No nation whose political sagacity was less highly developed by a free constitutional and political system could have emerged from the two years of revolution upon which Aragon now entered without detriment to its liberty and legal institutions. For during the interregnum the kingdom fluctuated between two perils; it might either have broken up into its three constituent parts or succumbed to a military despotism.

Count James of Urgel, an ambitious and unscrupulous nobleman, counted the majority of the great nobles of Aragon, more particularly the partisans of the powerful family of Luna, among his adherents, the cortes of Catalonia was on his side, and what his title might lack he was prepared to make good by the sword, for the lower classes everywhere were in his service. The murder of the archbishop of Saragossa by his brutal associate Antonio de Luna, an act of violence in which he himself was not unconcerned, was intended to cow all resistance. The ricos hombres[43] saw in anticipation the return of the time when the right of the mailed fist should override the law, when the aristocracy, allied with the town rabble, should triumph over the middle classes, and the anarchy of the unions settle down upon the country once more. The danger was realised by the wise justiciary Cerdaño, his friends and those likeminded with him, chief among whom were Gil Ruiz de Lihori, governor of Aragon, and Berengar de Bardaxi, a man distinguished alike for genius and learning, and to their judicious and patriotic exertions the preservation of the ancient constitution is mainly due. Allying themselves with the freemen of the communes and the minor nobility, they endeavoured to force the decision into the hands of the cortes. Fortunately for them the great nobles were split up by faction, for the Urrea family sided with the constitutional party out of hatred to the Lunas, and their ranks were soon further reinforced by the accession of the Heredia family, to which the murdered archbishop belonged. The latter contrived that the infante Ferdinand should garrison the frontier with Castilian troops to prevent violent measures on the part of the count of Urgel.

Nevertheless the situation was full of peril, owing to the mutual jealousies of the three divisions of the kingdom; the cortes of each held separate consultations and each was anxious to give the casting vote. It was then that the patriotic energy of the men above mentioned intervened to save the kingdom from impending ruin. They proposed that a general parliament should be called together, and that the legal decision should be left to it, as King Martin had wished; representing at the same time to the separate assemblies that if the question of the succession were decided by the sword, the victor would dictate new laws at the sword’s point, as though to a conquered nation. According to their proposal the cortes of the three kingdoms were to elect committees for joint deliberation. By this time, however, they were all too deeply imbued with party spirit, and the cortes of Valencia refused to co-operate with the rest. Those two astute politicians Cerdaño and Bardaxi then ventured upon a bold stroke. They induced the cortes of Aragon and Catalonia to authorise them to nominate a committee of nine members at their own discretion from the three divisions of the country. This committee was to sit at Caspe on the Ebro, and after conscientiously examining the claims of all pretenders was to give its decision according to law. The Urgel party at Valencia tried to interfere, but the victory of the barons at Murviedro put an end to their resistance, and the patriotic caution and justice displayed by Cerdaño and Bardaxi in the selection of the nine secured general recognition and public confidence.

While the whole country was a prey to tumultuous passions, factions at strife one with another, civil war raging with all its accompaniments of crime, rape, and ignominy, these nine men—who were held in the highest esteem by all men, not only for learning and experience but also for strictness of morals and blameless life, and who, like Bardaxi, Ferrer, and Aranda Valseca, were among the first jurists of their day—undertook a laborious examination of the claims submitted to them by the agents of the various pretenders. The count of Urgel had the largest following, and if his Aragonese origin and his descent through the male line were taken into account he would necessarily have had the prior claim; but his despotic temper, always apt to choose methods of violence rather than of law, made them apprehensive of a tyrannic government if he were chosen, and the majority of the electoral college therefore decided in favour of Ferdinand, infante of Castile, whose mother Leonora had been the daughter of Pedro IV, and the wife of Henry II.

ARAGON UNDER RULERS OF THE ROYAL HOUSE OF CASTILE

No better choice could have been made, and accordingly the new king was acknowledged by the estates of the three united kingdoms as soon as he had confirmed the rights and liberties of the realm (1412). Ferdinand, who combined justice and clemency with vigour, restored tranquillity and order, and used his power to overawe the malcontents both in Aragon and in the islands. But the count of Urgel could not brook defeat. Ferdinand treated him with the utmost distinction, but in spite of all, impelled by his own ambition and incited by his imperious wife, he presently raised the standard of rebellion. He invaded and ravaged Catalonia with an army of mercenaries which the duke of Clarence had handed over to him in Guienne, but was defeated by Ferdinand (1413), and paid the penalty of his unlawful deeds by loss of fortune and perpetual imprisonment.

In the following year Ferdinand added splendour to his accession to the throne by a gorgeous coronation at Saragossa. Thus the crowns of Castile and Aragon were worn by scions of the same reigning house, a prelude to the future union of the two kingdoms under Ferdinand’s grandson and namesake.

Through the prudence and patriotic zeal of one statesman and friend of the people, Aragon had passed through a dangerous crisis without injury to her government or liberties. Ferdinand of the ruling house of Castile, after he had taken the oath of fealty to the constitution, which he did according to custom, kneeling bareheaded before the justiciary, was recognised as king of the united realm and received the homage of the cortes. This upright and well-disposed monarch, Ferdinand, conscientiously observed the laws and even respected and acknowledged the excessive liberties and privileges of the rich commercial town of Barcelona on an occasion when it was extremely inconvenient to himself to do so; but he died after four years’ reign (1416).

His son, Alfonso V, busied himself during the greater part of his reign with the affairs of Naples. That newly acquired kingdom in the beautiful country of the Apennines, where a docile people bowed in obedience and submission to the will of the master, and where the senses were courted with a rich, luxurious life, elevated through social culture and adorned with art and science, was more congenial to Alfonso’s inclinations than his hereditary domain of Aragon with its rigorous legal forms and its earnest population; therefore he preferred a residence in Naples, whilst his native kingdom was governed by a regency. At its head was the king’s brother Juan, afterwards Juan II, a prince well-versed in statecraft and sharing, in regard to politics and public morality, the faithless principles of his time. Already as governor and regent he gave signs of that inclination to despotism and tyranny which later on, when he had succeeded his brother on the throne, he openly displayed, so that the estates took care to secure their constitution against invasion while there was yet time.

We have seen what importance and consideration were attached to the position of chief justice or justiciary of Aragon, the guardian and protector of the laws. To secure the office against violation and despotism of any kind, it was decreed that the holder should retain office for life, and could only be removed by the king with consent of the estates and on sufficient grounds (1442). There was no danger that a legal institution of this nature, standing as it did between the throne and the people, would be diverted against the laws of the country, since the justiciary was subject to a regular and close inquiry into the administration of his office from a committee of the states. Besides this, a navigation law which forbade foreign vessels to ship cargoes in any of the domains under the crown of Aragon was passed in the reign of Alfonso V (1454), an important enactment, which gave a new impulse to the maritime trade of Barcelona, the Catalan capital, at whose instigation the regulation was made. Thus, both in constitutional progress and in commercial policy, Aragon was the forerunner of the island kingdom of Britain.

The reign of Juan, both as regent and afterwards as king, turns to a great extent on the acquisition of the kingdom of Navarre and the family quarrels which it kindled. In 1442 the mountain country on either side of the Pyrenees passed to the princely house of Aragon by the death of Blanche, wife of Juan, and previously the widow of King Martin. She had inherited Navarre from her father Charles III and by her will her patrimonial domains were to fall as an independent lordship to her eldest son Charles, prince of Viana. More as a matter of courtesy than a legal restriction the condition was added that, before assuming the government of the country, he should obtain the consent and approbation of his father. Juan seems at first to have made no difficulty to his son’s taking possession, so that Charles, while his father continued to bear the rank and title of king of Navarre, conducted the administration for several years as governor and ruler of his mother’s inheritance.

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.

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.

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

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.

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