So, as we have seen, Spain was prolific in men of force and gallantry, who poured out their blood freely for her sake, and who ventured their lives rashly in the expeditions she sent forth. The long wars with the Moors, lasting for centuries, had brought forth a race of soldiers unequalled perhaps in any other country at that time. They seem to have been bred and nurtured for these very deeds of risk and heroism which were born of their encounters with the natives of the New World; for self-denial, for intrepidity under almost insuperable difficulties. They were also fierce and cruel—how fierce and how cruel it is only necessary to read of the conquest of Mexico by Cortes; of the conquest of Peru by Pizarro; yes, of the treatment of the innocent natives by Columbus himself, who initiated the system of slavery, by which eventually they were extinguished in the West Indies. Humanity was foreign to their nature; long familiarity with the bloody work of the Inquisition in the home country, the persecution of Moors and Jews, the scenes of rapine and massacre they had witnessed and heard reported by their fathers, had accustomed these conquistadores to cruelty and merciless oppression. Even the gentlest and most merciful of them were so only by comparison, for their progress everywhere could be traced by ruin and desolation, by ravaged homes and murdered men, women, and children.
Contemporaneously with her conquests in the New World, Spain herself acquired increasing territory in Europe, not alone by force of arms, but chiefly through matrimonial alliances and succession to power. To understand how this came about, we must retrace our course and bestow a parting glance upon the affairs of Isabella and Ferdinand. This royal pair, under whom Spain had at last become consolidated into a veritable kingdom, with a union of interests if not unity of purpose always, had five children born to them: Juan, the only son, born 1478, who married a daughter of Maximilian, Emperor of Germany, but died without heirs, in 1497; Isabella, born 1470, married twice, to two princes of Portugal, whose only child lived but two years; Juana, born 1479, married to the Archduke Philip, son of Maximilian, who had two sons, Charles and Ferdinand; Mary, born 1482, and Catherine, born 1485, who became the unfortunate wife of Henry VIII of England, and from whom she was divorced in 1533.
By the death of Juan in 1497, of Isabella in 1498, and of the latter’s child two years later, the succession to the throne now devolved upon Juana, in accordance with the will of her mother, Isabella, executed in October, 1504. King Ferdinand, who had so successfully administered the affairs of the crown of Castile during thirty years, was appointed regent until Juana’s elder son, Charles, should attain to his majority.
Though at first there was a disagreement between Ferdinand and Philip, Juana’s husband, as to the regency, all difficulties were settled in 1505 by mutual agreement, and the next year, by the sudden death of the young archduke, the king became sole regent, and virtually ruler over all Spain. Juana, the bereaved “lady proprietor,” was crazed by this affliction, smiting upon a mind already diseased, and until her death, forty-seven years after, took no part in the affairs of the kingdom. As Juana loca, or “Crazy Jane,” she is known to history. She became most insanely jealous respecting her dead husband’s remains, would not allow them interred, and journeyed with them from place to place, always in the night; for, she mournfully said, “A widow who has lost the sun of her own soul should never expose herself to the light of day.” Thus she lived in mental darkness, in her palace of Tordesillas, for nearly half a century, an object of pity and commiseration.
Left at liberty to pursue his conquests where he would, Ferdinand first turned to matrimony, and married Germaine, a frivolous niece of Louis XII of France, in 1506. Three years later his great cardinal, Ximenes, waged war on Oran, a port on the African coast, equipped an army at his own expense—or rather from the revenues he derived from his position as Primate of Spain—and took the Moorish stronghold after great slaughter on both sides. The figure of this austere and virtuous cardinal, who so faithfully served first Isabella, then Ferdinand, Juana, and finally Charles, and who found time to attend to affairs of state and to purge the kingdom of its heretics through inquisitorial fires, to carry on a war at his own cost, to found a university, to cause to be translated the famous Complutensian Bible, which employed men of learning fifteen years at the task—his is one of the sturdiest and strongest of this epoch. The University of Alcala, founded in 1500, and the renowned Bible, the last portion of which was printed in 1517, are but two of the many monuments he erected during his life.
In the year 1511 the Holy League was formed between Ferdinand and Pope Julius II, Venice, and Henry VIII of England, against the French, by which Spain was the gainer; and in 1512 Navarre was annexed to Aragon, thus welding the northern kingdoms into one. In December, 1515, Gonsalvo de Cordova, the “Great Captain,” who had won Ferdinand’s victories in Italy, passed away; to be followed but a month later by his sovereign, who expired on a morning in January, 1516, in a wretched tenement where he had been overtaken by heart disease.
He was in his sixty-fourth year; his reign had endured forty-one years, and at his death he left a reputation for ability, wisdom in diplomacy, sincere interest in the affairs of his people, and economy in the administration of the vast dominions embraced under his kingship over Spain, Naples, and the two Americas.
For more than twenty years he had borne the title bestowed upon him by Pope Alexander, in 1494, and as the great King of Spain, Ferdinand “the Catholic,” he has passed down to history and the present time. His remains were taken to Granada, where they were at first deposited within the Alhambra; but to-day all that is earthly of Ferdinand and his glorious consort repose in the magnificent marble tomb in the royal chapel of Granada, which with its exquisite carvings and memorial effigies, was executed by world-famous artists at the command of Charles, the son of Juana loca the demented queen.