The death of Martin the Younger not only brought the crown of Sicily to the king of Aragon, but also gave rise to a disputed succession in the latter kingdom. The |Disputed succession.| elder Martin was now the only surviving male descendant of Peter IV., and he died in 1410, before any arrangement had been come to about his successor. If male descent were insisted upon, the obvious heir was James of Urgel, whose grandfather had been the second son of Alfonso IV. Recent precedents, notably the accession of Martin himself in preference to the daughters of John I., were in favour of the exclusion of heiresses, but there remained the open question whether the male descendants of a woman could derive a claim through her. Of such candidates, two were most prominent—Louis, the eldest son of Louis II. of Anjou and John I.’s daughter Yolande, and Ferdinand, the regent of Castile in the minority of John II., whose mother was Eleanor, a daughter of Peter IV.[[13]] There can be no doubt that the count of Urgel had by far the strongest hereditary claim; but his own rash assumption that he had only to take the crown provoked opposition among the rather contentious Aragonese, and he was ultimately excluded. A joint committee was appointed from the Cortes of the three provinces to inquire into precedents; and after an interregnum of two years, their choice curiously fell upon Ferdinand of Castile, whose claim by descent was unquestionably weaker than that of his rivals (1412).

Thus the lucky house of Trastamara, in spite of its illegitimate origin, had come to furnish a king in Aragon as well as in Castile. And within a generation events enabled the family to add to these possessions the kingdom of Naples, and for a time the kingdom of Navarre. Ferdinand I. did not live long enough to display in Aragon the great qualities which his administration in Castile had shown him to possess. His elder son Alfonso V. (1416-1458) |Alfonso V. and Naples.| is more associated with the history of Italy than with that of Spain. He inherited from his father Sicily and Sardinia as well as Aragon, and in 1423 his adoption by Joanna II. opened to him the prospect of inheriting Naples. But the vicious queen soon changed her mind, disinherited Alfonso, and adopted in his place Louis III. of Anjou, who could claim through his mother a better right to the crown of Aragon than Alfonso himself. This double adoption led to the long war between the house of Aragon and the second house of Anjou, which raged for the last twelve years of Joanna’s reign, and for eight years after her death. It ended in the victory of Alfonso, who reigned peacefully in Naples until his death in 1458 (see p. [271]). As he left no legitimate children, Aragon, Sicily, and Sardinia passed to his brother John II. (1458-1494), but Naples was transferred to his bastard son Ferrante I. Half a century was to elapse before the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was re-formed by Ferdinand the Catholic.

While Alfonso was engaged in winning the crown of Naples amidst the turmoil of an Italian war, his younger brother John had succeeded in establishing an intimate |Relations of Aragon and Navarre.| relation with Navarre. This little kingdom, which comprised territory on both sides of the Pyrenees, had for a long time been more closely connected with France than with Spain.[[14]] United with the French crown by the marriage of Blanche of Navarre with Philip IV., it had again become independent on the extinction of the direct line of the house of Capet. When Philip of Valois ascended the throne of France, Navarre passed to the rightful heiress, Jeanne, the daughter of Louis X., and she was crowned with her husband, Philip of Evreux, in 1329. Their son, Charles the Bad (1349-1387), played a prominent, though not very creditable part in French history during the wars with Edward III. (see [Chapter IV].). Charles II. (1387-1425), who succeeded his father, devoted more attention to art and letters than to politics, and kept his kingdom in peace and obscurity. His daughter and heiress, Blanche, married John of Aragon, but the succession was secured to her children. As long as she lived Blanche ruled Navarre in her own right, and on her death in 1442 her son, Charles of Viana, was entitled to the crown of |John II. and Charles of Viana.| Navarre. He actually undertook the administration of the kingdom; but in deference, apparently, to his mother’s wishes, he forbore to assume the royal title, which was still borne by his father. In the ordinary course of things, no special difficulty need have arisen, as Charles would have succeeded his father in Aragon as well as Navarre. But in 1447 John concluded a second marriage with Joanna Henriquez, daughter of the Admiral of Castile, and a woman of equal energy and ambition. She persuaded her husband to intrust her with the administration of Navarre, and Charles of Viana found plenty of advisers to remind him that the kingdom was lawfully his own, and to urge resistance to such an encroachment upon his authority. Hence arose a civil war between the father and the stepmother on the one side, and the son on the other. The great Navarrese families of Beaumont and Egremont, as uniformly hostile to each other as the Orsini and Colonnas in Rome, gladly welcomed so congenial a pretext for warfare. The Beaumonts were intimately associated with Charles, so the Egremonts had perforce to espouse the cause of his father. At Aybar, in 1452, the royal troops won the victory, and Charles fell a prisoner into his father’s hands. He was released soon afterwards, but his power had been destroyed by his defeat, and his position was rendered worse by the birth of a son, afterwards Ferdinand the Catholic, to the queen in 1452. Joanna hardly concealed her intention to secure the recognition of her own son as heir to his father, and her influence over John was unbounded. The unfortunate prince of Viana set out to Naples in 1458 to implore the advice and assistance of his uncle Alfonso V. But Alfonso died in 1458, and John was now king in Aragon instead of merely lieutenant for his brother. In 1460 Charles of Viana ventured to return to his father’s kingdom, and, after a feigned welcome, was thrown into prison at Lerida. This gross injustice—for there was no shadow of a charge to be brought against the prince—excited a rebellion among the liberty-loving Catalans. The revolt rapidly spread to the other provinces, and the king of Castile showed a suspicious interest in the welfare of the heir to the crown of Aragon. John II. found it politic to yield to such general pressure. Charles of Viana was released and appointed governor of Catalonia, but before he could undertake the rule of his province he was removed by poison.

This terrible crime enabled John to retain possession of Navarre for his lifetime, but it rather increased his difficulties |Rebellion in Catalonia.| in his lawful kingdom. The Catalans renewed their rebellion to avenge the death of the prince whose cause they had championed with such fatal results, and besieged the queen and her son in the fortress of Gerona. Unable to force his way through to their aid, John was compelled to purchase the assistance of Louis XI. of France by pledging the provinces of Roussillon and Cerdagne to cover his expenses. French troops raised the siege of Gerona, but the Catalans maintained an obstinate resistance. They went so far as to offer the crown to Réné le Bon of Anjou and Provence, who was a grandson, through his mother, of John I. Réné, old, and averse to risk or exertion, sent his chivalrous son, John of Calabria, who had already fought a desperate war against the reigning Aragonese king of Naples (see p. [277]), to carry on the war with the same family on the soil of Aragon. For a time John was almost in despair. He had become blind, and in 1468 he lost the wife whom he had loved and trusted too well. But the old man fought on with a dogged obstinacy which deserved its reward. In 1469 John of Calabria died, and in 1472 the fall of Barcelona completed the reduction of Catalonia. On his death in 1479 John bequeathed to Ferdinand an inheritance which was only diminished by the loss of Roussillon and Cerdagne, and these provinces were restored by Charles VIII. in 1493 in the hope of preventing the sending of aid from Aragon or Sicily to the bastard ruler of Naples, whom Charles was preparing to attack.

Death had at last relaxed the tenacious grip which John II. had so long maintained upon the kingdom of Navarre. Of his three children by his first wife Blanche—Charles |Navarre after 1479.| of Viana, Blanche, and Eleanor—only the last, who had married Gaston de Foix, survived her father; Charles had been poisoned by his father, and Blanche had been poisoned by her sister. And, after all, Eleanor only outlived her father for a few weeks. Her grandson, Francis Phœbus, succeeded her, but died in 1483, and his sister Catharine carried the kingdom to the house of d’Albret. From this family Ferdinand the Catholic wrested that part of Navarre which lay on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. The remainder came to the house of Bourbon by the marriage of duke Antony to Jeanne d’Albret, and by the accession of their son Henry IV. to the throne was ultimately annexed to France. When in the following century Roussillon and Cerdagne were finally handed over to the same state (1659), the Pyrenees at last became, as nature seemed to have intended, although history was always thwarting her intention, a boundary between two separate states.

The union of Castile and Aragon by the accession in the two kingdoms of Isabella (1474) and Ferdinand (1479) laid the foundations of a kingdom of Spain, and |Union of Castile and Aragon.| opened the way for a brief period of Spanish predominance in Europe. Yet the union of the kingdoms was merely personal: it was no more, in some ways it was even less, than the union of England and Scotland effected by the accession of James I. in the former kingdom in 1603. The great states of the peninsula were not welded into one; they remained distinct units, each with its own national characteristics, its own laws and institutions, its own sense of corporate life and interests. This imperfection of the union is a fundamental fact in later Spanish history; it marks the essential difference between Spain and its more successful neighbour France; it is a chief cause of the rapid and apparently irreparable decline of Spain in a later age. Nevertheless, in spite of its defects, the union was a necessary condition of the emergence of Spain from its mediæval isolation. The very want of harmony among the component states contributed to the rise of the royal power, and the strength and weakness of Spain were equally bound up with the fate of the monarchy. Without the forces of Aragon it would have been impossible for Isabella to put down the disorderly independence of the Castilian nobles, or for Charles V. to repress the communes and to degrade the Cortes to impotence. And without the forces of Castile Philip II. could never have ventured to trample upon the hardy liberties of Aragon.

The grand period of Spanish history, and even great part of the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, lie beyond the limits of this volume, which is only concerned with |Government of Ferdinand and Isabella.| the earlier achievements of these monarchs. The primary duty of the queen was to strike at the independence of the Castilian nobles, and to put an end to the lawless anarchy which had reached its height under the feeble rule of her brother. For this purpose she found an instrument ready to her hand in the time-honoured privileges of the burgher class. In 1476 she proposed and carried in the Cortes the organisation of the Santa Hermandad, or Holy Brotherhood, which was to supply a force of civic police on a most extensive scale. Its affairs were managed by a central junta, composed of deputies from all the cities of Castile, which was convened once a year. A small army of two thousand cavalry, with attendant archers, was formed to enforce the decisions of local magistrates and of the supreme court. The nobles protested against the measure as unconstitutional, but the protest of the chief evil-doers is a proof of its value and its efficiency. Other measures followed in rapid succession. The extravagant grants of lands and pensions which had been made to the nobles in recent years were revoked, the fortresses which had served as centres of brigandage were destroyed, and steps were taken to codify the numerous laws which had been enacted since the reign of Alfonso X. The grandmasterships of the orders of Calatrava, Alcantara, and St. James, which conferred upon their holders powers too great to be safely intrusted to subjects, were on successive vacancies annexed to the crown. And the strengthened monarchy showed itself the enlightened protector of the material interests of its subjects. Trade and industry were encouraged by the remodelling of taxation, by a much-needed reform of the currency, and by the removal of the barriers to commercial intercourse between Castile and Aragon. It has been reckoned that the royal revenue, without any increased charges upon the people, was multiplied thirty-fold between Isabella’s accession in 1474 and her death in 1504.

The greatest of rulers have their defects, and Isabella’s were a fanatical hatred of heresy and a feminine passion for religious uniformity. There can be no doubt that her influence predominated in bringing about |The Spanish Inquisition.| the introduction of the Inquisition, which was authorised by a bull of Sixtus IV. in 1478, and was set in working in 1483 under the presidency of Torquemada. It may be regarded as the first institution of a united Spain. Its extension to Aragon excited much opposition among the liberty-loving people, but the iron will of Ferdinand proved irresistible. One of the first outcomes of religious persecution was the expulsion of the Jews in 1492. Some two hundred thousand Jews are said to have been driven from Spain by this edict. It was a cruel measure, but it was not so disastrous as it has been represented by some writers, who seem to have forgotten that it was followed, not by the immediate decline of Spain, but by a period of unexampled prosperity.

The first overt proof to the world that a new power had arisen in Spain was furnished by the final extinction of the |Conquest of Granada.| Moorish dominion in the peninsula. The most signal illustration of the weakness caused by the internal disorders of Castile for the last two hundred years is to be found in the prolonged existence of the kingdom of Granada. The establishment of a united and efficient state upon their borders was fatal to the Moors. The war began in 1481, and was steadily but not impetuously prosecuted for ten years. On November 25, 1491, the capitulation of the Moorish capital was signed. The terms granted to the conquered were as liberal as prudent policy could dictate or as their heroic resistance had deserved. Full liberty as to the exercise of their religion and the maintenance of their own laws was granted to all who would peacefully submit to Christian rule. But unfortunately the terms were not observed. After seven years of tranquillity the bigotry of the Castilian government proved stronger than considerations either of honour or of policy. The Moors were suddenly called upon to choose between conversion and exile. Those who accepted the former alternative had to live under a sort of ban in the midst of an alien and hostile majority, until the insane edict of expulsion against the Moriscoes in 1609 deprived Spain of a harmless and industrious element of its population just at the time when it could least afford to lose them.

In one great department of activity—geographical discovery and expansion—Spain was anticipated and to some extent |Portugal.| guided by her neighbour Portugal. Portugal began life as one of the struggling Christian states of Spain, with no essential difference from the other petty counties or kingdoms which were in the end combined to form larger states. Gradually Portugal had been hardened into something like nationality by a long struggle, first to secure its existence against the Moors, and then to resist that absorption into Castile which considerations of geography and race seemed to render not only natural, but almost inevitable. The first end was achieved by the victories of Alfonso I. (1112-1185), who exchanged the title of count for that of king; the second by the victory of Aljubarrota in 1385 (see above, p. [474]), and the wise government of John I. (1383-1433). It was in the reign of the latter that Portugal |Geographical discovery.| began to interest itself in the task of exploring the west coast of Africa, which was destined to bring to the small kingdom such a lavish measure of wealth and renown. His third son, who was also the grandson of an Englishman, John of Gaunt, was the famous Prince Henry the Navigator. He was inspired with a confident belief that it was possible to sail round Africa, and that the Portuguese might by this route divert to themselves the great gains which the Venetians and Genoese enjoyed from their indirect trade with India through the Levant. His dream was not fulfilled during his own lifetime, but his efforts contributed to its later realisation. For forty years he laboured to fit out expeditions for African exploration, and to these were due the successive discovery, or in some cases the re-discovery, of Porto Santo (1419), Madeira (1420), the Canaries, which were later surrendered to Castile, the Azores (1431-1444), the White Cape or Cabo Blanco (1441), and Cape Verde (1446). When once the great shoulder of Africa had been rounded it was easy to reach the Guinea coast. The death of Prince Henry in 1460 checked, but did not arrest the progress of discovery. Africa had been found to produce one very valuable commodity—slaves—and Portugal was keenly interested in the lucrative but demoralising slave-trade. This served to stimulate frequent voyages to the west coast of Africa, and it was certain that before long some of the more adventurous sailors would be induced, either by design or by accident, to prolong their journeys. Moreover, as the fifteenth century advanced, the impulse to find a new route to India became constantly stronger. The Levant was becoming more and more a Turkish lake. First the coast of Asia Minor and then Constantinople fell into their hands. There was a growing danger that the great markets in which the Venetians and Genoese had purchased from Arab caravans the products of the East would be closed to Christian merchants. Europe could not afford to dispense with commodities which had become almost necessaries to her peoples, or to purchase them upon terms which drained the western countries of their all too scanty supply of the precious metals. A great prize was offered to the discoverers of a direct maritime connection with India, and the competition became more and more keen. Portugal, thanks to Prince Henry, had been first in the race, and she deservedly won the prize. In 1486 Bartholomew Diaz reached Algoa |The Cape route to India.| Bay, having at last rounded the Cape, to which he gave the well-merited name of Cabo Tormentoso, or the stormy cape; though King John II., with greater prescience and less familiarity, insisted upon calling it the Cape of Good Hope. Twelve years later, in 1498, Vasco da Gama completed the work by conducting a continuous voyage from Lisbon to Calicut.