Ferdinand II of Aragon

6 Key excerpts on "Ferdinand II of Aragon"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Man behind the Queen

  Male Consorts in History

  • C. Beem, M. Taylor, C. Beem, M. Taylor(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  without Isabella. First, I attempt to ascribe certain specific initiatives to Ferdinand rather than Isabella. Second, I attempt to show that the interests of Ferdinand as king of Aragon have been underestimated during the lifetime of Isabella, greatly affecting our understanding (or misunderstanding) of the direction the policy of the Catholic Monarchs took. The emphasis in the approach I adopt is thus policy rather than personality, though this was an age in which personality often determined policy. If at times I appear to be talking more about the “Aragonese” direction of policy than about Ferdinand himself, this is because I obstinately insist that the hand of Ferdinand can be detected in the wider direction of policy, which in my view was geared more to the interests of Ferdinand in Aragon and its dependencies than has generally been assumed. Clearly it is not possible here to examine all aspects of the many reigns of Ferdinand, and it has seemed best to make a ruthless selection of linked topics, connected to the treatment of religious minorities in Spain and further afield. This way we see Ferdinand at work in not just Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia, but Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples, and exercising strong influence in both Portugal and Navarre, as well as in the newly discovered islands of the Caribbean. It is also an aspect of the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella that has dominated discussion of the period in recent years.

  This geographical range is itself unusual, for another feature of the books by Ladero, Edwards and Liss is their emphasis on the affairs specifically of Spain, more especially Castile. This reflects, once again, traditional preoccupations. It is the legacy of a long-standing centralist view of Spanish history that maintained its dominance under Franco. As well as an emphasis on the formation of a Spanish state, we find an emphasis in some works on the Christian identity of that state, reaffirmed when the Catholic Monarchs dealt harshly, though rather differently, with their Jewish and Muslim subjects. In the years around 1940, the idea of the Christian mission of Castile was forcefully expressed in the works of José-Maria Doussinagué on the foreign policies of Ferdinand the Catholic, one of the few works on the reign which concentrates heavily on the early sixteenth century. The learned Carlist historian of law and political ideas, Elías de Tejada, saw the Spanish occupation of the kingdom of Naples as beneficial to southern Italy precisely because it drew the area into the unique world of Christian Spanish civilisation, which was, he passionately argued, neither European nor African. The views of these historians might easily be dismissed as irrelevant and outdated, were it not for the fact that Elías de Tejada still has his enthusiasts in contemporary Naples, where one of his books has recently appeared in Italian (admittedly under the imprint of a far Right publishing house), and that Doussinagué and his contemporaries exposed to view a rich documentation which makes their works essential places of reference.9

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  A History of Europe

  From 1378 to 1494

  • W.T. Waugh(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The next king, Peter’s son John, was a patron of music and a keen sportsman; but when he died in 1395 he had made little mark on the country. Meanwhile, however, his nephew Martin had married Maria, heiress to Sicily, who had been captured and held in captivity by Peter IV; and the bridegroom, with his father (also called Martin), had gone to Sicily to enforce their rights to the throne. Owing to stubborn resistance by the Sicilians, they had made little headway. But when in 1395 the elder Martin succeeded his brother John on the Aragonese throne, he was able to support his son so effectively that by the end of 1397 the island was reduced to obedience. The younger Martin was an able and attractive man, who soon made himself popular with the Sicilians; but in 1409 he died, leaving no issue. His heir was his father, in whose hand all the possessions of the royal house of Aragon were now united. But Martin I himself died in 1410, and as he had no direct heirs, Aragon was exposed for two years to the troubles which usually attend a disputed succession. A committee composed of three representatives of each of the three Cortes of the realm weighed the rights of the three claimants. It was a complicated case, and its details need not concern us. In 1412 the choice of the committee fell upon Ferdinand of Antequera, son of John I of Castile and Eleanor, Martin of Aragon’s sister. He was nearer in descent to King Martin than either of his two rivals; otherwise both had a better hereditary claim. One reason for the choice was the success of Ferdinand’s rule as regent for his nephew, Ferdinand I the young John II of Castile. The House of Trastamara now of Aragon, held the sovereignty of both Castile and Aragon. The union 1412–16 of the two was well within the sphere of practical politics, and plans for bringing it about had much influence on the course of events in Spain from that time onward.

  Martin I of Aragon, 1395–1410 Aragon and Sicily united, 1409 Ferdinand I of Aragon, 1412–16

  The reign of Ferdinand I lasted only four years. He is best remembered for the part he played in terminating the Great Schism by withdrawing his obedience from Pope Benedict XIII. He also put down a revolt in Sicily, and arranged a match between his second son John and Joanna, Queen of Naples, though Joanna broke her word and married the Count de la Marche. These doings, however, determined the policy of Ferdinand’s son Alfonso, who succeeded to all his father’s dominions and claims. He was a very brilliant and ambitious man—a capable soldier, a clever diplomatist, and a keen and discriminating patron of the art and learning of the Italian Renaissance. Though an attempt of his to make good the Aragonese claim to Corsica was defeated by the Genoese, he succeeded in consolidating his authority in Sardinia. His great achievement, however, was the con-quest of Naples-a task which took twenty-two years and exposed him to many caprices of fortune. The doings of Alfonso concern Italy rather than Spain. In his realm of Aragon he spent little time, and after his hold on Naples was secure it became his regular place of residence. His Aragonese subjects viewed his doings with disapproval, for he showed that he preferred Italy to Spain, he had demanded their services and money in the prosecution of his foreign projects, and he had tampered with their constitutional liberties. The character and behaviour of his brother John, who acted as regent for Alfonso, did not tend to soothe their tempers. The Catalans, in particular, were ready for mischief when, on Alfonso’s death in 1458, John became king of all his dominions save Naples, which Alfonso had bequeathed to his bastard son Ferrante.

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  Speaking of Spain

  The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World

  • Antonio Feros(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  In addition to the Iberian kingdoms, he ruled over a number of Italian territo-ries—Sardinia, Naples, Sicily, Genoa, and Milan—the Low Coun-tries, and French Lorraine. The situation did not change much after Charles resigned in 1556 and left the Spanish and a majority of his European possessions to his son Philip II. The immediate political and military consequences of the union of Ferdinand and Isabel irreversibly changed the course of Iberian history. Their contemporaries were apparently convinced that, vir-tually overnight, a new political entity had been created, the start of a definitive reunification of the peninsular kingdoms. In 1492 the humanist Antonio de Nebrija, author of the first grammar of the Castilian language, declared that, with the dynastic union of Ferdinand and Isabel and their great triumphs, “the limbs and the pieces of Spain, which had been scattered over many parts, were 18 S P A I N S brought together and joined as one body and kingdom.” 5 Royal offi-cials recognized the merits of reuniting the various peninsular king-doms under the authority of one monarch. At the start of their joint reign official circles talked approvingly of Ferdinand and Isabel pro-claiming themselves “kings of Spain, now that they were [rulers] of the major part of the peninsula.” The monarchs rejected the tempta-tion and held on to their separate titles. 6 As equal partners, both Isabel and Ferdinand were in agreement that they were not going to promote the dissolution of all extant kingdoms in order to create one, and only one, Spanish kingdom. The monarchy’s strategy in the 1500s was to transform the figure of monarch and religion, king and God, into foci of loyalty and union instead of forcing the total dissolution of the various kingdoms. At this time, monarchy, not republic, was widely considered the system MEDITERRANEAN SEA ATLANTIC OCEAN PORTUGAL NAVARRE ARAGON CASTILE GRANADA map 1.

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  Speaking of Spain

  The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World

  • Antonio Feros(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  1

  Spains

  IN OCTOBER 1469, two young princelings—Isabel, eighteen, and her cousin Ferdinand, seventeen—married in a small Castilian town in virtual secrecy. As members of the same Trastámara dynasty, their marriage was an attempt to establish order and stability in the peninsula following decades of conflict, regicides, rebellions, and civil wars.

  Isabel became queen of the crown of Castile in 1474 when she succeeded her brother Enrique IV. Five years later, in 1479, Ferdinand became king of the crown of Aragon. This was strictly a union of heads, not bodies: the marriage accords did not call for, or envisage, a true political and juridical union of the two crowns and their kingdoms. Nevertheless, the practical result of the marriage was that for the first time in centuries, the two most powerful states in the Iberian Peninsula were dynastically amalgamated.

  Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians claimed that this fateful union of the crowns of Aragon and Castile stitched together a territorial unit rent asunder by the eighth-century Arab invasion of the peninsula and also unquestionably marked the birth of Spain as a nation and state. In the past few decades, however—at least since the establishment of democracy in Spain in the 1970s—historians have challenged this interpretation. In their view, the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabel did not forge a nation, and the old kingdoms survived as autonomous entities with deeply entrenched “national” identities that have endured until the present day. Alternatively, a growing number of early modern historians have observed that one of the key if unintended consequences of the marriage between Isabel and Ferdinand was not the creation of a nation-state so much as the emergence of a well-defined Spanish national identity. They find evidence of this process in cultural and juridical concepts and practices that reveal an increasingly widespread sense among early modern Spaniards of belonging to a “Spanish” nation and in a growing popular tendency to self-identify unambiguously as “Spaniards.”1

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  Defenders of the West

  The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam

  • Raymond Ibrahim(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bombardier Books

    (Publisher)

  65

  When it came to Spain’s history, Muslims, and war—or simply jihad and Reconquista—Archbishop Rodrigo (or Roderick) Jiménez de Rada of Toledo (1170–1247) was especially influential on Ferdinand. He had been his grandfather’s best friend and counselor, and stood by Alfonso VIII at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. The archbishop soon became Ferdinand’s principle advisor. An implacable but learned foe of Islam, Rodrigo had commissioned an early translation of the Koran into Latin—so that Christians might understand the “sacrilegious decrees and strange precepts” of the Moors—which was completed in 1210, two years before Las Navas. Further to “expose the secrets of the Moors,” three years later, he commissioned a translation of an Arabic treatise by Ibn Tumart, the aforementioned founder of the Almohad sect.

  Later in his life, and to “unravel that people’s slyness and ferocity,” Rodrigo personally wrote the Historia Arabum (“History of the Arabs”), based on and translated from “their” sources. It contains a biography of and shows “how, through false revelation the sly man Muhammad from his heart crafted a pestilential virus [Islam].”66 Along with all this “intelligence” that he passed on to Ferdinand, he also had a special translation concerning Almanzor and his strategies made for the king in his youth from the original Arabic.67

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  Spain 1474–1598

  • Jocelyn Hunt(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 and although there was no campaign in the Holy Land, the campaign in North Africa preoccupied Ferdinand for much of his reign. Moorish pirates threatened the sea links to the Balearic Islands, as well as to Naples and, from the 1480s on, they were joined by the Ottoman Turks whose navies attacked Rhodes, Malta and even Sicily. Any land gained in North Africa would also have the effect of reducing Portuguese trading influence, and there was a possibility that colonisation might ease the problem of land shortage in Castile, where huge areas, for example the province of Estremadura, were, as the name implies, of limited fertility. In the event, however, Ferdinand established no more than coastal garrisons, for example at Mers el Kebir (1505), Oran (1509), Tripoli and Algiers (1510). These outposts were vulnerable to attack from corsairs, and were to be a source of anxiety to Charles during his reign.

  If interest in North Africa was one immediate consequence of the capture of Granada which could have been predicted, the sponsorship of Columbus to discover a short route to Asia was unexpected. In her gratitude to God, Isabella was more prepared to listen to Columbus than she had been in 1486. In the event, Columbus’ four exploring journeys reached only the West Indies and the mainland of Central America. By the time of Isabella’s death, concerns about the treatment of the native peoples were beginning to be expressed, and in 1512 the first attempts at government regulation, the Laws of Burgos, were promulgated. As was the case with so much of Ferdinand’s foreign policy, his successor, Charles was to find this a growing and intractable problem throughout his reign.

  Matters closer to home engaged the attention of the Catholic monarchs even before Columbus’ first departure. The provinces of Rosellon and Cerdena, in the Pyrenees between France and Aragon, had been occupied by France since 1462. Ferdinand, as ruler of Catalonia to whom they had previously belonged, was determined to repossess them. He was able to make an alliance with Henry VII of England in 1489 (at Medina del Campo). Henry’s accession to the throne of England had been materially assisted by the Duke of Brittany, and so Henry was angered by a French attack on his childhood protector. Although the treaty with Spain supposedly concerned Brittany, Ferdinand attacked the Pyrenean provinces and was recognised as their ruler by the Treaty of Barcelona (1493). Ferdinand’s other claim in the Pyrenees concerned Navarre. During the unrest in Aragon which preceded Ferdinand’s accession, Navarre had declared its independence, but there was a dispute between the families of de Foix and d’Albret over which should rule. In 1506, Ferdinand married Germaine de Foix, to enhance his claim, and to prevent the King of France gaining control of her; but he did not take action until 1512, when he was again at war against France. He demanded the right to use Navarre as a springboard for his attack into France, and d’Albret’s refusal provided him with the excuse he needed to annex Navarre, which remains Spanish to this day.

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