The evil of internal disorder which for so many years had been hanging over the Castilian monarchy came to a head in the reign of Henry IV “the Impotent” (1454-1474). If Juan II had been weak, Henry IV was weaker still, and he had no Álvaro de Luna to lean upon. He commenced his reign with an act of characteristic flaccidity which was to serve as one of the pretexts for the insurrections against him. War was declared upon Granada, and the Castilian army reached the gates of the Moslem capital, when the king developed a humanitarianism which hardly fitted the times, declining to engage in a decisive battle lest it prove to be bloody. A more important pretext for rebellion arose out of a dynastic question. Failing to have issue by his first wife, Henry procured a divorce and married again. For six years there were no children by this marriage, wherefore the derisive name “the Impotent” was popularly applied to the king, but at length a daughter appeared, and was given the name Juana. Public opinion, especially as voiced by the nobles, proclaimed that the father was the king’s favorite, Beltrán de la Cueva, on which account the young Juana became known vulgarly as “La Beltraneja.” The Cortes acknowledged Juana, and she was also recognized as heir to the throne by the king’s brothers and by his sister, Isabella, but the nobles formed a league on the basis of her supposed illegitimacy with the object of killing the favorite. They directed an insulting letter to the king, demanding that his brother, Alfonso, should be named heir. Instead of presenting a bold front against these demands, Henry was weak enough to consent to them.
The seigniorial program and the vacillation of the king.
The dynastic question was far from being the principal one in the eyes of the nobles. By this time it was perfectly clear that the real struggle was political, between the elements of seigniorial independence and strong monarchy. Thus the nobles and their allies had insisted that the king’s guard should be disarmed and that its numbers should be fixed; that the judges in royal towns and certain other royal officials should be deprived of their office and be replaced by the appointees of the league; that the king should be subjected to a council of state formed of nobles and churchmen, which body was to intervene in the affairs formerly handled by the king himself, including even the exercise of ordinary judicial authority; that all cases against nobles and churchmen should be tried by a tribunal of three nobles, three churchmen, and three representatives of the towns, and several of the members who were to compose the tribunal (all of them opponents of the king) were named in the document of these demands; and that there should be a right of insurrection against the king if he should contravene the last-named provision. After he had accepted the nobles’ terms Henry realized the gravity of his act and changed his mind, declaring his agreement void. The nobles then announced the deposition of the king, and named his brother, Alfonso, in his stead, but the royal troops defeated them soon afterward, and Alfonso suddenly died. The nobles then offered the crown to Isabella, but she declined to take it while her brother was living, although consenting to do so in succession to him, thus retracting her previous recognition of Juana. On this basis the nobles offered peace to the king, and he consented, which for the second time put him in the position of acknowledging the dishonor of his wife and the illegitimacy of Juana. The queen protested, and in 1470 Henry again recanted, but at the time of his death, in 1474, he had not yet resolved the succession to the throne.
The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella.
The union of Castile and Aragon.
Meanwhile Isabella had contracted a marriage of surpassing importance in the history of Spain. In 1469 she married Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Aragon, rejecting Henry IV’s proposal of a marriage with the king of Portugal. Isabella was proclaimed queen on the death of her brother, but many nobles now took the other side, upholding the cause of Juana, including some who had formerly fought on the side of Isabella,—for example, the archbishop of Toledo. The hand of Juana was promised to the king of Portugal, who therefore joined in the war on her side. The forces of Isabella were victorious, and in 1479 a treaty was made whereby she was recognized as the queen. The unfortunate Juana chose to enter a convent. In the same year, 1479, Ferdinand became king of Aragon, and at last a political union of the greater part of Christian Spain had become a fact.
CHAPTER XI
DEVELOPMENT TOWARD NATIONAL UNITY: ARAGON, 1276-1479
General characteristics of the era.
THE general remarks made with respect to Castilian history in this period apply, with but few modifications, to that of the kingdom of Aragon. In Aragon the victory of monarchy over seigniorial anarchy was externally clear as early as the middle of the fourteenth century. The civil wars after that date (and there were very few until the last reign of the period) were due to the vast power of the city of Barcelona in conflict with the king, to the difference in interests of Aragon proper and Catalonia, and to social uprisings. Social progress in this region, but especially in Catalonia, was much more marked than in Castile, merely because there was so much more to gain, and great as were the advances made they did not bring the masses to a state of social freedom equal to that which had been attained in Castile. Of great importance to the future of Spain was the embarkation of Aragon on a career of Italian conquest. Fatal as Spain’s Italian aspirations were to be in succeeding centuries, that evil was balanced, at least in part, by a contact with Renaissance influences proceeding out of Italy, and by a favorable commerce which redounded in many ways to the benefit of Spain. This was one of the periods when the advantages of the Italian connection were greater than the disadvantages.
Pedro III and the nobles.