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.