Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (40 page)

Alfonso’s role as patron of the arts is the subject of differing opinions. ‘No man of his day’, wrote a later British consul at Barcelona, ‘had a larger share of the quality called by the Italians “
virtù
”.’ He set his courtiers an example by carrying the works of Livy and Caesar on his campaigns, and by halting his army in respect for Virgil’s birthplace. He was said to have been cured from illness by listening to Latin poetry, and the sycophants likened him to Seneca or to Trajan (both of whom were Iberian). On entering Naples, he set to work to turn it into a fitting rival for Florence or Venice. His sculptured portrait, attributed to Mino da Fiesole, hangs in the Louvre. Overall, however, the achievements of Naples’
Quattrocentro Aragonese
were relatively modest, especially under Alfonso’s successors. According to Giorgio Vasari, ‘the Neapolitan nobles value a horse more than a painter’.
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Alfonso’s role as power broker was undeniably significant. Though Aragon had been an international player for two centuries, it rose in Alfonso’s time to the first rank. An equal partner in the Iberian conglomerate, it also controlled a large slice of the Italian peninsula, and could exert great influence on the papacy. Possession of all the major islands of the western and central Mediterranean gave it an unrivalled hold on trade and shipping. Indeed, after Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, it was forced to take the lead in challenging Ottoman power. Alfonso was the chief patron of Skanderbeg, the Albanian warlord battling the Turks in the Balkans, and he even contacted distant Coptic Ethiopia with a view to forming an anti-Muslim alliance.
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In the opinion of Britain’s leading historian of the medieval Mediterranean, Alfonso was a man of ‘imperial vision’ whose reign ‘marks the high point of Aragonese influence’, both ‘within Spain and within the Mediterranean’.
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Indeed, some of his plans which did not materialize were at least as significant as those which did. In 1448, for example, he captured the statelet of Piombino, including the island of Elba, aiming thereby to exercise greater control over Genoese shipping lanes, but he had also carved out a stepping stone into nearby Tuscany. If Alfonso had replaced the Medici in Florence at the height of the Renaissance, his name would be in every history book. As it was, all the other powers in Italy united against him and he was forced to desist. Even so, the scale of his ambition is clear. To a degree rarely admitted, he was the role model for his nephew, Fernando El Católico, who is conventionally given the sole credit for widening Aragon’s horizons.

On Alfonso’s death in 1458, Naples did not pass, like Sicily and the rest of the Crown of Aragon, to Alfonso’s brother Juan II. In the first instance, it was bequeathed to Alfonso’s bastard son, Fernando I, known as Don Ferrante (r. 1458–94). It then passed successively to Don Ferrante’s son Alfonso II and grandson Fernando or Ferdinand II, and then to Don Ferrante’s second son Frederico. After a brief French interlude it finally fell in 1504, like the other Crown lands, to the ‘Catholic Monarchs’.

By far the longest of these Neapolitan reigns was that of the much underrated Don Ferrante, who presided over the kingdom for nearly forty years. Like his father, he possessed an inimitable mixture of courage, artistic gifts and Machiavellian ruthlessness. He also possessed a wife, Isabella of Taranto, whose dowry brought in a treasure chest of feudal claims and titles. As a result, he styled himself ‘king of Jerusalem’ as well as king of Naples, asserting authority over vengeful Angevins, rebellious barons and Turkish intruders alike. Don Ferrante’s record bore stains and setbacks, not least the loss of Otranto to the Turks in 1480. Yet his survival during the international wars of the 1490s was proof of remarkable resilience.

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Nothing better illustrates the international prominence of Aragon at this time than the extraordinary careers which turned an obscure Aragonese family into a household name. Borja is a small town in the province of Zaragoza, and a merchant family of that provenance was long established in Valencia. A law professor from the University of Lleida, Alfons de Borja (1378–1458), made a brilliant reputation for himself in Aragon’s diplomatic service, and, thanks to his success in reconciling his master with the pope at the Council of Basle (1431–9), received a cardinal’s hat. In Rome, as Cardinal ‘di Borgia’, he replicated the same success within the Church hierarchy, and was eventually elected pontiff as Pope Callistus III in 1455. Legend holds that he excommunicated the comet, later known as Halley’s, which blazed through the skies in 1456. He quashed the judgment against Joan of Arc, and he filled Rome with Aragonese officials: his death in 1458, in the same month as Alfonso V’s, sparked a riot against the hated ‘Catalans’.
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The upward mobility of the Borgias, however, did not stop with his death. Pope Callistus had raised two of his Valencian nephews to the cardinalcy, thereby creating a powerful Borgia faction, notorious for its corruption and nepotism. One of these, Roderic Llançol de Borja (1431–1503), gained a grip on Church administration under five popes, and fathered a bevy of bastards whose interests and marriages he promoted with undivided zeal. In 1492, at a conclave swamped in gold ducats, he secured the throne of St Peter for himself, and as Alexander VI headed the papacy during its most unholy era. His pontificate was marked by the French wars in Italy, by the rise and fall of Savonarola in Florence, by zealous exploitation of the international indulgence scam (which triggered Luther’s Reformation), and, in 1493, by the Bull of Donation which divided the New World between Spain and Portugal. Of his children, Giovanni, duke of Gandia, was assassinated; the much maligned Lucrezia was the source of lurid tales; and Cesare Borgia was said to be the model for Machiavelli’s
Prince
.
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In the conventional view, the unified Kingdom of Spain was born at the end of the fifteenth century through the personal union of Ferdinand and Isabella. Thanks to that union, the ascendant Castilians are said to have exerted a dominant position over their declining Aragonese partners. This reductive interpretation ignores both the incremental steps whereby union was achieved and the very complex relationship between Castile and Aragon over many decades. From an Aragonese perspective, though the Castilians took over Aragon in 1412, the Aragonese establishment gained ascendancy over Castile in the last quarter of the century.

At the dynastic level, three distinct steps can be observed. In Step One, following the installation of Fernando d’Antequera in Aragon in 1412, two branches of the Castilian House of Trastámara ruled Castile and Aragon in parallel. In Step Two, which lasted for a quarter of a century after the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castile in 1469 and the subsequent accession of each of the spouses to their respective kingdoms, Castile and Aragon were ruled in tandem by co-monarchs forming a single political team. In Step Three, which began with Isabella’s death in 1504, the widowed Ferdinand added the regency of Castile to his existing duties as the hereditary king of Aragon. (He was able to do so because the only surviving child of the Catholic Monarchs, their daughter Juana, had been judged insane, and incarcerated.) From that point on, he and his successors reigned over the two kingdoms in full personal union. But was Fernando El Católico/Ferran El Catolic Aragonese or Castilian? The answer is that he was both. He was a prince of Aragon of Castilian descent, who reigned for thirty-seven years in Aragon and for forty-six years in Aragon and Castile jointly.

The prospects of the young couple had improved only gradually after their marriage in 1469. They were both distressed by the many pains of their parents’ generation, and they set their minds on the benefits of unification both in political and in religious affairs. They had signed a prenuptial arrangement promising exact equality, their motto being ‘
Tanto Monta, Monta Tanto, Ysabel E Fernando
’ (Isabella and Ferdinand, it’s all the same). Their device, drawn from their initials, was the Y(oke) and the F(asces) – the ancient rods of authority. Following the death of Isabella’s half-brother in 1474, they became joint monarchs of Castile, but not without their being denounced as usurpers. After the death of Ferdinand’s father in 1479, they added Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Sicily and Naples to their portfolio.
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But for ten years, from 1462 to 1472, the kingdom-county was wracked by civil war in which King Juan II battled against three successive pretenders: Enrique of Castile, El Impotente, Pedro V, constable of Portugal, and René d’Anjou, count of Provence. Apart from being the hereditary count of Provence René d’Anjou (1409–80) was duke of Lorraine, titular king of Jerusalem and the chief rival of the Aragonese in Naples. For twenty years, after being ousted from Naples by Alfonso V, he was a redundant royal looking for better employment. Fortune finally smiled on him in the 1460s. The nobles of Catalonia had expelled Juan II from the country, quickly followed by two hopeful ‘anti-kings’. René was the third anti-king to be invited to take the throne. In practice, his ‘reign’ was a non-starter, and after sending his son to Barcelona to test the political climate, he sensibly stayed away. He retired to Aix-en-Provence where he devoted himself to the arts and to good works. He is known in Provençal and French history as ‘Le Bon Roi René’. Memorial fountains have been erected to his name both in Aix and in Naples, but not in Barcelona. His tomb stands in the cathedral of Angers, the cradle of Angevin destiny.
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The troubles of the 1460s, often labelled the ‘Catalan Crisis’, have sometimes given rise to generalizations about ‘the unexpected eclipse of the Crown of Aragon’, about ‘a society in retreat’, and about Castile and Aragon being ‘unequal partners’.
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These judgements tell only one side of the story. There certainly was a period of vicious internal strife, and Barcelona in particular experienced steep economic decline.
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But Castile was in uproar no less than Catalonia, and, within the Aragonese orbit, the decline of Barcelona was more than offset by the ‘golden age’ of Valencia and by the splendour of Naples. Commercial patterns seem to have adapted well to a fluid political environment. Catalan and Valencian merchants swarmed into Naples, and Aragonese traders protected by the Catalan Company retained an emporium as far away as the island of Aegina in Greece. The kingdom-county as a whole was by no means moribund. The leading specialist of the subject concludes, ‘It was the sixteenth and not the fifteenth century that saw the decline of the Crown of Aragon.’
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Aragon’s grip on its ‘empire’ started to slip after the turn of the century. Conditions in Italy had been transformed by the entry of French troops into Naples in 1495. Yet a papal coalition against the French and two royal deaths opened the way for Fernando El Católico’s intervention. Based at the time in Sicily, his first thought was to partition the Neapolitan kingdom as a means of halting the French. But the victory of his general, Gonzalo de Córdoba, on the Gargliano (1502), rendered concessions unnecessary, and Naples then followed Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Sicily and Sardinia into united Spanish rule.

It was the Aragonese pope, Alexander VI, who dubbed Ferdinand and Isabella
Los Reyes Católicos
. The epithet was well deserved. In 1474, they had subjected their joint kingdoms to the
Santa Hermandad
, or Holy Brotherhood, a system of extra-judicial political and religious police. In 1482 they launched the all-Spanish Inquisition under the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada (1420–98). In 1492, after the fall of Granada, they expelled many Jews and Moors who refused to convert to Catholicism. Spain’s religious zeal stood at the opposite end of the scale to that of the Vatican.
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Nonetheless, the apparently wholesale expulsions of non-Christians were not unqualified. The policy aimed above all to separate converts from the unconverted, and many
conversos
continued to flourish. Having resisted conversion, many Muslim communities even stayed in place for a century and more. Luis de Santángel, a Jewish
converso
who had bankrolled Christopher Columbus, hired the Genoese ships which carried the expellees from the ports of Valencia and Catalonia. The great majority of them sailed to Naples, where they were welcomed by Don Ferrante and settled down in the Mezzogiorno, still under Aragonese rule.
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