried under the altar steps of his chapel at Wiener Neustadt, positioned so that every priest saying mass there would stand directly over his heart. With him gone, Margaret had outlived every member of the family she was born into.

And the throne her father left behind was elective. What followed was one of the most expensive bribery contests in European history: the election of a new Holy Roman Emperor, with Charles as one candidate, and in a twist you could see coming, the king of France as the other. Francis I, son of Louise of Savoy, Margaret’s old schoolroom companion. Margaret took over the Habsburg campaign machinery in the north and ran it ferociously, coordinating agents and, above all, money.

Staggering sums borrowed from the Fugger banking house of Augsburg, the total spent on the seven electors reaching something in the neighborhood of two million gold florins, delivered in bills and coin to some of the most respectable palms in Germany. On the 28th of June 1519, the electors chose Charles, nineteen years old, and the child from Margaret’s nursery became Charles V, ruler of Spain, the Low Countries, Austria, Naples, and an empire in the Americas. His flags were still unrolling across the largest accumulation of titles in Christendom. His first substantial act toward his aunt says everything about what he had learned since 1515.

Within weeks, by an act issued from Spain that July, he restored Margaret as governor of the Netherlands, and the following year he made the appointment effectively permanent. Of all the regents Charles appointed and discarded across his enormous life, she is the only one he ever begged back. Her second regency, from 1519 to her death, was the busiest stretch of her life, and also the stretch where the children she had raised began scattering into their own tragedies, each of which landed back on her desk in Mechelen. Because Margaret had arranged their marriages.

That was the job. You raised royal children so you could deploy them. And she deployed hers across Europe with the strategic eye she brought to everything, and then had to live with where they came down. Isabella went first.

At thirteen, in 1515, the middle niece was married to Christian II, King of Denmark, a man nearly twice her age with a reputation already curdling. He kept a Dutch commoner as his open mistress, a young woman named Dyveke, and installed her and her mother at court, while his child queen learned to live around them. Margaret and the family protested through every diplomatic channel. The mistress remained until she died suddenly a few years later, amid rumors of poisoned cherries that put the court on edge.

Isabella, to her credit and to the surprise of most observers, grew into a loyal, capable queen who came to love her difficult husband. It bought her nothing. Christian’s rule collapsed into rebellion after he presided over a massacre of Swedish nobles in Stockholm, a bloodbath of beheadings in a public square that stained the family name across Europe. And by 1523, king, queen, and children were fugitives, sailing into exile in the very Low Countries Isabella had left as a bride.

Margaret took them in. She had shipped out a thirteen-year-old girl. Back came a worn-out woman in her early twenties with a wrecked husband, no throne, and failing health. Isabella of Austria died in exile near Ghent in January of 1526, twenty-four years old.

And the accounts of her deathbed record her begging her aunt and her family to help restore her husband’s crown, spending her last breath on the man. Margaret buried her ward and took in the three small children Isabella left behind. A second generation of royal orphans folded into the same Mechelen rooms that had raised their mother. Fortune infortune.

She had carved it on a church. Now it was carving up her nursery. That same year, 1526, took another one. Mary, the youngest, had been married to Louis, the young king of Hungary and Bohemia, and by every report theirs was a happy match.

Two lively teenagers who liked each other. In August of 1526, the Ottoman army of Suleiman the Magnificent met Louis’s forces at Mohács and annihilated them in an afternoon. Thousands of Hungarian knights died on the field or under the executioner’s blade afterward. The king himself drowned in a swollen stream during the rout, dragged down, the story goes, by his own armor.

Twenty years old. Mary of Hungary was a widow at twenty, and she reacted in a way that must have made her aunt’s breath catch. She put on mourning, refused every remarriage proposal from then on, and hardened into a formidable political operator. Margaret had, without meaning to, produced a copy of herself.

And before long, the succession at Mechelen would need her. Eleanor’s road had been its own quiet tragedy for a decade already. As a teenager at Mechelen, she had fallen in love, actually in love, with a visiting German prince, Frederick of the Palatinate, a charming and well-connected nobleman who courted her seriously, and for a while the pair exchanged letters. Then the correspondence was discovered.

Charles, still a teenager himself, reacted with a cold fury that startled his own court, forcing renunciations from both parties and driving Frederick from favor. Whatever Margaret privately thought of two young people wanting each other, the family firm did not sell its assets for sentiment, and the affair was crushed. In 1518, Eleanor was married to the man the firm had chosen instead: Manuel of Portugal, a widower approaching fifty, who had already been married in succession to two of Eleanor’s own aunts, her mother’s sisters, and had buried both of them. An eighteen-year-old shipped to Lisbon to become the third bride from the same family for the same aging king.

Manuel died three years later, leaving her a widow at twenty-two with a small daughter, who would ultimately be made to leave behind in Portugal when the next assignment came. The decade it came out of was savage, and Margaret governed straight through the middle of it. Luther’s revolt was tearing the church apart, and the Low Countries, dense with printers and literate townsfolk, drank the new ideas fast. Margaret held the line for the old faith, as her office and her own convictions demanded, and under her government the axe fell early.

In 1523, in the main square of Brussels, two Augustinian monks, Hendrik Vos and Jan van Essen, were burned alive as the first Lutheran martyrs anywhere in Europe. Executions for heresy in her provinces were public, deliberate theater. The condemned chained to a stake over wood, the crowd close enough to hear everything that fire does to a human being. And the new movement promptly turned the two monks into heroes.

Luther wrote a hymn about them. Margaret’s letters show a ruler who thought repression through as policy, pushing placards and edicts, a persecution that would swell after her death into something far larger and bloodier under her successors. However you judge her for it, and people do, she considered it a duty owed to God and to her nephew, and she discharged it the way she discharged everything: thoroughly. War with France ground on through the decade as well.

The old family feud now continental in scale. Charles against Francis, Habsburg against Valois, with Margaret’s provinces paying and provisioning from the north. In 1525, at Pavia in Italy, imperial forces shattered the French army and captured the king of France himself on the battlefield. Francis spent a humiliating stretch as Charles’s prisoner in Madrid.

He bought his freedom with a treaty, surrendering his own two small sons to Spain as hostages in his place. Little boys handed over at a river border while their father rode away. And then he promptly repudiated everything he had signed, on the reasonable grounds that promises extracted from a prisoner bind nobody. The war ignited all over again.

The boys stayed hostages for years, kept in increasingly grim Spanish castles, pawns of their father’s broken word all over Europe. In other words, the game Margaret had been played as in 1483 was still running, still consuming children. And the two people who understood that game most intimately, from having been pieces in it, were about to sit down together and end a war with it. By 1528, everyone was exhausted.

Charles was drowning in France. Francis was losing in Italy. The treasuries on both sides were scraped hollow, and neither king could be seen suing the other for peace without dishonor. Into that deadlock stepped two widows in their late forties.

Margaret proposed, through quiet channels, that she and Louise of Savoy, mother of the French king, the girl who had shared her lessons at Amboise more than forty years before, should meet and settle it, woman to woman, aunt of one monarch and mother of the other, with full powers to bind their impossible men. Both kings, relieved to have the climb-down done by someone else, agreed. The two of them met at Cambrai in July of 1529, and the staging alone was extraordinary. The delegations were lodged in adjoining houses, and a connecting door was cut between their private quarters, so that the two old women could pass back and forth to negotiate alone at any hour, with no ministers listening.

For weeks, the fate of Europe was hashed out through that doorway by two people who had known each other as girls. Both of them survivors of the exact trade they were now conducting. And you would give a great deal for a transcript that does not exist. What we do have are glimpses.

Both women arrived ill, two people in their late forties whom the sixteenth century had aged hard. Louise tormented by gout, Margaret nursing the abscessed leg she kept out of her letters. Observers described the pair trading remedies along with territories. The talks nearly foundered more than once.

Couriers galloped between Cambrai and the two royal masters with drafts and counterdrafts. And at the worst impasse, the negotiation was saved, the tradition says, by the simple fact that neither woman would accept failure in front of the other. Forty years earlier, they had shared a schoolroom under Anne de Beaujeu. Now they haggled over Burgundy itself.

Two old students applying the same lessons from opposite sides of a connecting door. What exists beyond the glimpses is the result, signed on the 5th of August 1529. And history immediately gave it the only name it has ever needed: the Paix des Dames, the Ladies’ Peace. France gave up its claims over Flanders and Artois and its positions in Italy.

Charles shelved his demand for the old Duchy of Burgundy. The captive French princes were ransomed home for two million gold crowns. And the seal on the whole arrangement was a marriage: Eleanor, Margaret’s eldest niece, to Francis himself, sent to be queen of the France that had once discarded her aunt. The two ladies swore the peace publicly in the Cathedral of Cambrai.

Contemporaries did not miss what had happened. The emperors and kings of Europe had failed for a decade to stop the bleeding, and their aunt and mother had done it in five weeks. Cambrai was the summit of Margaret’s life, and her body chose that exact season to begin failing. Her health had been sliding for a couple of years.

The correspondence from 1527 onward mentions illness after illness, and during the Cambrai negotiations themselves she was reportedly troubled by an ulcerated, abscessed leg, pain she worked through and mentioned as little as possible. She was forty-nine. She had been effectively a head of state for two decades, and she had outlived her parents, both husbands, her child, her brother, and one of the four children she had raised. The following year, 1530, brought her one last satisfaction.

In February, in Bologna, the pope set the imperial crown on Charles’s head. The last papal coronation of an emperor there would ever be. The formal summit of everything she had schemed and borrowed and negotiated for since the boy was seven. Margaret was not present.

She was in Mechelen, minding the shop, as she had been for twenty-three years. She had roughly nine months to live, and the thing that was going to kill her was already waiting in the ordinary furniture of her house. By the autumn of 1530, the house around that bedchamber was one of the wonders of Northern Europe, and Margaret had arranged it as something no one had quite seen before: a residence you could tour, room by room, where the objects were displayed to be studied. Distinguished visitors were walked through it, sometimes by the governor herself.

Past a collection her own inventories counted in the hundreds. Paintings and carvings and tapestries, cabinets of coral and carved gems. Portraits of nearly every relative she had buried, hung in sequence. A family she could still walk past.

Maps and globes for the new geography her nephew’s ships kept redrawing. And in the garden galleries, cages of exotic birds whose upkeep appears in her accounts beside the salaries of ambassadors. One cupboard held objects from a world that had not existed for Europeans when Margaret was born. Featherwork, masks, and treasures of the Aztecs, sent back across the ocean after Cortés shipped Moctezuma’s gifts to Charles, who forwarded a share to his aunt.

She was among the very first people in Europe to collect the Americas. One wall held a smallish oak panel from the previous century. A Bruges painting of a merchant couple in a green-curtained room. The man in a vast black hat, the woman in green, a convex mirror behind them reflecting the whole scene back.

Her inventory clerk logged it in her presence: the portrait called Hernoul le Fin with his wife in a chamber, made by the painter Johannes. And noted her instruction that a lock be fitted so its protective panels could be closed. Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, one of the most famous paintings on Earth, spent Margaret’s last years as her personal property, kept under lock like a jewel. Her library ran to hundreds of volumes, bound in velvet with gilt clasps, a visiting Italian churchman marveling at a richly decorated library fit for a princess.

And among the manuscripts were things that stop the breath now. Her mother’s own book of hours, and the unfinished masterpiece of the Duke of Berry, the Très Riches Heures, which she had carried north from Savoy. A woman who could keep almost nothing of the people she lost kept their books. She herself, at fifty, was described by those who met her as still handsome.

Gray coming in under the white widow’s hood. Heavier than the golden girl of the portraits, with the full Habsburg lower lip and the disarming quickness in conversation that had charmed Spain three decades earlier. Her routine was work. Correspondence with Charles across the world, council meetings, audiences, accounts.

Her leg troubled her and had for a while. The ulcer from the Cambrai year had never entirely resolved, by some accounts, and she moved less easily than she had. None of it stopped the machine. In November of 1530, she was drafting instructions and managing the aftermath of the peace she had built.

A woman at the absolute height of her authority, planning for years she assumed she had. Then, around the 15th of November, the glass broke. When the wound turned, the physicians of the most powerful woman in Northern Europe arrived at the only remaining move on their board. The foot, perhaps the leg below the knee, would have to come off.

Amputation in 1530 amounted to a wager. Surgery was a trade practiced by barber-surgeons who occupied a social rung well below physicians, and its defining constraint was that the patient was awake. General anesthesia lay three centuries in the future. What existed instead was a short menu of blunt instruments for dulling a human being: strong wine, preparations of mandrake and opium, usually as sponges soaked in drugged solution held to the mouth and nose, or drafts mixed by an apothecary who was guessing at strength, because every batch of opium varied and no one could measure a dose against a body with any precision.

Too little, and the patient felt everything. Too much, and the breathing slowed and slowed and stopped. Surgeons of the era knew both failure modes intimately and wrote about the second one with a shudder. The sleepy drafts, one English writer warned, could make men sleep so soundly they never woke.

Between those two cliffs, the operation itself was pure speed. The limb was bound tight above the site to starve the vessels. A curved knife went around the leg through skin and muscle to the bone in one or two sweeping cuts. Then the saw.

A practiced barber-surgeon could have the limb off in well under a minute, with assistants pinning the patient’s shoulders and remaining leg through the screaming. And then came the part that killed as reliably as the disease. The open stump, spurting from vessels the size of a finger, had to be sealed. The refined technique of tying off each artery with thread was only just being revived and would take decades to spread.

Standard practice in 1530 was cautery: a red-hot iron pressed to the raw cross-section of a living leg, or the stump plunged into boiling oil or pitch. The wound cooked closed while the patient, if conscious, experienced something for which we can only be grateful no reliable first-person accounts survive. Survive all that, and infection of the stump still claimed an enormous share of patients over the following days. Those were the odds being weighed in a Mechelen bedchamber at the end of November 1530, for a fifty-year-old woman already feverish with spreading sepsis.

Her surgeons proposed the wager anyway, because the alternative was watching the black creep up her leg until it killed her. And Margaret, lucid in pain and under no illusions about any of it, agreed. Around her in those last days, the room kept its own economy of dread. Her ladies kept the vigil in shifts, the household she had trained and would shortly be leaving legacies to by name.

Braziers burned herbs against the smell that everyone pretended politely to ignore. Her confessor came and went. And the government kept arriving at the bedside, because Margaret would not stop working. Dispatches were brought in, instructions went out, and the tradition that comes down through her early biographers has her handling the business of the provinces almost to the end, dictating from the bed while her foot blackened under the coverlet.

Accounts describe her calm through all of it, and the calm is believable. She had been rehearsing composure at deathbeds since she was seventeen. Facing an operation she had every reason to believe would kill her on the table, in an era when sudden death was above all a spiritual catastrophe, dying unprepared, unconfessed, accounts unsettled, Margaret ran her own death like a state matter. She summoned her confessor and made her confession.

She called for her notary and worked through legacies, pensions, and payments to the servants of her household, name by name. The woman who had counted ships and grain now counting out her chamberers and grooms. She had her will put in order, naming Charles her sole universal heir. Everything to the boy.

And on the 30th of November 1530, with the surgery scheduled and her strength visibly running out, she dictated a final letter to the nephew she had raised, who was far away in Germany. It survives, and most of it should be heard as she dictated it. The composure of a woman lying in a room that smelled of her own gangrene, hours from the knife. Monseigneur, she begins, the hour is come when I can write to you no more with my own hand, for I feel myself so ill that I doubt not my life will be short.

I find myself with conscience at rest, and wholly resolved to receive whatever it shall please God to send me, without any regret whatsoever, save only being deprived of your presence and being unable to see and to speak with you once more before my death. She tells him she has made him her sole and universal heir, and asks him to carry out the charges of her will. And then comes the sentence in which twenty-three years of work are handed over in a single breath. I leave to you your countries over here, which during your absence I have not only kept as you left them to me at your departure, but have greatly increased them, and restore to you the government of the same, whereof I believe to have loyally acquitted myself, in such wise that I hope for divine reward, satisfaction from you, Monseigneur, and the goodwill of your subjects.

She commends peace to him, particularly, she says, with the kings of France and England. And she closes asking that, for the love he has been pleased to bear this poor body, he remember the salvation of her soul and look after her poor servants and vassals, bidding you the last adieu. She signs it. Your very humble aunt, Margaret.

The last adieu. She knew precisely what the night held. That night, the 30th of November, the surgeons came to ready her for the amputation, to carry her under the pain if such a thing could be done. They administered opium, by most accounts a draft.

And here the record splits into versions. Nobody in that room fully understood what happened. So take the accounts as they come. One version, the most often repeated, says the dose was simply too large.

Her physicians, trying to push a sick, exhausted woman deep enough under that a saw through her leg bone would not kill her by shock, overshot. Margaret sank into sleep. Her breathing went shallow, and somewhere in the small hours it stopped. She never felt the knife, because the knife was never used.

The mercy was administered first, and the mercy killed her. If that version is right, then the governor of the Netherlands, the architect of the Ladies’ Peace, died of an accidental overdose at the hands of doctors trying desperately to spare her pain. A second version, favored by more cautious tellings, keeps the sequence but lowers the certainty. She was dosed, she slept, and she died before the operation could take place.

And whether the opium stopped her breathing or the sepsis chose that hour to finish her, no one could say then, and no one can say now. Blood poisoning at that stage kills on its own schedule. Her fever had been climbing for ten days, and organs fail quietly in the night. The opium and the infection were both fully capable of it, and they were both in her body when it stopped.

A third account, taken up by some modern historians, steps further back and questions the shape of the whole story. Her health had been broken since at least 1527. The abscessed leg had tormented her since before Cambrai. And in that light, the elegant little tale of the dropped goblet and the splinter in the slipper looks like an anecdote that attached itself to the death afterward, a tidy cause for an untidy decline, while the underlying truth was an ulcerated limb that finally went gangrenous and a body that sepsis had been circling for years.

The goblet appears in the tradition early and often. The leg trouble is in the record independently. Both can be true at once. A chronic wound and a fresh injury meeting in the same doomed foot.

The sources permit any of these, and we do not get to know. What no version disputes is the outcome. Between midnight and one in the morning, in the first hour of the 1st of December 1530, Margaret of Austria died in her palace at Mechelen, aged fifty years and ten months, without waking. The amputation never performed.

The foot that killed her still attached. The woman who had written her epitaph for the sea at sixteen, who had buried two husbands, a child, a brother, and a niece, who had governed an empire’s richest province for a generation and made peace between the two most powerful men alive, was killed by a drinking glass, and quite possibly by kindness. Around her bed stood physicians who would spend the rest of their lives wondering which of their hands had done it. Dawn broke over Mechelen on the 1st of December with the bells already tolling, and the news went out along the winter roads by fast courier, to Brussels, to Antwerp, to the courts of Europe, and across the continent to Charles in Germany.

The emperor’s grief is recorded as deep and genuine, and it had a practical edge of pure panic underneath it, since the letter announcing his aunt’s death arrived alongside her farewell, the one signing off with the last adieu, and it left him without the one administrator he trusted absolutely in the one set of provinces he could never afford to lose. Charles ordered full court mourning. He would eventually fill the vacancy straight from his aunt’s nursery. First, though, her household had a body to attend to, and the sixteenth century attended to royal bodies with a thoroughness Margaret had planned for herself in detail in advance.

Within a day or so of death, the surgeons who had been meant to take her leg opened her body instead. Royal embalming of the period was butchery performed with reverence. The torso opened, the heart lifted out and set aside, the entrails removed, the cavity washed with vinegar and spirits and packed with herbs and spices. The whole corpse wrapped tight in layer upon layer of waxed cloth and sealed into a coffin against the journey everyone knew lay ahead.

Dividing the body was the point, and it was standard for her rank and her family. Her brother’s heart had made a separate journey, and her instructions embraced the custom fully. Three destinations for one woman. Her entrails were buried at Mechelen, in the city she had governed from.

An offering of her actual insides to the seat of her power. Her heart was sealed in its own casket and sent to Bruges, where her mother had died in her bed of the injuries from the ditch, where Mary of Burgundy lay entombed in gilded bronze in the Church of Our Lady. The heart of the daughter who could not remember her mother’s face went to keep company near the mother’s grave, closing a circle that had been broken open in 1482. And the body itself, the largest relic, was destined for Philibert.

Four days’ hard travel to the south, in a church that was still, after twenty-four years of construction, receiving its finishing touches. Her obsequies at Mechelen ran with the full theatrical weight of Burgundian ceremony, the tradition of her grandfather’s court turned on its inventor’s granddaughter. The lying in state, the chapelle ardente blazing with hundreds of candles around the coffin, the black-draped churches, the masses in their dozens, the household in mourning cloth issued down to the kitchen boys. Her motto hung over all of it.

Her will, meanwhile, was executed faithfully. Charles paid out the legacies, the pensions to her ladies and chamber servants, the sums to her physicians, the alms to the poor of Mechelen. The correspondence of the following years shows her executors chasing bequests item by item, and shows the emperor, a man permanently at war with his own finances, honoring his aunt’s promises down to the last. She had endowed masses for her own soul, for Philibert’s, for Juan’s, the machinery of perpetual prayer that a believer of her generation regarded as the most practical of all investments.

And the chantries duly ground into motion at Mechelen, at Bruges, at Brou. Priests paid in perpetuity to sing her toward heaven. Her household dissolved slowly. Servants pensioned off or passed into Mary of Hungary’s service.

The palace inventoried room by room. Every painting and jewel and manuscript logged for the heir. A state was being wound up. And the paperwork survives in such volume that historians can furnish her rooms from the records alone.

And when the ceremonies ended, the strangest phase of Margaret’s story began. The phase where she waited. Brou was not ready. The tombs, the whole reason the church existed, were still under the chisels.

The sculptor’s workshop had years of carving left. So the coffin traveled to Bruges and was placed in the keeping of a convent of Annunciade nuns, an order devoted to the sorrows of the Virgin. And if a widow who signed herself the lady of mourning had to spend her afterlife’s first stretch anywhere, a house dedicated to Our Lady of Seven Sorrows was almost too fitting. She lay there, boxed and sealed, through 1531 and into 1532, ahead of state in storage, while masons two duchies away raced to finish her grave.

Meanwhile, the government she left behind changed hands with a smoothness that was itself her monument. Charles named her successor within weeks, and the choice was the girl from the Mechelen nursery. Mary, the widow of Hungary, twenty-five years old, dressed in the mourning she had worn since Mohács and would wear until she died. The niece stepped into the aunt’s office, into her palace, among her collections, and governed the Netherlands for the next quarter century with a rigor that made even Charles flinch sometimes.

After Mary came other women governing those same provinces on behalf of absent Habsburg men, decade after decade, so consistently that female regency in the Netherlands hardened from an emergency measure into a tradition. Every one of them worked in the shadow of the office as Margaret had built it. She proved the model for a hundred years of women running that country, and she had done it while raising the orphans of the man whose death created the vacancy. As for the building itself, it had been one of the longest-running threads of her life.

After a shaky start with local masters, Margaret handed the project to a Flemish master builder, Loys van Bodeghem, sent down from Brussels with authority over the whole site. And for two decades, the little town of Bourg hosted an outpost of Netherlandish craft in the middle of Bresse. Carvers and masons working to drawings approved hundreds of miles away. Margaret drove the work by courier, and her letters to the site survive in numbers, approving and rejecting designs, demanding speed, wincing at the bills.

Her treasurers grumbled about the cost for twenty years, and she overruled them for twenty years, funneling her Savoyard widow’s income into stone while she governed an empire’s provinces on a salary. Monks were installed in the finished monastery. The glass went in, the stalls were carved, the tombs crept toward completion. She followed every stage of it on paper and in models, and never once stood inside it.

By 1532, the church was ready. Spring of 1532 ended the waiting. The coffin was taken up from the Annunciades and began its last journey. A funeral cortege crawling south through France’s borderlands toward Bresse, black-draped wagons and outriders and clergy, more or less the route a twenty-one-year-old bride had traveled in 1501 on her way to three years of happiness.

The procession came down at last into the plain of Bourg-en-Bresse, and rising out of the town before them was the thing she had been paying for and dreaming over, letter by letter, for twenty-six years, and had never once laid eyes on. The church of Brou, pale stone against the sky, finished, consecrated that very year, waiting for exactly this delivery. She arrived at her own masterpiece as its final furnishing. Brou survives essentially intact, and it is one of the strangest and most moving buildings in France once you know whose story it tells.

From outside it is late Gothic pushed to its breaking point, stone worked until it stops looking like stone, stones spun into pinnacles and tracery under a roof of glazed tiles laid in diamond patterns. Inside, past a carved rood screen like a fence of lace, the choir holds the three tombs arranged exactly as the widow ordered. Philibert lies in the center, the position of honor, a young man in white marble. And the sculptor gave him a detail that has been noted by nearly every visitor for five centuries.

His head is turned, tilted to one side, toward the tomb of his wife, as though he rolled over in his sleep to look at her. To one side lies his mother, Margaret of Bourbon, whose unkept vow started it all, her feet resting on a greyhound for fidelity. And on the other side, under a canopy of carved stone so dense it looks like vegetation, lies Margaret of Austria. Twice.

Because her tomb follows the double-decker tradition of the age. An effigy above and an effigy below. And the way she used that tradition is pure Margaret. These paired tombs usually preached a sermon in stone.

Above, the person in their earthly glory. Below, the transi, the corpse carved rotting, worm-eaten, sometimes split open. A memento mori shouting that beauty ends in decay. Margaret took the format and rewrote the sermon.

Above, on the upper slab, she lies in state. A woman of fifty in her robes and ducal coronet. The governor, the stateswoman, formal and finished. Below, where the rotting corpse should be, lies instead a young woman in a simple shroudlike gown.

Her face smooth, her feet bare, and her hair, the golden hair sheared off at the scalp in 1504, carved loose and unbound, flowing down past her shoulders in long waves of alabaster. This lower figure is Margaret as she will rise on the last day. The body perfected, the grief undone, the hair given back. The sculptor was a German master named Conrad Meit, and what he and his workshop achieved in that lower effigy sits comfortably among the greatest funerary sculpture ever cut.

And then, on that perfect resurrected body, one detail. On the bare foot of the lower effigy, the carvers included a wound. A small, sculpted lesion on the foot, exactly where the splinter of glass went in, exactly where the gangrene began. The injury that killed her, reproduced in polished alabaster on the body meant to represent her freed from every injury.

Nothing about that tomb happened by accident. She and her artists planned its program for years, and the wound was completed after her death, to order. So the church she built for love ends up carrying, on its centerpiece, a permanent record of the manner of her death. A five-hundred-year-old medical annotation in stone.

Christ rose with his wounds. Margaret the tomb answers would rise with hers. The cut foot presented like a credential. Around all three monuments, worked into railings and vaults and windows in hundreds of repetitions, run the emblems.

The letters P and M knotted together with love cords. Marguerites, the daisies punning on her name. And everywhere, everywhere, the four words. Fortune.

Infortune. Fort une. Her coffin went into the vault beneath in 1532, beside the husband she had last touched twenty-eight years earlier, and the doors of the story more or less closed. What gives Brou its final twist is what happened around it afterward, or rather what failed to happen.

Royal tombs have a terrible survival rate in France. During the Revolution, the necropolis of the French kings at Saint-Denis was systematically wrecked, the vaults broken open, centuries of royal bodies dragged out and tipped into lime pits, effigies smashed for building stone. Brou, sitting in its provincial town, dodged the annihilation. The monastery was ransacked and repurposed, stabling and storage and worse.

But the tombs came through the centuries essentially whole. The woman who spent her life losing everything built the one royal funerary ensemble in France that fortune, for once, left alone. You can stand in front of her alabaster face this afternoon, if you can get yourself to Bourg-en-Bresse. And thousands of people do every year, most of them with no idea who she was.

Her worldly goods scattered the way worldly goods do, and a few of the trajectories are strange enough to follow. The little oak panel of the merchant couple, the painting she kept under lock, passed to Mary of Hungary along with the rest of the collection’s cream, traveled with the Habsburgs to Spain, sat in royal inventories for centuries, got swept up in the chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, and finished its journey in London, where it hangs today in the National Gallery as the Arnolfini Portrait, stared at by millions who have never heard the name of the woman who once ordered a lock for it. The Très Riches Heures wandered its own road and rests now in a château at Chantilly, arguably the most famous manuscript in existence. Her song albums sleep in libraries in Brussels and beyond, still performable, still performed, her court’s grief still sung by choirs five centuries on, mostly to listeners who will never know whose mourning they are hearing.

The people took longer to scatter. Juana, the sister-in-law behind the walls, outlived Margaret by twenty-five years, dying at Tordesillas in 1555 after forty-six years of confinement, having outlasted nearly everyone who put her there. Eleanor reigned as the unloved queen of France, endured her husband’s open neglect with the family patience, and died in 1558. Mary governed the Netherlands until her hands gave out, laid down the office when Charles laid down his crowns, and followed her brother into retirement in Spain.

And Charles himself, the seven-year-old from the Mechelen nursery, ruled his impossible empire for another quarter century after his aunt’s death and broke his health doing it. In the end, he did the thing no emperor had done in living memory. He abdicated everything, piece by piece, and withdrew to a monastery in the Spanish countryside, where he died in 1558, gout-wrecked and exhausted, surrounded by clocks he liked to take apart. Among the possessions he kept about him to the end were relics of the family that had poured everything into him.

The family whose women had raised him, funded him, governed for him, and died in harness for him. So how did she become the forgotten one? The answer is depressingly structural. Margaret never wore a crown of her own.

Governor is a job title, and job titles fade next to thrones. She left no living child to burnish her memory. Her only offspring was a stillborn girl with no name. Her achievements were the invisible sort: wars deflected, treaties brokered, economies kept breathing, a boy raised well.

And history’s spotlight has never known what to do with prevention. The nephew she manufactured into an emperor grew so colossal in the record that everyone who built him got flattened into his backstory. Even her grave works against her. She lies in a small French town off every major tourist artery, in a church most guidebooks give a paragraph.

Her own carefully constructed image, the modest widow in white, the humble aunt, the servant of her house, did its work too well for five hundred years. The men she outmaneuvered would mostly be astonished at how completely she has slipped out of the story. The last word should probably belong to the place she chose. Go to Brou, into the choir, past Philibert with his head turned forever toward her, and crouch a little at the lower level of her tomb, where the young Margaret lies with her hair unbound, waiting for a resurrection she has been announcing for five centuries.

Look at the bare alabaster foot. The wound is right there. Small and precise, carved by men who had stood in the room where she died. A girl who wrote her own epitaph in a storm at sixteen got, in the end, an epitaph nobody had to write.

A splinter’s mark on a stone foot, in a church built on grief, under four words that never resolve. Fortune misfortunes one woman greatly. Fortune and misfortune make one woman strong. Fortune ruins everything except one.

All those meanings are still true at once. And she planned it that way.