Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  The question might be asked… whether an examination of the changes within the administrative system [of the Crown of Aragon] might not be an exercise in futility. After all, [the system] left few lasting traces… But its ultimate lack of success does not affect its value… We have witnessed the truth that modernisation, no matter how visionary, is not enough to guarantee the survival of the state.94

  In the 1350s Pedro IV had lined up against Castile in the so-called ‘War of the Two Peters’, whose causes have long since been forgotten. By the late fourteenth century, Iberia was moving towards a series of dynastic disasters which would culminate simultaneously. The ruling houses of Trastámara in Castile and of Barcelona in the kingdom-county were already intermarried, yet by the turn of the century each was eyeing up the other’s uncertain prospects, as a long minority in Castile combined with a paralysing interregnum in Aragon to create a knot of problems of mind-bending complexity. The resulting convulsions continued for decades until the two houses finally united for good in the epoch-making marriage of 1469.

  In Castile, the crisis began in 1406 with the premature death of King Henry III El Doliente, ‘the Sufferer’, whose son and heir was barely one year old. The ensuing regency was presided over by two co-regents: Henry’s widow, Catherine of Lancaster, and his younger brother, Fernando d’Antequera, who had earned the sobriquet thanks to his victory over the Moors in Andalusia. The arrangement involved Aragon because Fernando and his late brother were both sons of Eleanor of Aragon, daughter of Pedro IV and Eleanour of Sicily.

  In Aragon, at exactly the same time, a parallel crisis was precipitated by the death of the royal heir apparent, who had been ruling in Sicily. The king himself, Martin I El Humano, ‘the Humane’ – the last royal descendant of Count Wilfred the Hairy – lived on for a further four years, but the ruling house had run out of male issue. In 1410, when the king followed his son to an early grave, there was no obvious successor. No fewer than six candidates vied for the throne. They placed their claims before the assembled representatives of Aragon, Barcelona and Valencia, but no decision was reached. Then, a commission of nine notables sought to find a resolution, and an eventual winner emerged at the so-called Compromise of Caspe. The commissioners’ choice was momentous, not to say adventurous, for it fell on none other than Fernando d’Antequera, infante and regent of Castile – a man who spoke no Catalan, and whose personal estates lay in southern Spain. Yet the winner proved his mettle, defeating his most recalcitrant rival, the count of Urgell, in battle at Montearagon near Huesca, and quickly restoring stability. For an interval, the affairs of both kingdoms were entrusted to the same person.

  Fernando I, king of Aragon (r. 1412–16), known in Barcelona as ‘Ferran d’Antequera’, was a prudent administrator and forceful politician. His most important achievement was to press successfully for the deposition of the Aragonese antipope, Benedict XIII, thereby ending the Great Schism of the Western Church.95 Most importantly, he was blessed with an ample supply of sons. The two older ones, Alfonso and Juan, would succeed him in turn. His regal style, as recorded in a document of 1413, reads: ‘Ferdinandus, Dei Gratia Rex Aragonum, Sicilie, Valencie, Maioricarum, Sardiniae et Corsice, Comes Barchinone, Dux Athenarum et Neopatriae, ac etiam Comes Rossilonis et Ceritaniae’ (‘Fernando, by the Grace of God king of Aragon, Sicily, Valencia, Majorca, Sardinia and Corsica, count of Barcelona, duke of Athens and Neopatria, and also count of Roussillon and Cerdagne’).96 Needless to say, several of the titles were redundant.

  At this juncture, a clear head is necessary to disentangle the multiple coincidences of names. Fernando’s nephew, the boy-king of Castile, and Fernando’s second son shared the same Christian name, and both were destined to rule their respective kingdoms for long periods under the same designation of Juan II. Juan II of Castile (r. 1406–54) is generally regarded as feeble-minded. His cousin, Juan II of Aragon (r. 1458–79), was intemperate. To cap it all, in order to perpetuate the intimate relations of the courts of Toledo and Barcelona, the sister of Juan II of Castile was married off to Alfonso of Aragon, while the sister of Juan II of Aragon married Juan II of Castile. Both of these brides were called Maria; they were first cousins, and each of them married a first cousin. After their marriages, Princess Maria of Castile became Queen Maria of Aragon, and Maria of Aragon became Maria of Castile. The phrase ‘keeping it within the family’ gains new significance.

  The Crown of Aragon escaped from this tangled web of consanguinity by an agreement of mutual convenience between Fernando I’s two sons. Soon after their father died in 1416, Alfonso, his successor, decided to sail away and to concentrate his career on Aragon’s overseas territories and would shortly turn his attentions to Naples. Juan, the younger brother, was left at home as lieutenant-general and effective ruler of the kingdom-county. If one adds the thirty-seven years of Juan’s lieutenant-generalcy to the twenty-one years of his reign in his own right, one finds that he ruled longer than any other Aragonese monarch.

  Juan II’s long rule, however, was not particularly felicitous. He embroiled his subjects in a wearying saga of spats, wars and feuds that render his sobriquet of ‘the Great’ a mystery. Having married a Navarran princess, he spent fifty years as the effective ruler of the Kingdom of Navarre iure uxoris, but neglecting his other duties. In the 1450s, he was totally absorbed by a Navarrese civil war and by a vicious vendetta against his elder son, whom he had appointed viceroy in Barcelona. In the 1460s, he faced a ten-year Catalan revolt, and in the 1470s pursued an ill-judged war against Louis XI of France.

  The one favourable element in his reign lay in the continuation of close ties between Aragon and Castile. The two branches of the Trastámara clan co-operated discreetly to keep the family fortunes afloat, and together, they weighed down on the dwindling power of the Moors in Granada. The culmination of their plans was achieved on 19 October 1469 at Valladolid, where Fernando, the younger son of Juan II of Aragon, was joined in wedlock to Isabella, the only daughter of Juan II of Castile. They are known to posterity as ‘Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs’ (see below). The two principal kingdoms of Iberia were moving ever closer.

  During the long, strife-filled decades of the fifteenth century, the ramshackle structures of the Crown of Aragon were undoubtedly weakened, further; the heartland increasingly lost a firm hold on its overseas dependencies. Alfonso V (r. 1416–58), king of Sicily by hereditary right and, from 1421, the designated heir to the Kingdom of Naples, emerged as one of the most resplendent princes of the early Renaissance. Surrounded by an inimitable mixture of artists, soldiers of fortune, men of letters, architects and ambitious Aragonese courtiers, he spent his time fighting, feuding, feasting and forging his reputation as ‘the Magnanimous’. During his reign Corsica was captured, and Naples conquered.97

  In theory, Corsica had formed part of the Aragonese Kingdom of Sardinia from the days of Pope Boniface. In practice, encouraged by Genoa, it had rejected Aragon’s advances for more than a century. Alfonso V of Aragon personally led the expedition which conquered Corsica in 1420. Reducing the fortress of Bonifacio by siege, he briefly established a regime headed by a local viceroy. In 1453, however, unable to defend his acquisition, he handed it back to the Genoese in return for a loan from the Banco di San Georgio. Surprisingly, the brief Aragonese presence was sufficient to introduce the symbol of the ‘Moor’s Head’ which later emerged as Corsica’s national emblem.98

  The Kingdom of Naples – that is, the part of the original Kingdom of Sicily that had stayed in Angevin hands after 1282 – was the largest and most populous state in medieval Italy, occupying the whole of the southern half of the peninsula from the frontier of the Romagna to the heel of ‘the boot’. Its territory consisted of six modern regions – Abruzzi, Molise, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria – and coincided very closely with what Romans and northern Italians call il Mezzogiorno, the Midi, or ‘the land of the noonday sun’. Because the Angevins were papal clients, it was also a traditional protectorate o
f the papacy.

  For 150 years after the War of the Sicilian Vespers, the Angevin monarchs had held on to their Neapolitan inheritance. Their readiness to fight their own Angevin relatives was only exceeded by their determination to exclude their Aragonese rivals. There were two episodes of acute crisis. Both featured heirless queens – Joanna I (r. 1343–82) and Joanna II (r. 1414–35) – and both possessed a specifically Aragonese angle.

  Joanna I imported four husbands, including Jaime IV, pretender to the throne of Mallorca, but none of them brought stability. Joanna II reigned over a kingdom rent by violence and scandal. Her first husband, a Habsburg, left her, and the second soon fled in fear of his life. The queen was then free to have herself crowned as sole monarch and to rule in league with successive lovers. The one that lasted longest, Giovanni Caracciolo, known as ‘Sergianni’, was the wealthiest of her subjects and an inveterate intriguer. Before being stabbed to death, he was a virtual dictator.

  Like her earlier namesake, however, Joanna II was dogged not simply by the lack of a child and of scruples, but also by a congenital inability to stick with a decision. She designated in turn no fewer than four men as her official heir. In 1420, when the pope gave his support to an Angevin to be her successor at Naples, the queen promptly turned to Alfonso V of Aragon as counter-heir. Alfonso invaded, captured Sergianni, and was besieging the royal palace of Castel Capuano when the queen again changed her mind, repudiated him, and reverted to the pope’s original candidate. La regin’ è mobile. Later, Joanna chose another Angevin, René d’Anjou, count of Provence, to take his place.

  In the two ensuing wars of the Neapolitan succession, 1420–24 and 1435–43, the fighting spread far and wide. In 1424 Alfonso’s imminent victory in Naples was interrupted when he was summoned back to Barcelona to handle a crisis with Castile, sacking Marseille on his roundabout route home. In the second war, Alfonso was defeated at sea by the Genoese, taken prisoner, handed over to the Sforza family of Milan, and eventually ransomed. In the middle phase, when René d’Anjou was installed in Naples, Alfonso set up a strong naval base at Gaeta, but was repeatedly rebuffed on land. In the final phase, he successfully picked off all of the kingdom’s peripheral regions, reconciled himself to the papacy, and, by making decisive use of his formidable artillery train, slowly surrounded his prize. In June 1442 René fled, and Alfonso finally entered Naples in style. He cherished it above all his other possessions. He ruled over both kingdoms of Sicily, thereby creating in personal union an early emanation of the joint Regnum utriusque Siciliae, the ‘Kingdom of the Two Sicilies’. For the next sixty years, Naples was tightly held in the hands either of Alfonso or of his sons.

  Naples in its Aragonese period ranked high in both size and opulence among Europe’s port cities. Its history went back to ancient Greek times, and it served as the outlet for a region in which Greek-speaking communities survived into modern times. Its hinterland consists of the productive plain of Campagna; and its approach from the sea, with the cone of Mount Vesuvius in view, is spectacular. ‘See Naples and die’ is a phrase attributed to Goethe, but it is a sentiment that fits Alfonso the Magnanimous perfectly. Many of the urban landmarks were of great antiquity, but that did not prevent the incoming Aragonese from altering or embellishing them. The Greek-built fortress of Castel d’Ovo, for example, which guards the old harbour, had been strongly fortified by the Normans. The Aragonese pulled down the tall Norman towers. The cathedral of San Gennaro, patron of the city, stands on the site of a temple of Apollo; the Aragonese lavishly decorated some of the chapels. The pine-wooded promontory of Pizzofalcone (whence the breath-taking panorama across the bay to Vesuvius) had hosted the villas of the rich and powerful for nearly 2,000 years. The Aragonese simply joined the queue.

  Many of the most prominent buildings dated from Angevin times. The university had been founded in the thirteenth century. The castle of St Elmo, the Belforte, had overlooked the city from an anterior ridge since 1343. The monastery of San Domenico Maggiore, which contains the cell of Thomas Aquinas, was completely restored in 1445. The imposing Castel Nuovo, constructed during the War of the Sicilian Vespers, protected the harbour. A triumphal arch in white marble was placed incongruously between the two round towers of the façade by the Aragonese, and dedicated to Alfonso the Magnanimous.

  The city’s prominence in the late fifteenth century owed much to the final phase of commericial growth prior to the long recession caused by Ottoman expansion. Naples joined Palermo, Malta, Valencia, Barcelona, Palma, Corsica and Sardinia in a naval and mercantile network which dominated the western Mediterranean.

  Alfonso’s coat of arms and regal style well illustrate the complexities of his position. An inscription on his triumphal arch read: ‘ALFONSO REX HISPANUS SICULUS ITALICUS PIUS CLEMENS INVICTUS’. He was claiming, extravagantly, to be the ‘king of Spain, Sicily and Italy’. It displays the simple arms of Aragon surmounted by a cannon and two griffins. More usually, his arms appear as Aragon quartered with Naples, in which the Neapolitan element, reflecting the city’s past, contains the emblems of Hungary, Anjou and Jerusalem. In one of the last documents of his reign, dating from March 1458, his full regal style exceeded even his father’s: ‘Nos Alfonsus D.G. Rex Aragonum, Siciliae Citra et Ultra Farum, Valentiae, Hierusalem, Hungariae, Maioricarum, Sardiniae et Corsicae, Comes Barchinone, Dux Athenarum et Neopatriae ac etium Comes Rossilionus et Ceritaniae’ (‘We Alfonso, by God’s Grace king of Aragon, of Sicily both before and beyond the lighthouse, of Valencia, Jerusalem, Hungary, Mallorca, Sardinia and Corsica, count of Barcelona, duke of Athens and Neopatria, and also count of Roussillon and Cerdagne’).99

  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’.100

  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.101

  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’.102 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’.103