The glory of the Faith! The glory of Spain! Were they in truth achieved? the Queen must have asked herself, as she and Ferdinand attended their daughter’s second wedding in the border town of Alcantara.
Fortune’s wheel never stands still in this world [says Bernaldez sorrowfully]. It gives and it takes away; it exalts and it humbles; to the poor and miserable it grants long years of which in their weariness they would fain be quit; while to the wealthy, to Princes, to Kings, and great lords,—to all for whom according to human understanding life is a boon, it decrees naught but death.
In the very midst of the wedding rejoicings came the news that the Prince of Asturias, never robust, had fallen ill of a fever in Salamanca; and Ferdinand, hurrying as fast as he could to his bedside, only arrived when the end was all too certain. On October 4, 1497, at the age of nineteen, Prince John died. Apart from the private grief of his parents for a son, whose character had held the promise of all that is best in manhood, his death was a national calamity; and for weeks the shadow of mourning hung alike over cottage and castle.
I never heard [says Commines] of so solemn and so universal a mourning for any Prince in Europe. I have since been informed by ambassadors that all the tradesmen put themselves into black clothes and shut up their shops for forty days together; the nobility and gentry covered their mules with black cloth down to their very knees, so that there was nothing of them to be seen but their eyes; and set up black banners on all the gates of the cities.
Even the hope that an heir at least would be left to their Prince was destroyed when the young widow, nerve-stricken at her sudden loss, gave birth a few months later to a still-born daughter.
AVILA FROM BEYOND THE CITY WALLS
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID
The succession to the throne now devolved on the young Queen Isabel of Portugal; and early in 1498 she and her husband appeared in Toledo to receive the homage of the Castilian Cortes. The Aragonese Cortes however utterly declined to follow this example, declaring that they owed allegiance to Ferdinand and his male heirs alone; their obstinacy producing a public tension only relieved when in August, 1498, the young Queen gave birth to a son, whom all were willing to acknowledge.
The longed-for Prince, heir of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal was born at last; the highest ideals of Spanish unity seemed on the eve of fulfilment; but, almost within the hour that gave him life, his mother died; and the Infante Miguel, weak and fragile, was not destined to reach his second year.
Three deaths within three years and those the most precious in the land!