[1469-1475 A.D.]
This brave robber captain soon possessed himself of the northern district of Ampurdan and under the walls of Gerona he fought a battle with the queen, who in this time of trial showed heroic courage, and who since her husband’s blindness, the result of the hardships of war during the winter before Amposta, had directed the defence of the country in unison with her son. John’s chivalrous bearing towards the townspeople of Barcelona won for him such open sympathy that his public appearance always resembled a triumph. The embarrassment of King Juan of Aragon reached its highest point when his consort, who had been the very soul of the government and the guiding spirit of the war, succumbed to a long and painful illness at a time when the state coffers were completely drained, when the chief province of the kingdom was in revolt and partly in the possession of a bold leader of mercenaries, and new warlike complications were threatening with Navarre and Castile. But here too the proverb held good, “The darkest hour is that before the dawn.” In the same year, 1469, the king, now a very old man, had his sight restored by a skilful Jewish doctor, and Duke John of Calabria and Lorraine was called to his account, an event that filled the inhabitants of Barcelona with the deepest grief, which they exhibited by giving him an imposing funeral. He was laid to rest in the vault of the ancient rulers of Barcelona. It was only natural that here too the suspicion of poisoning should be raised, though it was without foundation.
The duke’s death could not break the defiant spirit of the Catalans; they steadfastly rejected every summons to yield. After a two years’ struggle, when the greater part of the country had fallen into the hands of the energetic old king, when the town bands were reduced by heavy losses to a very small number, and Barcelona was besieged by sea and land, then only did the stern Catalan spirit stoop to peace. King Juan sweetened their bitter cup of submission and homage. He confirmed their privileges and judicial government, granted universal amnesty and conceded to the foreign mercenaries, and any who might choose to join them, freedom to depart. After the conclusion of peace King Juan, mounted on a white charger, made a solemn entry into Barcelona (December, 1472). Thus the succession to the whole kingdom of Aragon of Ferdinand the Catholic, the husband of the infanta Isabella of Castile, was secured. The result had been arrived at with much difficulty, perhaps crime. A few months later the provinces of Roussillon and Cerdagne, which had been pledged to France, made great efforts to become reunited to Aragon. King Juan lent them his aid and, supported by his son, he defended the town of Perpignan with great heroism against the French. But Louis XI did not let his prize escape him. For the space of two years he made war on the town and the whole country with such overwhelming force that at last they were completely broken and submitted to the foreign yoke. The inhabitants of Perpignan, worn out by suffering and hunger, were expelled, in 1475, by the malice and cruelty of the French ruler.[b]
A few years previous to this, in 1469, the heir of King Juan II, Ferdinand of Aragon, had married Isabella of Castile, uniting thus the two countries into one Spain, as we have previously shown. Having thus brought Aragon’s history down to where it merges into that of Castile, we may return to Castile, which we left at the death of Pedro the Cruel.[a]
FOOTNOTES
[37] [Though this king is usually called “Jayme,” he spelled his own name “Jacme” in the Catalan form.]
[38] [Burke,
g however, credits this entirely to Barcelona.]
[39] [This statement of Petrarch’s indebtedness is, however, open to discussion. There was another Jordi who lived in the fifteenth century and may have been the author of the poems in which resemblances to Petrarch are detected. This would make Petrarch the original. But the Spaniards generally attribute the poems to the contemporary of James the Conqueror, who has left an account of a storm which overtook that monarch’s fleet near the island of Majorca.]
[40] [This document has been well called Aragon’s Magna Charta, and it was secured in much the same manner. The Privilege was confirmed by the cortes of Saragossa in 1325, and torture of witnesses in criminal trials was abolished. In five years followed the Privilege of Union in which the king of Aragon was forced to authorise unions of his subjects to make war upon the sovereign in case of a denial of justice, or any attempt to act independently of the justiciar. We have to look to Poland for a like constitutional defiance of royalty.]