Suspension of the Moorish wars in the middle of the thirteenth century—Constitution of Castile—Disorders in the kingdom—Alfonso XI.’s victories over the Moors—Peter the Cruel and Henry of Trastamara—John of Gaunt in Spain—John II. of Castile and Alvaro de Luna—Henry III. and the accession of Isabella in Castile—The Constitution of Aragon—Acquisition of Sicily and Sardinia—The general Privilege and the Privilege of Union—Reign of Peter IV.—Re-union of Sicily with Aragon—Accession of the House of Trastamara in Aragon—Alfonso V. gains Naples—Relations of Aragon and Navarre—John II. and Charles of Viana—Union of Castile and Aragon—Government of Ferdinand and Isabella—The Santa Hermandad and the Inquisition—Conquest of Granada—Geographical discoveries of Portugal and Castile—The Bull of Borgia and the Treaty of Tordesillas.
The middle of the thirteenth century was an important turning-point in the history of Spain. Hitherto the Christian |Suspension of Moorish wars.| states had been engaged in a continuous crusade for the conquest or expulsion of the Moors, who had held almost the whole peninsula in the eighth century. But the capture of Cordova in 1236, and of Seville in 1248, with the reduction of the province of Murcia in 1266, drove the Moors to their last stronghold in the kingdom of Granada, which they were allowed to retain in comparative peace for nearly two centuries and a half. This cessation of military activity in the south was due to several causes. Granada itself was strongly defended by nature, and its population was more homogeneous than that of the dominions which had been lost. And the old enemies of the Moors were now diminished in number. Portugal was cut off from all direct contact with the infidel by the district round Seville and Cadiz, and Aragon was equally isolated by the intervention of the Castilian province of Murcia. The only state which had a conterminous frontier with the Moors was Castile, and the attention of Castile was distracted from its southern neighbours by internal feuds and foreign interests. One result of the termination of the religious war is that Spanish history loses such unity as it had hitherto possessed, and it is henceforth necessary to follow the separate history of its component states. And with its unity the history of the peninsula loses much of its dignity and importance. The record of internal feuds, of dynastic revolutions, and of criminal bloodshed, which fills the annals of the Spanish kingdoms, and especially of Castile, would hardly be worth preserving if it were not the necessary prelude to the rise of Spain in the sixteenth century to a foremost position among the powers of Europe.
Castile, permanently united with Leon since 1230, was the largest, and ultimately the dominant state of Spain. It had been formed in the course of a prolonged religious |Constitution of Castile.| war, and this had left a permanent impress on the constitution. While the kings had risen to power as military leaders, the nobles and cities had also earned great independence in a struggle which had often depended more upon sudden local effort than upon the action of large armies; and the clergy, as the preachers of religious ardour against the infidel, retained more authority than in any other country in Europe. When national exertion was relaxed by the diminution of external danger, a struggle between the rival forces was inevitable; and though the victory rested in the end with the monarchy, it was long before this result was assured. The national assembly, or Cortes, was composed of three estates—clergy, nobles, and citizens—and its importance varied very much from time to time. But the royal power was more effectually limited by the danger of armed resistance than by any formal constitutional restrictions. The great nobles were independent princes in their own domains, and could command the allegiance of their vassals in private feuds with each other, and even in warfare against the crown. For the vindication of their own rights, and for resisting the encroachments of the barons, the towns claimed and exercised the right of forming an armed union or hermandad. It was fortunate for the kings that conflicting interests and mutual jealousy prevented any common action between classes whose power both of offence and defence was so extremely formidable.
Alfonso X., who ruled in Castile from 1252 to 1284, is known in history as ‘The Wise,’ but the epithet was earned |Disorders in Castile.| by his remarkable learning rather than by his ability as a ruler. The only territorial acquisition of his reign, Murcia, was won for him by the arms of Aragon. He abandoned the war against the Moors for a vain effort to gain the imperial dignity, which he disputed during the Great Interregnum with an English rival, Richard of Cornwall. His later years, and the reigns of his successors, Sancho IV. (1284-1295) and Ferdinand IV. (1295-1312), were disturbed by a disputed succession to the crown. Alfonso’s eldest son, Ferdinand de Cerda, died in 1275, leaving two sons, who are known as the Infantes de Cerda. According to modern ideas, their hereditary claim would be incontestable. But in the Middle Ages it was frequently held that nearness of blood gave a better claim than descent in an elder line. On this ground Alfonso’s second son, Sancho, was recognised as his father’s heir, and succeeded in ousting his nephews. But the Infantes de Cerda had many partisans in Castile, and a prolonged but desultory struggle ensued, in which the neighbouring kings of Aragon and Portugal were involved. The actual contest was ended by a treaty in 1305, by which the claimants were bought off with lavish grants of land. But the disorders to which it had given rise were not so easily suppressed. Two successive kings, Ferdinand IV. and Alfonso XI. (1312-1350), came to the throne in their childhood, and a minority is always an evil in an early stage of society. Castile in this matter was almost as unlucky as was Scotland a little later, and the results in the two countries were very similar. The noble families fought out private wars among themselves, and the kings became rather partisans than arbiters among their subjects. In fact, the chief force for the maintenance of order was supplied, not by the monarchy, but by a great hermandad or brotherhood, which was formed in 1295 by thirty-four Castilian towns.
The obvious weakness of Castile, after nearly seventy years of anarchy, encouraged the Moors to make an effort for the recovery of their lost power. Abul Hakam, the |War of Alfonso XI. with the Moors.| Emir of Fez, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in 1339 with a large army. He was joined by the ruler of Granada, and their combined forces laid siege to Tarifa. The approach of danger had a wholesome and healing effect upon Castile. Alfonso XI. was enabled to make peace with his rebellious subjects, and also with the king of Portugal, whose daughter he had married only to desert her for the beautiful Eleanor de Guzman. In 1340 he advanced to the relief of Tarifa, and gained in the battle of the Salado the first victory which had fallen to a Castilian king for nearly a century. The complaisant chronicler of the royal achievement tells us that only twenty Christians perished in a battle which cost the lives of two hundred thousand Moslems. It is at any rate authentic that Abul Hakam was driven back to Africa, and that in 1344 Alfonso captured the town of Algeciras. He hoped to complete his success by the reduction of Gibraltar, which would have excluded any further reinforcement from Africa to the Moors of Granada. But he was carried off by the Black Death in 1350, and this event led to the abandonment of the siege. Alfonso’s successes against the infidel have outweighed in the histories of Spain both the vices of his private character and the disorder that prevailed in the kingdom during his minority and the greater part of his reign.
Few historical epithets have been more thoroughly deserved |Peter the Cruel.| than that of ‘the Cruel,’ as attached to the name of Peter I. (1350-1369). Numerous attempts to whitewash his character have been made in vain, and all that can be said in his favour is that he had received very great provocation. He was the only son of Alfonso XI. and Maria of Portugal, and during his father’s reign both he and his mother had been kept in ignominious seclusion, while every mark of favour was showered upon the royal mistress, Eleanor de Guzman, and her numerous children. Henry, the eldest of the bastards, was Count of Trastamara, and his twin-brother Frederick held the grand-mastership of the great Order of St. James. It was by no means unnatural that the dowager queen should urge her son, when he came into power, to avenge the insults which she had so long endured in angry impotence. Eleanor de Guzman was strangled in 1351, and two of her sons in later years were murdered by the king’s own hand. Henry of Trastamara sought safety in exile, first in Portugal, and afterwards in France. It would be disgusting even to enumerate the atrocious acts which have been attributed, some with more and some with less authority, to the youthful monster in his early years. His treatment of Blanche of Bourbon, whose hand he had solicited from the French king, is a conspicuous but rather mild illustration of his ruthless temperament. He was living openly with a mistress, Maria de Padilla, when the princess arrived, and he refused even to see her. Later, under considerable pressure, he went through the form of marriage, but immediately returned to the arms of his mistress; and the bride, who was never a wife, was consigned to a solitary prison, and ultimately poisoned. In 1356 Peter put down a rebellion among his nobles, and took the most sanguinary vengeance upon his defeated opponents. His thirst for bloodshed seems, in moments of excitement, to have amounted almost to mania. Yet, for a long time at any rate, he was not unpopular with the lower orders among his subjects. It was upon the nobles and the Jews, neither very popular with the people, that his hand fell with such severity, and he could show at times a coarse good-nature and a taste for rough buffoonery which won him some popular applause. This helps to explain why he met with little or no opposition when he endeavoured to secure the succession to his own illegitimate children. In 1362 he solemnly swore to the Cortes, and his oath was supported by the archbishop of Toledo, that he had been for ten years the lawful husband of Maria de Padilla, and the docile Cortes recognised her children as legitimate heirs to the crown. But this settlement was not destined to be carried out. Bastardy in Spain, as in Italy, was not considered so fatal a bar to inheritance as it was regarded in northern countries. Henry of Trastamara found supporters in Peter of Aragon and Charles V. of France, who had both grounds of quarrel with the king of Castile. The latter, who was preparing to repudiate the treaty of Bretigni and to renew the war with the English, was not unwilling to allow Bertrand du Guesclin to train on Spanish soil the military companies which he was forming for the service of France. In 1365 a large army crossed the Pyrenees into Aragon, and thence proceeded in the next year to establish Henry of Trastamara upon the Castilian throne. Peter fled to Bordeaux to implore the aid of the Black Prince, and unfortunately succeeded in touching a chivalrous chord in his host’s character. At the battle of Najara the war-hardened troops, which had won the victory of Poitiers, proved more than a match for the only half-trained recruits of du Guesclin (1367). Peter recovered his kingdom, but he showed as much ingratitude to his auxiliaries as he showed barbarity towards his own subjects. Neither the Black Prince nor his army ever completely recovered from their successful but disastrous campaign in Spain, and Charles V. was able in a few years from 1369 to expel the English from nearly the whole of their possessions in France (see p. 95). But the betrayer had no better fortune than the betrayed. The departure of Peter’s allies enabled Henry of Trastamara to return to Castile, and with French aid to win the battle of Montiel. In a personal interview the two half-brothers came to blows, and Henry’s dagger avenged the death of his murdered kinsfolk. The two surviving children of Peter and Maria Padilla, Constance and Isabella, had been left at Bordeaux, and were married to two brothers of the Black Prince—John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, and Edmund Langley, duke of York.
Henry II. had by no means reached the end of his troubles when the death of Peter enabled him for the |Henry II., 1369-79.| second time to ascend the throne of Castile. His title was contested by two rival candidates—Ferdinand of Portugal, whose grandmother had been a daughter of Sancho IV., and John of Gaunt, who asserted the legitimacy and rights of his wife as recognised by the Cortes of 1362.[12] The Portuguese king was the nearer and, for the moment, the more formidable opponent, but French aid enabled Henry to attack Lisbon and extort a treaty of peace. The illness of the Black Prince left the conduct of the war in France to John of Gaunt, and so Henry was able at once to harass his rival and to repay some of his obligations to Charles V. by sending a Castilian fleet to cut off direct communication between England and Gascony. Thus the reign, which had opened so stormily, ended in complete peace, and Henry of Trastamara handed on the crown to his son |John I. 1379-90.| John I. (1379). His accession gave the signal for a renewal of the war with Portugal and of the Lancastrian claim. In 1385 the Portuguese troops won a crushing victory at Aljubarrota, and in the next year John of Gaunt came to the Peninsula in person to uphold his wife’s cause. His daughter Philippa was married to the new king of Portugal, John I., and their united forces invaded Castile and occupied Compostella. But the Castilians had no desire to accept a foreign dynasty; and John of Gaunt, never very lucky or very resolute in his enterprises, was induced to desert his son-in-law and to conclude a separate peace (1387). Catharine, the only daughter of John of Gaunt and Constance, was betrothed to John of Castile’s eldest son Henry, the first heir to the crown who received the title of Prince of Asturias, and the mother’s claim was renounced in favour of the youthful bride.
Henry III., though he was only a boy when his father was suddenly killed by a fall from his horse, proved to be one of |Henry III., 1390-1406.| the ablest kings in the history of Castile. He insisted on a resumption of domain-lands which had fallen into the hands of the nobles, and maintained greater order in the kingdom than had been known for many generations. His marriage with Catharine of Lancaster freed him from any rival claimants to the throne, and also contributed to the maintenance of peace with Portugal, whose queen was Catharine’s half-sister. But, unfortunately, his health was never strong, and he died in 1406 at the early age of twenty-seven, leaving a boy of two years old to succeed him. As it happened, the minority |John II., 1406-1454.| of John II. proved to be the most successful and orderly part of his reign. The regency was shared between his mother and his uncle Ferdinand; and so great was the respect inspired by the latter, that he might easily have supplanted his nephew with the general approval of the Castilians. But Ferdinand acted with perfect loyalty; and after his elevation to the throne of Aragon in 1412, he continued to give honest and disinterested advice to his sister-in-law. Unfortunately, when John II. was old enough to take the government into his own hands, he proved wholly unworthy of the care with which his kingdom had been administered for him. Unwarlike and averse to the cares of business, he allowed himself to be completely overshadowed by the famous Alvaro de Luna, grand-master of the |Alvaro de Luna.| Order of St. James, and constable of Castile. Alvaro de Luna was no commonplace favourite. He was by general recognition the most accomplished knight of his country and his age, and he combined with his brilliant personal attractions political abilities of no mean order. He set himself to increase the authority of the crown because that authority was wielded by himself, and he achieved no small measure of success. He trampled upon the privileges of his brother nobles, and he prepared the way for the humiliation of the third estate by reducing the representation in the Cortes to seventeen of the principal cities. But his government, although despotic, was by no means conducive to order. The absolutism of a king may be submitted to and even welcomed, but the absolutism of a subject is certain to excite discontent among those who consider themselves to be legally his equals. The reign of John II. was filled by a series of conspiracies and rebellions, and the malcontents in Castile received formidable assistance from the king’s cousin, John of Aragon. The constable, however, was as successful in the battle-field as in the tilt-yard, and no Castilian rebel or foreign foe was strong enough to effect his overthrow. His ultimate downfall was due to the ingratitude of his master. John’s second wife, Isabella of Portugal, indignant that her authority counted for so little in the state, set herself to sow distrust between her husband and the all-powerful minister. The more domestic influence triumphed for the moment over the feeble mind of the king, and Alvaro de Luna was put to death after a parody of a trial in 1453.
John II. only survived the constable a year, and his death in 1454 ushered in a still more troubled period for Castile. He left behind him three children—Henry, the son of his first wife, Mary of Aragon, and Isabella and Alfonso, the offspring of Isabella of Portugal. Henry IV., |Henry IV., 1454-74.| who succeeded his father, was the most incapable king of Castile until the accession of the unfortunate Charles II. in the seventeenth century. He was equally feeble in mind and body, and the contempt of his subjects found expression in his appellation of ‘Henry the Impotent.’ There were several aspirants to fill the position which Alvaro de Luna had held in the previous reign, and success rested with Beltran de la Cueva, who had all the showy without any of the solid qualities of the famous constable. It was currently reported that the handsome favourite supplemented his influence over the king by securing the affections of the queen, Joanna of Portugal. The birth of a daughter increased instead of allaying the scandal, and the unfortunate infanta was generally known as ‘la Beltraneja.’ Jealousy of the favourite and disgust with the king’s incompetence combined to provoke a formidable rebellion (1465). At Avila the rebels went through the formal ceremony of deposing a puppet dressed up to represent the king. The crown was offered to Henry’s half-brother Alfonso, on the ground that Joanna was illegitimate, but the young prince died in 1468, before the civil war had come to a decisive end. Isabella, to whom the malcontents now turned, showed that she had inherited the qualities of her mother rather than those of her father. With a calculating wisdom beyond her years, she |Isabella.| refused to weaken her claim by allowing her cause to be associated with rebellion against the monarchy. At the same time she was equally resolute to avoid any recognition of the legitimacy of her niece. Her firmness extorted a treaty from Henry IV., by which she was recognised as his heiress, and on this condition the rebels were induced to lay down their arms (1468). In the next year Isabella concluded her all-important marriage with Ferdinand, the heir to the crown of Aragon. As soon as the immediate danger of deposition was removed, Henry IV. embarked in a struggle to repudiate the recent treaty and to secure the succession to his wife’s daughter. But he died in 1474 without having succeeded in his aim, and his half-sister inherited the crown. The cause of Joanna was now espoused by her uncle, Alfonso V. of Portugal, but Isabella succeeded in maintaining the position she had won. Her accession, and the subsequent union of the crowns of Aragon and Castile, ushered in a new and more distinguished epoch in the history of the Spanish peninsula.
The kingdom of Aragon was formed by the union of the three provinces of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia. The union was very imperfect, as each province jealously |Constitution of Aragon.| insisted upon retaining its own laws and institutions, and resented any attempt to introduce uniformity of administration. The powers of the monarchy were more narrowly restricted than in the neighbouring kingdom of Castile. The privileges of the ricos hombres, or great nobles, were so extensive as to make them almost the equals of their king, and the desire to maintain these privileges brought about among them a wholly unusual unity of interest and political action. Ferdinand the Catholic expressed this difference between the two kingdoms in his saying that ‘it was as difficult to divide the nobles of Aragon as to unite the nobles of Castile.’ And the citizens were not far behind the nobles in the spirit of independence, which was especially strong in the maritime province of Catalonia. The representation of towns in the Cortes of Aragon dates back to 1133, thirty-three years before any similar concession was made in Castile, and more than a century before any regular practice of central representation was established in England. The Cortes was not a general assembly of the whole kingdom, but each province had its own Cortes, which possessed within its borders the supreme control of jurisdiction, legislation, and taxation. In Valencia and Aragon the assembly consisted, as in Castile and France, of the ordinary three estates—clergy, nobles, and citizens. But the Cortes of Aragon contained four estates or arms (brazos). Besides the clergy and the delegates of towns, the secular nobles were divided into two distinct classes—(1) the ricos hombres, who had the right of attending either in person or by proxy, and (2) the infanzones, or lesser tenants-in-chief, and the caballeros, the sub-tenants, who were entitled to attend in virtue of their knighthood. In the office of Justiciar, Aragon possessed a unique institution which has always attracted the interest of historical students. Originally the Justiciar was merely the president of the Cortes when it sat as a court of justice, and his functions were of no special political importance. But in course of time he became the mediator, and ultimately the supreme arbiter, in all disputes between the monarch and his subjects. In this capacity he was regarded as at once the depositary and the champion of constitutional traditions and liberties. The dignity of the office was enhanced by the character of its successive holders, and the history of Aragon abounds with instances of their resolute resistance to despotism on the one hand or to lawless disorder on the other. It is noteworthy that the responsibility of the Justiciar to the Cortes was secured by his selection from the lesser nobles or knights. The ricos hombres, whose privileges included exemption from execution or any corporal punishment, were always excluded from the office.
James I. of Aragon (1213-1276) is known by the honourable title of the Conqueror. He brought the long Moorish wars to an end, and completed the extension of the kingdom by the annexation of the Balearic Islands, which had long been a nest of Mussulman pirates, and of Valencia. He also effected the reduction of Murcia, but with rare loyalty handed it over to the king of Castile, in whose name he had carried on the war (1266). One result of these victories was that his successors, freed from the pressure of continual warfare at home, were able to turn their attention eastwards to events in Italy. Peter III. (1276-1285) was married to Constance, the daughter and heiress |Aragon and Sicily.| of Manfred, and thus acquired a claim to be regarded as the successor of the Hohenstaufen in Naples and Sicily. But it is doubtful whether this claim would have led to any practical results but for the massacre of the French in the famous Sicilian Vespers (1282). To protect themselves from the vengeance of Charles of Anjou, the islanders appealed to the king of Aragon, and offered him the crown. Hence arose the prolonged wars against a coalition formed by the Angevin rulers of Naples, the popes and the kings of France, which constitute the most prominent episode, not only in the later years of Peter III., but also in the reigns of his two sons and successors, Alfonso III. (1285-1291) and James II. (1291-1327). These wars have already been referred to in connection with the history both of France and of Italy (see pp. 25, 48), and it is unnecessary to tell the story again. The essential points to remember are that in 1295 Boniface VIII. negotiated a treaty by which James II. was to marry Blanche, the daughter of Charles II. of Naples, to receive the island of Sardinia, and resign his claim upon Sicily; but the Sicilians refused to agree to terms in which they had had no voice, offered the crown to James’s younger brother Frederick, and succeeded in 1302 in establishing him upon the throne. Hence in the end there was a double gain. Sicily was secured to a younger branch of the house of Aragon, and on its extinction reverted to the main line. Some years later James III. (1327-1336) took Sardinia from the Genoese and Pisans in virtue of a treaty which had been very imperfectly carried out on his side, as the only price which he paid for his acquisition had been an ineffectual attempt to expel his brother from a kingdom which he had deemed himself too weak to retain. Sardinia remained united with Aragon, and so with Spain, until the treaty of Rastadt in 1714 gave it to Austria, and the treaty of London in 1720 transferred it, with the title of king, to the duke of Savoy.
These Italian wars were not without their influence on the history of Aragon. They were waged in the interest of the dynasty, not of the kingdom, and the Aragonese |Concessions to the Aragonese.| had a substantial grievance in being called upon to furnish money, men, and ships for an enterprise in which they had no particular concern. Hence the kings were compelled to appease their subjects by concessions, which went far beyond any sacrifices extorted from contemporary rulers in other countries. The ‘General Privilege,’ granted by Peter III. in 1283, has been compared, and justly compared, with the English Magna Charta. It provided salutary securities for general and individual liberty, and its frequent confirmation shows that it was highly valued. But four years later Alfonso III. went to a dangerous extreme when he signed the famous ‘Privilege of Union’ (1287). By this his subjects were formally authorised to take up arms against their sovereign if he attempted to infringe their privileges. Rebellion may be and often is the only effectual safeguard against oppression, but it is harmful and unnecessary to formulate a right to rebel. The Privilege of Union put a very formidable weapon into the hands of the nobles, who could always disguise the selfish pursuit of their own interests under the pretence that they were engaged in opposing despotism.
Peter IV. of Aragon (1336-1387) was the first king who set himself to free the monarchy from some of the excessive |Reign of Peter IV.| restraints which had been imposed upon it. He annexed to the crown the Balearic Islands, which had been held since 1374 by a younger son of James the Conqueror and his descendants, under the title of kings of Majorca. The reigning king, James II., made a prolonged struggle to retain a dominion which he had done nothing to forfeit, but was compelled to submit to the superior force of his imperious cousin. This arbitrary act was followed by an attempt to settle the succession according to the personal wishes of the king. At the time (1347) Peter had only one child, a daughter Constance, and the heir-presumptive to the throne was his half-brother James, Count of Urgel. There was no law or custom excluding females from the succession in Aragon, but there was a very strong prejudice in favour of male heirs, and they had usually been preferred to heiresses, even though the latter stood nearer in the line of descent. The attempt of James to procure a settlement in favour of his daughter, combined with the generally high-handed character of his government, provoked a formidable rising among the nobles, and also gave them a powerful leader in James of Urgel. Claiming the rights accorded by the Privilege of 1287, the rebels formed a Union at Saragossa and formulated their demands. The king, taken by surprise, was compelled at first to feign compliance; but the opportune death of James of Urgel, attributed by contemporaries to poison administered by his brother’s command, together with a rally of the Catalans to the cause of the king, turned the balance in favour of Peter IV. In 1348 the royal forces met the rebels on the field of Epila, and gained a complete victory. The Privilege of Union was promptly revoked, and the parchment on which it was written was destroyed by the king’s own hands. Thus the monarchy gained a really considerable triumph, and the nobles were the only immediate sufferers. In fact, Peter made no attempt to curtail any popular liberties, and the authority of the Justiciar was more firmly established in his reign by the grant of a life-tenure to the holders of the office. His later years were occupied with wars against his cruel namesake in Castile, with a struggle against the Genoese in Sardinia, and with the suppression of an attempt on the part of James III. to recover his father’s kingdom of Majorca. The original doubt about the succession was removed by the birth of two sons, who successively came to the throne as John I. (1387-1395) and Martin I. (1395-1410). Their reigns are chiefly noteworthy for the reunion of Sicily with Aragon. The two crowns had |Reversion of Sicily.| been separated since the repudiation of his claims by James II. had given his younger brother Frederick the opportunity of gaining a kingdom. Since 1302 Sicily had been peacefully held by the descendants of Frederick I.; and on the extinction of the male line had fallen to an heiress, Mary, the daughter of Frederick II. by a marriage with a daughter of Peter IV. of Aragon. Mary was married in 1391 to her cousin, Martin the Younger, the only son of Martin I., who was enabled by the support of his uncle and father to obtain the Sicilian crown. On his early death in 1409, the island kingdom fell to his father, who for the one remaining year of his life was king both of Aragon and of Sicily.
The death of Martin the Younger not only brought the crown of Sicily to the king of Aragon, but also gave rise to a disputed succession in the latter kingdom. The |Disputed succession.| elder Martin was now the only surviving male descendant of Peter IV., and he died in 1410, before any arrangement had been come to about his successor. If male descent were insisted upon, the obvious heir was James of Urgel, whose grandfather had been the second son of Alfonso IV. Recent precedents, notably the accession of Martin himself in preference to the daughters of John I., were in favour of the exclusion of heiresses, but there remained the open question whether the male descendants of a woman could derive a claim through her. Of such candidates, two were most prominent—Louis, the eldest son of Louis II. of Anjou and John I.’s daughter Yolande, and Ferdinand, the regent of Castile in the minority of John II., whose mother was Eleanor, a daughter of Peter IV.[13] There can be no doubt that the count of Urgel had by far the strongest hereditary claim; but his own rash assumption that he had only to take the crown provoked opposition among the rather contentious Aragonese, and he was ultimately excluded. A joint committee was appointed from the Cortes of the three provinces to inquire into precedents; and after an interregnum of two years, their choice curiously fell upon Ferdinand of Castile, whose claim by descent was unquestionably weaker than that of his rivals (1412).
Thus the lucky house of Trastamara, in spite of its illegitimate origin, had come to furnish a king in Aragon as well as in Castile. And within a generation events enabled the family to add to these possessions the kingdom of Naples, and for a time the kingdom of Navarre. Ferdinand I. did not live long enough to display in Aragon the great qualities which his administration in Castile had shown him to possess. His elder son Alfonso V. (1416-1458) |Alfonso V. and Naples.| is more associated with the history of Italy than with that of Spain. He inherited from his father Sicily and Sardinia as well as Aragon, and in 1423 his adoption by Joanna II. opened to him the prospect of inheriting Naples. But the vicious queen soon changed her mind, disinherited Alfonso, and adopted in his place Louis III. of Anjou, who could claim through his mother a better right to the crown of Aragon than Alfonso himself. This double adoption led to the long war between the house of Aragon and the second house of Anjou, which raged for the last twelve years of Joanna’s reign, and for eight years after her death. It ended in the victory of Alfonso, who reigned peacefully in Naples until his death in 1458 (see p. 271). As he left no legitimate children, Aragon, Sicily, and Sardinia passed to his brother John II. (1458-1494), but Naples was transferred to his bastard son Ferrante I. Half a century was to elapse before the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was re-formed by Ferdinand the Catholic.
While Alfonso was engaged in winning the crown of Naples amidst the turmoil of an Italian war, his younger brother John had succeeded in establishing an intimate |Relations of Aragon and Navarre.| relation with Navarre. This little kingdom, which comprised territory on both sides of the Pyrenees, had for a long time been more closely connected with France than with Spain.[14] United with the French crown by the marriage of Blanche of Navarre with Philip IV., it had again become independent on the extinction of the direct line of the house of Capet. When Philip of Valois ascended the throne of France, Navarre passed to the rightful heiress, Jeanne, the daughter of Louis X., and she was crowned with her husband, Philip of Evreux, in 1329. Their son, Charles the Bad (1349-1387), played a prominent, though not very creditable part in French history during the wars with Edward III. (see Chapter IV.). Charles II. (1387-1425), who succeeded his father, devoted more attention to art and letters than to politics, and kept his kingdom in peace and obscurity. His daughter and heiress, Blanche, married John of Aragon, but the succession was secured to her children. As long as she lived Blanche ruled Navarre in her own right, and on her death in 1442 her son, Charles of Viana, was entitled to the crown of |John II. and Charles of Viana.| Navarre. He actually undertook the administration of the kingdom; but in deference, apparently, to his mother’s wishes, he forbore to assume the royal title, which was still borne by his father. In the ordinary course of things, no special difficulty need have arisen, as Charles would have succeeded his father in Aragon as well as Navarre. But in 1447 John concluded a second marriage with Joanna Henriquez, daughter of the Admiral of Castile, and a woman of equal energy and ambition. She persuaded her husband to intrust her with the administration of Navarre, and Charles of Viana found plenty of advisers to remind him that the kingdom was lawfully his own, and to urge resistance to such an encroachment upon his authority. Hence arose a civil war between the father and the stepmother on the one side, and the son on the other. The great Navarrese families of Beaumont and Egremont, as uniformly hostile to each other as the Orsini and Colonnas in Rome, gladly welcomed so congenial a pretext for warfare. The Beaumonts were intimately associated with Charles, so the Egremonts had perforce to espouse the cause of his father. At Aybar, in 1452, the royal troops won the victory, and Charles fell a prisoner into his father’s hands. He was released soon afterwards, but his power had been destroyed by his defeat, and his position was rendered worse by the birth of a son, afterwards Ferdinand the Catholic, to the queen in 1452. Joanna hardly concealed her intention to secure the recognition of her own son as heir to his father, and her influence over John was unbounded. The unfortunate prince of Viana set out to Naples in 1458 to implore the advice and assistance of his uncle Alfonso V. But Alfonso died in 1458, and John was now king in Aragon instead of merely lieutenant for his brother. In 1460 Charles of Viana ventured to return to his father’s kingdom, and, after a feigned welcome, was thrown into prison at Lerida. This gross injustice—for there was no shadow of a charge to be brought against the prince—excited a rebellion among the liberty-loving Catalans. The revolt rapidly spread to the other provinces, and the king of Castile showed a suspicious interest in the welfare of the heir to the crown of Aragon. John II. found it politic to yield to such general pressure. Charles of Viana was released and appointed governor of Catalonia, but before he could undertake the rule of his province he was removed by poison.
This terrible crime enabled John to retain possession of Navarre for his lifetime, but it rather increased his difficulties |Rebellion in Catalonia.| in his lawful kingdom. The Catalans renewed their rebellion to avenge the death of the prince whose cause they had championed with such fatal results, and besieged the queen and her son in the fortress of Gerona. Unable to force his way through to their aid, John was compelled to purchase the assistance of Louis XI. of France by pledging the provinces of Roussillon and Cerdagne to cover his expenses. French troops raised the siege of Gerona, but the Catalans maintained an obstinate resistance. They went so far as to offer the crown to Réné le Bon of Anjou and Provence, who was a grandson, through his mother, of John I. Réné, old, and averse to risk or exertion, sent his chivalrous son, John of Calabria, who had already fought a desperate war against the reigning Aragonese king of Naples (see p. 277), to carry on the war with the same family on the soil of Aragon. For a time John was almost in despair. He had become blind, and in 1468 he lost the wife whom he had loved and trusted too well. But the old man fought on with a dogged obstinacy which deserved its reward. In 1469 John of Calabria died, and in 1472 the fall of Barcelona completed the reduction of Catalonia. On his death in 1479 John bequeathed to Ferdinand an inheritance which was only diminished by the loss of Roussillon and Cerdagne, and these provinces were restored by Charles VIII. in 1493 in the hope of preventing the sending of aid from Aragon or Sicily to the bastard ruler of Naples, whom Charles was preparing to attack.
Death had at last relaxed the tenacious grip which John II. had so long maintained upon the kingdom of Navarre. Of his three children by his first wife Blanche—Charles |Navarre after 1479.| of Viana, Blanche, and Eleanor—only the last, who had married Gaston de Foix, survived her father; Charles had been poisoned by his father, and Blanche had been poisoned by her sister. And, after all, Eleanor only outlived her father for a few weeks. Her grandson, Francis Phœbus, succeeded her, but died in 1483, and his sister Catharine carried the kingdom to the house of d’Albret. From this family Ferdinand the Catholic wrested that part of Navarre which lay on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. The remainder came to the house of Bourbon by the marriage of duke Antony to Jeanne d’Albret, and by the accession of their son Henry IV. to the throne was ultimately annexed to France. When in the following century Roussillon and Cerdagne were finally handed over to the same state (1659), the Pyrenees at last became, as nature seemed to have intended, although history was always thwarting her intention, a boundary between two separate states.
The union of Castile and Aragon by the accession in the two kingdoms of Isabella (1474) and Ferdinand (1479) laid the foundations of a kingdom of Spain, and |Union of Castile and Aragon.| opened the way for a brief period of Spanish predominance in Europe. Yet the union of the kingdoms was merely personal: it was no more, in some ways it was even less, than the union of England and Scotland effected by the accession of James I. in the former kingdom in 1603. The great states of the peninsula were not welded into one; they remained distinct units, each with its own national characteristics, its own laws and institutions, its own sense of corporate life and interests. This imperfection of the union is a fundamental fact in later Spanish history; it marks the essential difference between Spain and its more successful neighbour France; it is a chief cause of the rapid and apparently irreparable decline of Spain in a later age. Nevertheless, in spite of its defects, the union was a necessary condition of the emergence of Spain from its mediæval isolation. The very want of harmony among the component states contributed to the rise of the royal power, and the strength and weakness of Spain were equally bound up with the fate of the monarchy. Without the forces of Aragon it would have been impossible for Isabella to put down the disorderly independence of the Castilian nobles, or for Charles V. to repress the communes and to degrade the Cortes to impotence. And without the forces of Castile Philip II. could never have ventured to trample upon the hardy liberties of Aragon.
The grand period of Spanish history, and even great part of the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, lie beyond the limits of this volume, which is only concerned with |Government of Ferdinand and Isabella.| the earlier achievements of these monarchs. The primary duty of the queen was to strike at the independence of the Castilian nobles, and to put an end to the lawless anarchy which had reached its height under the feeble rule of her brother. For this purpose she found an instrument ready to her hand in the time-honoured privileges of the burgher class. In 1476 she proposed and carried in the Cortes the organisation of the Santa Hermandad, or Holy Brotherhood, which was to supply a force of civic police on a most extensive scale. Its affairs were managed by a central junta, composed of deputies from all the cities of Castile, which was convened once a year. A small army of two thousand cavalry, with attendant archers, was formed to enforce the decisions of local magistrates and of the supreme court. The nobles protested against the measure as unconstitutional, but the protest of the chief evil-doers is a proof of its value and its efficiency. Other measures followed in rapid succession. The extravagant grants of lands and pensions which had been made to the nobles in recent years were revoked, the fortresses which had served as centres of brigandage were destroyed, and steps were taken to codify the numerous laws which had been enacted since the reign of Alfonso X. The grandmasterships of the orders of Calatrava, Alcantara, and St. James, which conferred upon their holders powers too great to be safely intrusted to subjects, were on successive vacancies annexed to the crown. And the strengthened monarchy showed itself the enlightened protector of the material interests of its subjects. Trade and industry were encouraged by the remodelling of taxation, by a much-needed reform of the currency, and by the removal of the barriers to commercial intercourse between Castile and Aragon. It has been reckoned that the royal revenue, without any increased charges upon the people, was multiplied thirty-fold between Isabella’s accession in 1474 and her death in 1504.
The greatest of rulers have their defects, and Isabella’s were a fanatical hatred of heresy and a feminine passion for religious uniformity. There can be no doubt that her influence predominated in bringing about |The Spanish Inquisition.| the introduction of the Inquisition, which was authorised by a bull of Sixtus IV. in 1478, and was set in working in 1483 under the presidency of Torquemada. It may be regarded as the first institution of a united Spain. Its extension to Aragon excited much opposition among the liberty-loving people, but the iron will of Ferdinand proved irresistible. One of the first outcomes of religious persecution was the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Some two hundred thousand Jews are said to have been driven from Spain by this edict. It was a cruel measure, but it was not so disastrous as it has been represented by some writers, who seem to have forgotten that it was followed, not by the immediate decline of Spain, but by a period of unexampled prosperity.
The first overt proof to the world that a new power had arisen in Spain was furnished by the final extinction of the |Conquest of Granada.| Moorish dominion in the peninsula. The most signal illustration of the weakness caused by the internal disorders of Castile for the last two hundred years is to be found in the prolonged existence of the kingdom of Granada. The establishment of a united and efficient state upon their borders was fatal to the Moors. The war began in 1481, and was steadily but not impetuously prosecuted for ten years. On November 25, 1491, the capitulation of the Moorish capital was signed. The terms granted to the conquered were as liberal as prudent policy could dictate or as their heroic resistance had deserved. Full liberty as to the exercise of their religion and the maintenance of their own laws was granted to all who would peacefully submit to Christian rule. But unfortunately the terms were not observed. After seven years of tranquillity the bigotry of the Castilian government proved stronger than considerations either of honour or of policy. The Moors were suddenly called upon to choose between conversion and exile. Those who accepted the former alternative had to live under a sort of ban in the midst of an alien and hostile majority, until the insane edict of expulsion against the Moriscoes in 1609 deprived Spain of a harmless and industrious element of its population just at the time when it could least afford to lose them.
In one great department of activity—geographical discovery and expansion—Spain was anticipated and to some extent |Portugal.| guided by her neighbour Portugal. Portugal began life as one of the struggling Christian states of Spain, with no essential difference from the other petty counties or kingdoms which were in the end combined to form larger states. Gradually Portugal had been hardened into something like nationality by a long struggle, first to secure its existence against the Moors, and then to resist that absorption into Castile which considerations of geography and race seemed to render not only natural, but almost inevitable. The first end was achieved by the victories of Alfonso I. (1112-1185), who exchanged the title of count for that of king; the second by the victory of Aljubarrota in 1385 (see above, p. 474), and the wise government of John I. (1383-1433). It was in the reign of the latter that Portugal |Geographical discovery.| began to interest itself in the task of exploring the west coast of Africa, which was destined to bring to the small kingdom such a lavish measure of wealth and renown. His third son, who was also the grandson of an Englishman, John of Gaunt, was the famous Prince Henry the Navigator. He was inspired with a confident belief that it was possible to sail round Africa, and that the Portuguese might by this route divert to themselves the great gains which the Venetians and Genoese enjoyed from their indirect trade with India through the Levant. His dream was not fulfilled during his own lifetime, but his efforts contributed to its later realisation. For forty years he laboured to fit out expeditions for African exploration, and to these were due the successive discovery, or in some cases the re-discovery, of Porto Santo (1419), Madeira (1420), the Canaries, which were later surrendered to Castile, the Azores (1431-1444), the White Cape or Cabo Blanco (1441), and Cape Verde (1446). When once the great shoulder of Africa had been rounded it was easy to reach the Guinea coast. The death of Prince Henry in 1460 checked, but did not arrest the progress of discovery. Africa had been found to produce one very valuable commodity—slaves—and Portugal was keenly interested in the lucrative but demoralising slave-trade. This served to stimulate frequent voyages to the west coast of Africa, and it was certain that before long some of the more adventurous sailors would be induced, either by design or by accident, to prolong their journeys. Moreover, as the fifteenth century advanced, the impulse to find a new route to India became constantly stronger. The Levant was becoming more and more a Turkish lake. First the coast of Asia Minor and then Constantinople fell into their hands. There was a growing danger that the great markets in which the Venetians and Genoese had purchased from Arab caravans the products of the East would be closed to Christian merchants. Europe could not afford to dispense with commodities which had become almost necessaries to her peoples, or to purchase them upon terms which drained the western countries of their all too scanty supply of the precious metals. A great prize was offered to the discoverers of a direct maritime connection with India, and the competition became more and more keen. Portugal, thanks to Prince Henry, had been first in the race, and she deservedly won the prize. In 1486 Bartholomew Diaz reached Algoa |The Cape route to India.| Bay, having at last rounded the Cape, to which he gave the well-merited name of Cabo Tormentoso, or the stormy cape; though King John II., with greater prescience and less familiarity, insisted upon calling it the Cape of Good Hope. Twelve years later, in 1498, Vasco da Gama completed the work by conducting a continuous voyage from Lisbon to Calicut.
Meanwhile Castile had attempted to solve the great problem of the age. By the treaty of 1479, when Isabella was recognised and the claims of Joanna were abandoned by her uncle and husband, Alfonso V., Portugal had given up the Canaries, but had received the confirmation of past and future discoveries on the African coast. Thus Spain was debarred from competing with Portugal on the route to India which Henry the Navigator had pointed out. But Christopher Columbus, a Genoese mariner who entered |Discovery of America.| the service of Castile, proposed to find a way to Asia by sailing westwards. In 1492 the first of his ever-famous voyages brought him to land which he conceived to be part of India. He had really found the new world of America, but his fruitful error has given to the islands at which he first touched the name of the West Indies.
These two discoveries, of America and of the route to India round the Cape, are perhaps the greatest events of the fifteenth century. They brought men face to face with new problems, new conceptions, new interests, |Partition of the New World.| which have drawn a conspicuous line of demarcation between the Middle Ages and later times. But these belong to a subsequent period. The most immediate result was to create a danger of collision between Spain and Portugal, which contemporary statesmanship set itself to avert. A bull of Alexander VI. in 1493 drew an imaginary line a hundred leagues west of the Azores, and gave the countries to the west of the line to Spain and those to the east to Portugal. This arrangement was modified in the next year by the treaty of Tordesillas between the two countries, which shifted the line of demarcation some hundred and seventy leagues farther west. This served to give to Portugal its subsequent claim to Brazil. But the monstrous pretension of the two pioneers of discovery to monopolise all its fruits to themselves provoked before long the vigorous resistance of northern countries which were equally fitted by geography for oceanic trade. When Spain in 1580 annexed Portugal, the struggle against a single monopoly became more desperate; and it was this, even more than differences of religion, which led to those prolonged wars with the English and Dutch in which the power of Spain was shattered.