By no arguments on his part, however subtle, could he evade Joanna’s right of succession to the Castilian throne; yet in her state of mental weakness its acknowledgment handed over the practical control of public affairs to her King-Consort; and with the Archduke Philip established as a hostile element in Castile, and Louis XII. an enemy hovering on the Pyrenees, Aragon and her King would have fared ill indeed.
FERDINAND OF ARAGON
CARVED WOODEN STATUE FROM CATHEDRAL AT MALAGA
Ferdinand’s marriage relieved the immediate tension of such a possibility; but its achievement courted even greater national disaster. The birth of a son could only mean the destruction of the union between Castile and Aragon, on which the foundations of Spanish empire had been laid; while by the terms of the marriage treaty Ferdinand also risked the dismemberment of his own dominions. Louis XII. was willing to cede as dowry for his niece the rights over Naples which he had failed to maintain by force of arms; but the price he demanded in return was the restoration of that half of the Kingdom which was guaranteed to him by the original Partition Treaty, should Germaine and the Spanish monarch have no heirs.
This bargain made and cemented by large quantities of Spanish gold to indemnify Louis for the expenses to which he had been put during the Neapolitan wars, the French King proceeded to forbid the Archduke and Joanna a passage through France, until they had arrived at some amicable understanding with Ferdinand as to the future government of their kingdom. Philip, seeing himself outwitted, sulkily complied, and, in the Treaty of Salamanca (signed in November, 1505) agreed that he, his wife, and father-in-law should “jointly govern and administer Castile,” Ferdinand receiving one half of the public revenues.
The peace thus extorted by circumstances was never intended to be kept; and, from the moment that the new King and Queen of Castile put foot in their land, they did their uttermost to encourage the growing opposition to Aragonese interference. Ferdinand, thwarted and ignored by his son-in-law and deserted by the Castilians, at length departed in dudgeon to visit the kingdom that Gonsalvo de Cordova had won for him in Naples; but it was not destined that the work to which he and Isabel had given the greater part of their lives should come to nought. In the autumn of 1506 the Archduke Philip died at Burgos; and Joanna, sunk in one of her moods of morbid lethargy, referred those of her subjects, who would have persuaded her to rule for herself, to Ferdinand’s authority.
From July, 1507, when Ferdinand returned to Spain, till his death in January, 1516, he governed Castile as regent; while the loss of the only child born to him of his union with Germaine de Foix preserved his dominions intact for “Joanna the Mad” and her eldest-born, the future Emperor Charles V. Naples, it is true, by the terms of his second marriage treaty should have been once more divided with the French Crown; but the Catholic King was to reap the reward of loyalty to the Holy See, and received a papal dispensation from the fulfilment of his inconvenient pledge.
Victories on the North African coast against Barbary pirates and the conquest of Southern Navarre closed his days in a halo of glory; and he passed to his final resting-place beside Isabel in the Royal Chapel at Granada regretted even by the Castilians and mourned by the Aragonese as their “last King.” Henceforth Spain was to be one and undivided.
“No reproach attaches to him,” says Guicciardini of Ferdinand, “save his lack of generosity and faithlessness to his word.” Peter Martyr declares that “contrary to the belief of all men he died poor.” Like Henry VII. of England he had been quick to lay hands on wealth, doling it out to others with the grudging reluctance of the miser; but the exhausted treasury he left showed that his main inspiration had been economy not avarice. His ambitions had been expensive, and Spain was to pay heavily both in money and the more precious coin of human life; but the fact that she could afford to enter the great national struggle with France at all marks the economic transformation that had taken place since the days of Henry IV. of Castile. She had passed from industrial infancy to prosperity and an assured commercial position; her population had increased; peace at home had given her financial security; while as the depôt for European trade with the New World vistas of profit opened before her.
The Catholic sovereigns were not blind to this great future, and the legislation of their reign dealt largely with measures for fostering national industries. If such protection was often misguided it was like the over-anxious care of a mother, that may be as dangerous to a child’s welfare as the opposite vice of neglect. Each age has its theories of political economy and looks back with superior contempt on the failings of its predecessors. To twentieth-century eyes the economic outlook of the fifteenth is often exasperatingly foolish; yet in the days of Ferdinand and Isabel it appeared the height of wisdom, and efforts to put it into practice were eagerly demanded by the Cortes. Industry, it was felt, must be wrapped in the cotton-wool of a myriad restrictions; it must be artificially nourished and subjected to constant supervision and interference, or it would die of exposure to the rough-and-tumble of competition. That industrial death might be sometimes due to sheer weariness of life in intolerable fetters was a diagnosis of which no mediæval economist would ever have dreamt; and Ferdinand and Isabel firmly believed that their paternal legislation must prove a panacea for every public ill.