Spain and Her Colonies, Compiled from the Best Authorities

by Unknown

But all their bad faith and covetousness was displayed in vain. The perfidious leaguers could not even trust one another; and the success of the French arms at Agnadel, in May, 1509, so seriously alarmed both Julius and Ferdinand that a second treaty was concluded in October, 1511, when the Pope and the King of Aragon invited the Venetian Republic, for whose destruction they had leagued themselves together with Louis XII. not three years before, to assist them in driving the French out of Italy.

Of the consummate skill with which Ferdinand, from the middle of 1509 to the end of 1511, played off his allies and rivals one against the other, until he had accomplished the central object of his diplomacy in the great Confederation against Louis XII., we may read in the history of France and of Italy, of England and of Germany, rather than in the Chronicles of Aragon. For King Ferdinand pulled the strings that moved the puppets, while he remained wellnigh hidden himself. But by the end of 1511 the showman was compelled to make his own appearance upon the stage of European warfare; and Ferdinand was ever less successful as an actor than as an impresario. His policy for the past two years had been the formation of a league against his dearly-beloved uncle-in-law, Louis XII., by the aid of his dearly-beloved son-in-law, Henry VIII. Queen Katharine, who had already played the part of embassador to her English father-in-law, was to make use of her influence over her English husband; and if the queen should refuse to advise King Henry to go to war with France, her confessor was to tell her that she was bound as a good Christian to do so.

To coerce the confessor, Ferdinand applied to the Pope; and to control the Pope, he betrayed to him, in secret, the whole scheme of King Louis XII. as regarded the plunder of the States of the Church. It is easy to understand what an effect the communication of the French king’s plans of spoliation produced upon the excitable and irascible Julius. When he had learned that he was not only to be robbed of his temporalities, but that he was to be deposed and imprisoned in case he should prove spiritually intractable, he hastened, in spite of his age and his infirmities, to traverse the snow-covered mountains, that he might meet his enemy in the field.

The King of Aragon was a diplomatist who left nothing to chance. He trusted no man. And if no man trusted him, he never deceived himself by supposing that any one was simple enough to do so. No detail, however trifling, was neglected by him in his negotiations. No contingency, however remote, was left out of sight in his intrigues. And however little we may respect his character, which was perhaps not much worse than that of some of his rivals, we cannot refuse to admire his transcendent skill, his infinite perseverance, his forethought, and his keen appreciation of every shade of political development. A little honesty would have made him a great man, a little generosity would have made him a great king. His policy, moreover, toward the close of his life, is at least worthy of an admiration which has rarely been extended to it. It was a policy which embraced all Europe in its scope; and although it had no direct relation to Spain or the Spanish people, it would be ill to conclude even a brief survey of the history of Spain without referring to the imperial dreams of the great Spaniard, first of modern diplomatists, and of his early endeavors to solve more than one of those questions that still embarrass the foreign policy of modern States: the establishment of a kingdom of Italy; the alliance between Italy and Germany, to withstand a dreaded power beyond the Danube and the Carpathians; the entanglement of England in a central European league; and the treatment of the Pope of Rome.

The Turks, the medieval bugbear in the East—for the Middle Ages had also their Eastern Question—were at this time rapidly encroaching upon Christian Europe; and it was obviously desirable to form a powerful empire, as a bulwark of Christendom, on the banks of the Danube. The opportunity of founding a great empire in central Europe actually existed. Ladislaus II., king of Bohemia and of Hungary, had only one son, Louis, who was of so delicate a constitution that no issue could be expected of his marriage. In case he should die without children, his sister, the Princess Anne, was the heiress of both his kingdoms; and if her father could be persuaded to marry her to the heir of the Austrian principalities, Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary, thus united with the heritage of the Hapsburgs, would form by no means a contemptible State, which might itself be but the nucleus of a greater and more ambitious empire.

Naples, which had so lately been added to the Spanish dominions, was still exposed to the attacks of the French, who claimed one-half, and were always ready to appropriate to themselves the whole of the kingdom. Naples was separated from France, indeed, by a considerable extent of territory in Italy; but the smaller Italian States were too weak to render any serious resistance, and too fickle to be counted upon as friends or as foes by any Spanish sovereign. The best way to render Naples secure was, in the eyes of Ferdinand, the foundation of a great kingdom in northern Italy, powerful enough to prevent the French from marching their armies to the south. The formation of such a kingdom moreover would have greatly facilitated a peaceful division of the great Austro-Spanish inheritance between Prince Charles and his brother, the Infante Ferdinand.

If Charles could be provided not only with the kingdom of Spain, but with the possessions of Maximilian and Ladislaus and the Princess Anne, and the empire of central Europe, his younger brother Ferdinand might content himself with a kingdom to be made up of all the States of Italy, protected against the encroachments of France by Spanish infantry and German landsknechts, and ready to drive the Turk out of the Mediterranean in support of the Christian empire on the Danube.

The kingdom of Italy, thus designed for his younger grandson by the far-seeing Ferdinand of Aragon, was to consist of Genoa, Pavia, Milan, and the Venetian territories on the mainland. The country of the Tyrol, being the most southern of the Austrian dominions, could, without sensibly weakening the projected empire, be separated from it and added to the new kingdom in Italy. Thus stretching from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic, and from the Gulf of Spezia to the Lake of Constance, this sixteenth century kingdom of Italy, with the whole power of the Holy Roman Empire to support it, would have been a splendid endowment for a younger son of the greatest family on earth. There was also a reasonable prospect that it might afterward be still further enlarged by the addition of Naples, and the smaller Italian States would easily have fallen a prey to their powerful neighbor. But in addition to all this, Ferdinand thought that he would render a notable service to the Catholic religion and to the peace of Europe if the Church were thoroughly reformed. What Rome herself has lost by Ferdinand’s failure it is not given even to the Infallible to know. What the king’s reforms were to be, we can only shrewdly surmise; and although they would most assuredly not have been Protestant, they would with equal certainty have been by no means palatable to the Vatican. For it is reasonably probable that if either Louis XII. or Ferdinand the Catholic had been permitted to carry out their designs, the Pope of Rome would have found himself deprived of his temporal power, and Garibaldi, nay, perchance Luther, would have been forestalled. It was the reforms of Ximenez that to a large extent prevented Luther in Spain. The reforms of Ferdinand might possibly have prevented him in Italy.

It was in 1516 that Ferdinand died. Seven years previous Queen Germaine had been delivered of a son, who received from his parents the name of John. But the curse that lay upon the children of Ferdinand was not yet spent; and the rival of Charles V., the heir of Aragon, Sardinia, Naples, and Sicily, was permitted to gladden the envious heart of his father by but a few hours of life. As years passed on there seemed little chance of any further issue of the King and Queen of Aragon. The unity of Spain at length appeared to be secure. But the ambition of Ferdinand was even surpassed by his jealousy. Childless, vindictive, and obstinate, he chafed at the ill-success of his personal schemes; and rather than suffer the crown of united Spain to pass over to his daughter’s son and heir, he sought, at the hands of some medical impostor, the powers that were denied to his old age. The drug that was to have renewed his youth destroyed his constitution, and his death was the direct result of one of the least creditable of the many developments of his jealousy, his obstinacy, and his selfishness.

At length came the inevitable end; and at the wretched hamlet of Madrigalejo, near Guadalupe, in the mountains of Estremadura, on the 23d of January of the new year 1516, Ferdinand died; and Spain was at length a United Kingdom.