The king soon closed the states, without yielding any further to the demands of the union, and hastened into Catalonia, with the avowed purpose of collecting troops, to reduce the whole body to obedience. That the leaguers did not prevent his departure was owing to the suspicions irresistibly forced on their minds that there was treachery in their camp, and that he had more secret adherents than they had expected. He was followed to Barcelona by the infante Don James, who sickened and died in that city, not without suspicions of poison. The union of Valencia, nowise discouraged by the ill success of that of Aragon, immediately invested the fortresses which held for the king, whose troops they defeated before Jativa. The infante Ferdinand, who was now proclaimed lieutenant-general of that province and head of the confederacy, with a force estimated at thirty thousand obtained a second victory over the royalists. Pedro now hastened from Barcelona, to crush in person this formidable rebellion.
He had soon an army on foot with which two of his generals attacked, defeated, and took Ferdinand.[41] The infante, however, from fear of the king’s vengeance, was conducted into Castile. Pedro himself advanced against Saragossa, the very stronghold of faction. One instance of ill fortune had damped, as much as success had encouraged, the rebels: they received him with great humility, renounced the privileges of the union, and threw themselves wholly on his mercy. Thirteen of the most obnoxious ringleaders were put to death; the rest he pardoned. In an assembly of the states, which he was no longer afraid of convoking, the ricos homes [or hombres] and deputies solemnly renewed the renunciation of the privileges claimed by the union; in presence of them all, the king tore in pieces the registered act of that body, but at the same time he confirmed his subjects in the possession of all their ancient rights. Aragon was now pacified; its union was no more: but Valencia remained in rebellion. Having assembled a formidable army, James marched into that province, and, in a general battle near the capital, triumphed over the leaguers. Valencia immediately surrendered at discretion.
[1356-1365 A.D.]
On the termination of these troubled scenes, Leonora and one of her sons took refuge in Castile. But misfortunes assailed them there, superior, perhaps, to any which would have befallen them in Aragon. How the infante Juan was murdered at Bilbao, and Leonora herself in the castle of Castro Xeres, by order of Pedro the Cruel, has been related in the reign of that monarch. Ferdinand, indeed, escaped the vengeance of the tyrant; but, as we shall soon see, a fate no less tragical awaited him. The misunderstanding between the two Pedros commenced in 1356, on the refusal of the Castilian to restore a prize made at sea by one of his Biscayan pirates. The second offence was committed by an admiral of Catalonia, who, under the eyes of the Castilian, captured two Pisan vessels—a power with which the Aragonese were at war—in the port of Santa Maria. With some justice, the Castilian remonstrated against the violation of a neutral port; and on the refusal of his brother sovereign to make satisfaction for it, he levied a heavy contribution on the Catalan inhabitants of Seville, and declared war against Aragon. Hostilities now commenced, with various success and many suspensions.
Cordova
In general, the success of the war rested with the Castilian. In 1363, through the interference of the papal legate, the first peace was made, the secret conditions of which were of an atrocious character. Pedro of Aragon engaged not only to remove by death the obnoxious brothers of the Castilian, but his own, the infante Ferdinand. A servant of Count Henry of Castile dealt the victim a fatal blow. Henry himself was spared—doubtless because Pedro foresaw that his new ally of Castile would not fulfil his engagements; perhaps, also, because he himself had no disposition to do so. His anticipations were right: war was renewed by the Castilian. His operations were as indecisive as those of the former.
Seeing that the war did not and could not lead to any result, in 1365 Pedro concerted with the count of Trastamara the invasion of Castile, and the dethronement of the Castilian king. The aid which Henry obtained from France, the fate of his first and second invasions, we have already related. But the Aragonese king—so true it is that no honour can long subsist among the wicked—was never on good terms with the new king of Castile. He insisted on Murcia, which Henry, while count of Trastamara, had agreed to resign, in the event of his obtaining the Castilian throne; and on the refusal of that prince to dismember so important a province from the crown, not only coolness, but actual hostilities, between the two kingdoms were preparing. But those hostilities were soon averted by the papal legates; and the truce was, from time to time, prolonged, until 1374, when peace was finally arranged between the two monarchs.
[1338-1386 A.D.]
The foreign transactions of Pedro were of some importance. In 1338 began his misintelligence with Don James, king of Majorca, whose dethronement he appears to have meditated from the commencement of his reign. Though, in 1339, James did homage for his kingdom, his destruction was no less resolved; his unpopular rule afforded Pedro well-founded hopes of success.