[12] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, lib. 34, cap. 1.—Histoire du Royaume de Navarre, p. 558. Leonora's son, Gaston de Foix, prince of Viana, was slain by an accidental wound from a lance, at a tourney at Lisbon, in 1469. By the princess Magdeleine, his wife, sister of Louis XI, he left two children, a son and daughter, each of whom in turn succeeded to the crown of Navarre. Francis Phoebus ascended the throne on the demise of his grandmother Leonora, in 1479. He was distinguished by his personal graces and beauty, and especially by the golden lustre of his hair, from which, according to Aleson, he derived his cognomen of Phoebus. As it was an ancestral name, however, such an etymology may be thought somewhat fanciful.
[13] Ferdinand and Isabella had at this time four children; the infant Don John, four years and a half old, but who did not live to come to the succession, and the infantas Isabella, Joanna, and Maria; the last, born at Cordova during the summer of 1482.
[14] Aleson, Annales de Navarra, lib. 34, cap. 2; lib. 35, cap. 1.—
Histoire du Royaume de Navarre, pp. 578, 579.—La Clède, Hist. de
Portugal, tom. iii. pp. 438-441.—Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 199.—
Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. p. 551.
[15] Lebrija, Rerum Gestarum Decades, ii. lib. 2, cap. 1.
Besides the armada in the Mediterranean, a fleet under Pedro de Vera was prosecuting a voyage of discovery and conquest to the Canaries at this time.
[16] Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 199.—Mariana, tom. ii. p. 551.— Coleccion de Cédulas y Otros Documentos, (Madrid, 1829,) tom. iii. no. 25.
For this important collection, a few copies of which, only, were printed for distribution, at the expense of the Spanish government, I am indebted to the politeness of Don A. Calderon de la Barca.
[17] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 58.—Pulgar, Reyes Católicos, p. 202.
Juan de Corral imposed on the king of Granada by means of certain credentials, which he had obtained from the Spanish sovereigns without any privity on their part to his fraudulent intentions. The story is told in a very blind manner by Pulgar.
It may not be amiss to mention here a doughty feat performed by another Castilian envoy, of much higher rank, Don Juan de Vera. This knight, while conversing with certain Moorish cavaliers in the Alhambra, was so much scandalized by the freedom with which one of them treated the immaculate conception, that he gave the circumcised dog the lie, and smote him a sharp blow on the head with his sword. Ferdinand, say Bernaldez, who tells the story, was much gratified with the exploit, and recompensed the good knight with many honors.