Vanished Kingdoms
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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.104
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.105
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.106
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’.107 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.108 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.’109
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.110 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.111
The early years of Ferdinand and Isabella’s joint reign were marked by the last Iberian crusade against the Emirate of Granada, and by the expedition of Christopher Columbus ‘to the Indies’. Both were completed in 1492–3.112 Yet there was no move towards closer union. Indeed, the Castilians jealously guarded their monopoly on contacts with the Americas. The most important development in the kingdom-county was the establishment of a Council of Aragon to co-ordinate the affairs of the Aragonese ‘empire’.113 The Crowns of Aragon and Castile were kept strictly apart. (One may compare Aragon’s position to that of Scotland after the union of the Crowns with England in 1603; the monarch had left for greater things, but the ‘auld kingdom’ remained intact.)
Ferdinand, as king of Aragon, was also responsible for launching Aragonese historiog
raphy. The Crónica de Aragón (1499) of Gualberto Fabricio de Vagad was commissioned by him;114 Lucio Marineo Sículo’s De Aragoniae Regibus et eorum rebus gestis libri V (1509) provided a multi-volume tour of Aragon’s past, real and imaginary, from the legendary eighth-century monarchs of Sobrarbe to the death of Alfonso V in 1458.
From 1494, Ferdinand was hard pressed to defend his dynasty. Carefully laid plans were going awry. Three of the royal couple’s five children, including the crown prince, predeceased their mother. So, too, did their eldest grandson and heir. The fourth child, Juana la Loca, was mentally disturbed; and the fifth, Catalina, headed to disaster in England as ‘Catharine of Aragon’. An ingenious solution was found by recognizing Juana’s Habsburg husband, Philip the Fair of Burgundy, as heir apparent to the Castilian throne. But in September 1506 he died as well. In an ironical twist of fate, a few months before Isabella’s death in November 1504, she and Ferdinand had been chosen to be joint emperors of the (defunct) Byzantine Empire.
Yet the worst anxieties were misplaced. The torrent of premature deaths did not carry off everyone. Despite Juana’s mental illness, two of her sons, grandsons of Los Reyes Católicos, Carlos/Charles and Fernando/Ferdinand, grew to manhood. Both faced dazzling futures at the head of the Habsburg world. On the death of Philip the Fair, Habsburg Burgundy had passed to Carlos/Charles, his eldest son, who in 1516 also succeeded his grandfather in Castile and Aragon. Three years later he was elected Holy Roman Emperor as Charles V and became known to history as the ‘emperor of the World’.115
Some people find the intricacies of dynastic politics tedious. To the medieval mind, they held prime importance. All the key decisions of Charles V’s reign were underlain by the sheer unwieldiness of his inheritance. The first, in 1521, was to appoint his brother Ferdinand as acting emperor in Vienna; the second, in 1555, was to divide the Habsburg lands permanently and to limit the rule of his son Philip to the Spanish territories. But possession of large parts of the Americas gave the Castilian element greater weight in the conglomerate than all the other lands put together. In 1516, when welcoming their presumptive co-king, the Cortes of Castile made sure that Aragon was formally excluded from the Americas. This selfish disposition was never rescinded.
In succession to Charles V, who abdicated in 1556, four kings from the House of Habsburg mounted the throne:
Felipe II (Philip II), the Prudent (1556–98)
Felipe III (Philip III), the Pious (1598–1621)
Felipe IV (Philip IV), the Great (1621–65)
Carlos II (Charles II), the Bewitched (1665–1700)
Aragon made trouble for all of them. Philip II was the first in history to use the title of ‘king of Spain’.116
Old divisions persisted. Castile and Aragon were still in personal but not constitutional union when their king was elected Holy Roman Emperor. Yet the election did not make them a dependency of the Empire: they remained, like Hungary, in the category of the emperor’s non-imperial territories.
After 1555, however, Aragon’s predicament changed once again. Indeed, as the Kingdom of Spain took flight, many historians talk as if Aragon’s story had finished. Such was not the case. The kingdom-county lived on: it kept its separate laws and institutions, its languages and traditions, and its cultural and commercial connections with its former ‘empire’. And it repeatedly rebelled against Castilian presumptions.
Of Aragon’s Italian possessions only Sardinia and Sicily stayed under direct Aragonese control. Malta and Gozo were donated to the Knights of St John in 1530.117 Sardinia, ‘the pearl of the Tyrrhenian Sea’, escaped Spain’s close attention except as a naval base from which the Iberian wool trade could be protected. Sicily stayed cut off from the rest of Italy. Indeed, for a long time to come, Sicilians probably had more in common with Catalans and Aragonese than with Piedmontese, Lombardi or Tuscans.118
Malta, too, despite the severance of its direct link, continued to exhibit strong Aragonese influences. From start to finish, Aragon made a prominent contribution to the Hospitallers, whose religious ethos, seafaring prowess and crusading traditions struck a common chord. The Aragonese formed one of the eight langues or ‘nations’ into which the knights were organized; the Auberge d’Aragon stands to this day as one of the grand edifices of Valletta; and eight out of twenty-eight Grand Masters of the Order in the Maltese period came from Aragon; the escutcheon of Juan de Homedes (r. 1536–53) is carved into the keystone arch of the city gate of Mdina. Most curiously, the centrepiece hanging above the altar in the chapel of the Langue d’Aragon in Valetta, a painting by Mattia Preti, shows a mounted St George slaying the Devil on the background of a medieval battle. The picture was long assumed to portray a battle-scene from the Holy Land. Recent conservation work, however, has revealed that it portrays the victory of El Puig, inflicted on the Moors in 1234 in the region south of Valencia. In other words, Preti had been commissioned to illustrate an episode in the foundation myth not of the Hospitallers, but of the Crown of Aragon.119
The separate identity of the Crown of Aragon was long preserved within Spain. Despite the dominance of Castile and the stream of centralizing measures flowing from the new capital in Madrid, Aragonese particularism continued to make itself felt right up to the early eighteenth century. Though the Cortes could only be convened by the king, the nobles maintained control over the Diputación, a representative body for preparing petitions, and the chief legal officer, the justiciar, could not be removed on the king’s order. The Fueros, the corpus of Aragon’s traditional laws and customs, was considered sacrosanct, and internal customs posts enforced the protective tariffs of Aragon-Catalonia’s commerce. Under Philip II and his successors, the lands and people of the Crown remained proud and formally distinct until the day of its extinction.
Religion provided a source of regular trouble. The Spanish kings were eager to enforce religious uniformity, and remained dutiful supporters of the Holy Inquisition, which Ferdinand and Isabella had founded. For practical purposes, however, the Inquisition could not enforce its rulings in Aragon. The nobility was temperamentally indisposed to help; and many dissidents and suspects were able to evade investigation. At least one-third of the population of Valencia were moriscos, Moorish converts, whose conversion to Catholicism was barely skin-deep. In the eyes of Madrid, where central power now resided, the failure of the Inquisition to make headway against them was proof of Aragon’s unreliability.
In 1582 royal troops were sent to Valencia without local agreement, and in 1589 the same thing happened in Ribagorça. But Philip II’s displeasure with the Crown of Aragon came to a head through the obstinacy of a royal secretary of Catalan origin called Antonio Perez. Perez, facing a dubious charge of murder, fled prison in Madrid and on reaching Aragonese territory promptly appealed to the protection of the Fueros. In particular, he claimed the right of a legal procedure, the firma de manifestación. The justiciar, Juan de Luna, ruled that Perez could not be extradited to Madrid. The viceroy was killed during violent demonstrations in Barcelona, and the king’s patience snapped. An army of 12,000 men marched into Aragon. Perez was smuggled across the frontier into Béarn. The justiciar and twenty-one other officials were executed. The king then hypocritically reconfirmed the Fueros, and a sullen Aragon returned to the status quo ante.120
The subsequent experience of the Crown lands within the Spanish state was characterized by a long, uneasy truce punctuated by three more violent episodes. The first insurrection, known to Castilians as the ‘Catalan Revolt’ (1640–52) and to the Catalans either as the Corpus de Sang (because it broke out on the day of Corpus Christi) or as La Guerra dels Segadors, the ‘War of the Reapers’ (because the first person killed by the soldiery was an innocent reaper), was provoked by a prolonged period of oppressive taxation and by the forcible billeting of troops in the countryside. Local disturbances drew in a French army, which occupied northern Catalonia for years, and the resultant conflict cost Spain an enormous haemorrhage of blood and treasure over two decades. It w
as terminated by the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), when Rosselló and east Cerdanya were ceded to France as the price of peace.121
The second insurrection, between 1687 and 1697, was named the ‘Revolt of the Barretinas’ after the high-crowned berets worn by Catalan peasants. The complaints were much as before, but this time did not involve the towns and cities. Tensions rose after a peasant mob demolished the small port of Mataro, and three members of the Diputación were arrested in Barcelona for daring to lodge a protest against official reactions. French agents toured the villages, a rural militia was raised, military support arrived from Roussillon, and in the culminating phase Barcelona was ineffectively surrounded. Years of local raids and vicious reprisals preceded an inconclusive stalemate.122
The third insurrection, between 1700 and 1713, erupted in the context of the Franco-Spanish War over the Spanish Succession. Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia all declared in favour of the Austrian contender, ‘Don Carlos’ von Habsburg, and organized a self-governing federation. In their own eyes, they had taken to arms in defence of their ancient liberties. In the eyes of Madrid and of Versailles, they had mounted an intolerable defiance of monarchical rule. French and Spanish armies combined to reduce the rebels to obedience. Valencia was reconquered in 1707, and Aragon in 1708. Barcelona held out through two terrible sieges until September 1714.123