Chapter IV: Aragon to the Union with Castile (2)

But when the prince of Aragon contracted a second marriage with Juana Henriquez, daughter of a Castilian admiral of the blood royal, rivalries were awakened which soon assumed a malevolent character. According to the disposition of her husband, the new consort, an imperious, ambitious, and enterprising young lady, was to conduct the government of Navarre in conjunction with the prince of Viana. But the divided rule did not satisfy her proud spirit; as queen of Navarre she desired to be the only person to issue orders, and exhibited an arrogant demeanour towards her stepson. The disagreement soon passed into open hostility when the two conflicting parties of the Beaumonts and the Agramonts took the opportunity to fight out their ancient quarrels in sanguinary encounters, and the Castilians, exasperated at the interference of Aragon in their internal politics, fanned the flame. At the instigation of the Beaumonts, Charles laid claim to the chief power, and at the head of his adherents led an army into the field against the queen and the Agramonts. Juan of Aragon, dominated by his wife’s superior intelligence, took part against his son. A battle was fought at Aybar, when the prince of Viana was defeated and made prisoner (1452). Some months before, in the little town of Sos in Aragon, the queen had given birth to a son who, as Ferdinand the Catholic, was afterwards to attain to such great historical importance.

After some time Charles of Viana was released from captivity; but the opposite party had in the meantime so successfully gained the upper hand in Navarre, that he could not maintain himself in the government. He betook himself to Naples to the court of his royal uncle Alfonso V, to beg for his intervention. The chivalrous, open bearing of the prince won him many friends and he was able to flatter himself with the prospect of being speedily reinstated in his mother’s inheritance by the aid of a powerful protector; but his uncle’s death rendered the hope vain (1458). By the dispositions of the late king’s will, his brother Juan was to succeed to his possessions in Spain, Sardinia, and Sicily, and his illegitimate son Ferdinand to the kingdom of Naples.

[Sidenote: [1458-1461 A.D.]]

The Neapolitans, who mistrusted the gloomy, equivocal character of the new prince, Ferdinand, tried in vain to persuade the chivalrous prince of Viana to come forward as a candidate for Naples, holding out to him the prospect of the people’s support. The magnanimous prince resisted the temptation; even in Sicily, to which he now turned, similar allurements awaited him; for there also the memory of his mother Blanche, who as the consort of King Martin had formerly won much affection in the island, procured him a good reception and many friends. But here again he withstood all seductive temptations; he contented himself with the generous assistance offered him by the gratitude of the islanders, and passed a long time in the quiet of a Benedictine cloister at Messina, occupied with scientific studies. He did not give up the thought of a reconciliation with his father and a restoration of his rights. After all he, as eldest son, was the rightful heir to the crown of Aragon, and the cortes of the three provinces were on his side. In this expectation he obeyed an invitation from his father to a personal interview at Iguala (1460). By a submissive and penitent demeanour towards the royal couple he endeavoured to put an end to the ancient enmity and win his father’s heart, but the queen, who wished to secure the succession to her own son Ferdinand, contrived to keep the distrust of her stepson still alive and by hostile insinuations to throw suspicion on everything he did. Whilst he was deceived by a delusive friendliness, he was surrounded by a web of intrigues. Above all there was exhibited a zealous eagerness to keep him from receiving any sort of homage or recognition of his rights on the part of the cortes.

Still the prince did not allow himself to be betrayed into taking an illegal step; only he became a suitor for the hand of the infanta Isabella of Castile, with the idea of thus procuring himself a lasting support for his claims to the throne. But it was just this alliance that was a thorn in the eye of the queen of Aragon; her policy had already singled out the princess for her own son, and she was to be the bond of a union between the two kingdoms. The prince of Viana’s project was endangering this plan in a formidable manner; it was therefore necessary to make an energetic decision. Charles was invited by his father to a meeting of the cortes at Lerida. The prince complied with the request in the hope of being recognised by the estates of the realm as heir to the throne. But immediately on his arrival he was arrested and taken to the inaccessible mountain fastness of Morella on the borders of Valencia; when the cortes showed signs of interposing with a protest, the assembly was dismissed. On the committee of estates demanding the cause of this remarkable proceeding, Juan darkly hinted at a plot, the inquiry into and punishment of which he must reserve for himself.

At the news of these occurrences the excitable Catalans took up the sword. Armed mobs advanced on Lerida and forced their way into the palace, while the king fled under cover of the night with a few companions to Fraga. The assailants were soon at the gates of Fraga, but the royal couple had already fled to the fortress of Saragossa. The flame of insurrection rapidly spread; in Navarre the Beaumonts, secretly supported and urged on from Castile, declared for the prince; in Aragon, in Valencia, in Sicily, the agitation was of a threatening character.

[Sidenote: [1461-1484 A.D.]]

King Juan could not resist these active manifestations of the popular desires. He set his son at liberty, recognised him as his rightful successor, and entrusted him with the office of governor-general of Catalonia. It was at this moment that the prince sickened, and soon the melancholy tidings of his death in his forty-first year were spread through the kingdom (September, 1461). There was a very natural suspicion that he had succumbed to a poison which had been brought to him in his captivity. Thus in the prime of life this noble and chivalrous prince, whose one crime was his lawful claim to the throne of Aragon, fell a victim to treacherous statecraft. Imbued as he was with devotion to the higher cultivation of the mind, had he succeeded to the throne he would have been a worthy rival of his Florentine contemporaries. The fruit of his profound studies was to be seen in a translation of Aristotle’s _Ethics_ and a history of Navarre.

The tragedy did not end with Charles’ death; instead, a second one resulted from it. At his demise he had appointed as heiress of Navarre his elder sister Blanche, who had formerly been married to Henry IV of Castile and afterwards repudiated by him because she was childless. But Blanche had always sided with her brother and had long shared his exile; for this reason she was now to be overtaken by a similar fate. In conjunction with the faithless King Louis XI of France, the sovereigns of Aragon surrounded the unfortunate princess with a net of cabals and deceits in which she could not fail to meet destruction. For it was firmly resolved that the inheritance of Aragon should be obtained for her younger sister Eleanor, countess of Foix, so that on the latter’s death it might pass to her son Gaston de Foix, the husband of a sister of Louis. With this view, and in accordance with a treaty concluded between Aragon and France, Blanche was forcibly removed from Olit, where she had hitherto resided, and conducted across the mountains to be placed under the supervision of her sister. It was to no purpose that she appealed in a touching letter to her former husband, King Henry of Castile, and pledged him her maternal inheritance of Navarre as the price of her rescue; there was to be no refuge for her from the hands of a cruel father and an unloving sister. In 1462 she was taken to the strong fortress of Orthez in Béarn, where, after two years of painful captivity she succumbed to a poison, given her by the guilty hand of a traitor By this means Navarre was united to Foix and Béarn and the ground thus cleared for the subsequent partition of the ancient kingdom between France and Spain.

Eleanor lived ten years longer than her son Gaston de Foix, prince of Viana, who met his death through a wound from a lance at a tournament in Lisbon in the year 1469. When she died, her grandson Francis Phœbus, a handsome princely boy with shining golden hair, inherited the throne of Navarre, with his mother Magdalena, sister of Louis XI, as his guardian. But only four years later Francis Phœbus died suddenly, as it was believed of poison, and his sister Catherine, then thirteen years old, entered on the inheritance. In 1484 she married Jean d’Albret, whose extensive possessions in the southwest of France were thus united to the kingdom of Navarre. Magdalena, the queen’s mother, had arranged this marriage, which was very displeasing to the Spanish rulers.

RISING IN CATALONIA

[Sidenote: [1461-1469 A.D.]]

The king of Aragon had entered into such close relations with France chiefly because he needed her help against his own people. Far from the rebellious movements subsiding on the death of the prince of Viana, the indignation against the king and queen mounted still higher amongst the excitable Catalans. The imagination of the people painted the tragic fate of the king’s unfortunate son in the liveliest colours. Charles’ ghost was seen to glide by night through the streets of Barcelona; he was heard lamenting in piteous tones over his untimely end and calling for vengeance on his unnatural murderer. At last he came to be honoured as a saint. When Queen Juana took her ten-year-old son Ferdinand to Barcelona, that he might receive the homage of the Catalan estates, she soon saw herself threatened with a rising, so that she sought refuge in Gerona. The Catalan troops followed her, made themselves masters of the town and besieged the fortifications where Juana and the prince were bravely defended by a small garrison. Thereupon the king of Aragon concluded a treaty with Louis XI (1462), in consequence of which that monarch sent seven hundred lances with archers and fieldpieces to the aid of the beleaguered queen.

In return for this Juan promised him 200,000 gold crowns and gave him the counties of Roussillon and Cerdagne in pledge. The Catalans could not withstand such a force. They retreated to Barcelona for the purpose of organising more crushing resistance in that excitable town. They sought to represent in a memorial that the liberties of their commonwealth had been betrayed, and that therefore, since the good of the state must be the highest law, they were justified in repudiating their allegiance. They summoned the young men to take arms, and turned to Castile and then to Portugal to win their support in the secession from Aragon (1463). Don Pedro, constable of Portugal, did actually enter the country with a small force, to lay claim to the government of Catalonia, to which, as a scion of the house of Barcelona, he asserted an ancient hereditary right. But the enterprise did not prosper; little by little, partly with the sword, partly by means of gold, King Juan gained possession of the most important towns in the country, such as Lerida, Cervera, Amposta, and Tortosa. Still he could not succeed in breaking Barcelona’s bold spirit of resistance; even when the Portuguese infante died suddenly, the town would not hear of conciliation, and two distinguished burghers were beheaded in the market-place for their sympathy with Aragon (1466).

The Catalans now turned to the famous “king” René of Anjou, that he might add Barcelona to the other kingdoms whose royal title he bore without possessing a handful of their soil. René sent his son John, the chivalrous, adventurous duke of Calabria and Lorraine, with some thousand mercenaries, across the Pyrenees. Louis XI, always seeing his own advantage in disturbances in a neighbouring state, secretly favoured his compatriot’s enterprise, but without dissolving his alliance with Aragon on that account.

[Sidenote: [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.]

[41] [“The loss of the principal nobles of the union at Epila was a death-blow to the feudal cause in Aragon.”[d]]

[42] St. Thecla, patroness of the church of Tarragona, appeared to him, upbraided him with impiety, and gave him so good a box on the ear, or smack in the face, that he never recovered from it. “_Está muy recibido que fue contigado de la mano de Dios, y se le aparecio en vision Santa Tecla, la qual le hirio de una palmada en el rostro, y que este fue la ocasion de su dolencia._”--_Zurita._[e] Who would expect Ferreras,[f] a writer of the eighteenth century, to believe such a relation?

[43] [This does not mean “rich men,” as would seem at first sight; but _rico_ here is related to the German word _Reich_, _i.e._, kingdom.]