When Ferdinand II (1479–1516; also known as Ferdinand V of Castile from 1474) succeeded to the Crown of Aragon in 1479, the union of Aragon (roughly eastern Spain) and Castile (roughly western Spain) was finally achieved, and the Trastámara became the second most powerful monarchs in Europe, after the Valois of France. The different royal houses of the Iberian Peninsula had long sought a union of their crowns and had practiced intermarriage for generations. Nevertheless, the union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon was far from inevitable in the last quarter of the 15th century. A union between Castile and Portugal was equally feasible, and it has been argued that it would have made more sense, for it would have allowed the two western Hispanic kingdoms to concentrate on overseas exploration and expansion, and it would not have involved Castile in Aragon’s traditional rivalry with France. The reasons that led John II of Aragon to arrange the marriage of his son and heir, Ferdinand, with Isabella of Castile in 1469 were essentially tacticaclass="underline" he needed Castilian support against French aggression in the Pyrenees. In Castile an influential party of magnates, led by Alfonso Carillo, archbishop of Toledo (who later reversed himself), and opposed to King Henry IV, supported the succession claims of the princess Isabella, the king’s half sister, against those of his daughter, Joan. They were anxious for the help and leadership of the Aragonese prince and content with the alliance of a country in which the magnates had such far-reaching privileges as the Aragonese nobility. It needed a forged papal dispensation for the marriage, the blackmailing of Henry IV into (wrongly) denying the paternity of his daughter (Joan), and, finally, several years of bitter civil war before Ferdinand and Isabella defeated Joan’s Castilian supporters and her husband, Afonso V of Portugal.
Ferdinand II (left) and his wife, Isabella I, relief with gilt and polychromy by Alonso de Mena, 1632; in the Capilla Real, Granada, Spain.Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis
Aragon and Catalonia
Ferdinand and Isabella ruled jointly in both kingdoms and were known as the Catholic Monarchs (Reyes Católicos). It was, however, a union of crowns and not of kingdoms. In size, institutions, traditions, and, partly, even language, the two kingdoms differed greatly. Within the kingdom of Aragon, Aragon and Valencia each had about 270,000 inhabitants, of whom some 20 percent and more than 30 percent, respectively, were Muslims and Moriscos (Muslims officially converted to Christianity). Catalonia had about 300,000 inhabitants. In each of these kingdoms the powers of the crown were severely limited. The barons ruled their estates like kings, dispensing arbitrary justice over their peasants. In Catalonia they had the right to wage private war. In Aragon anyone arrested by order of the king could put himself under the jurisdiction of a justicia who held his office for life and was therefore independent of the king’s pleasure. It was this highest judge who crowned the kneeling king and made him swear to observe the fueros, the laws and privileges, of the kingdom. Although it is now known that the formula
We who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you accept all our liberties and laws; but if not, not
is a forgery, most probably of the mid-16th century, the quotation does summarize succinctly the relations between the kings of Aragon and the Aragonese nobility.
Ferdinand made no attempt to change this position; nor did he do so in Catalonia, where the crown had just emerged successfully from a long and confused civil war. The nobility and the urban aristocracy of Barcelona had been faced with violent social movements of the peasants and the lower classes of the cities and were themselves riven by family and factional strife. The crown intervened, mainly on the side of the lower classes but, inevitably, in alliance with some of the noble factions and against the French who had taken the opportunity to occupy Cerdagne and Roussillon. In 1486 Ferdinand settled the Catalan problem by a compromise, the Sentencia de Guadalupe, which effectively abolished serfdom and the more-oppressive feudal obligations of the peasants in return for monetary payments to the lords. Otherwise, the political and legal privileges of the rural nobility and the urban aristocracy were left intact. Effectively, therefore, Ferdinand made no attempt to strengthen the powers of the crown and to give the principality a more efficient system of government. But Ferdinand had given Catalonia peace and the opportunity to make good the ravages of the civil wars and the losses of commercial markets to Italian competitors. This opportunity was only partially taken by the Catalans. They failed completely to prevent the Genoese from establishing a dominant position in the economy of Castile and, more especially, in the vital and rapidly expanding Atlantic trade of Sevilla. The union of the Crowns of Aragon and Castile therefore led to neither a political and institutional union nor to an economic integration of the Iberian Peninsula. Castile
Castile, too, was a poor country. Much of its soil was arid, and its agriculture was undeveloped. The armed shepherds of the powerful sheep-owners’ guild, the Mesta, drove their flocks over hundreds of miles, from summer to winter pastures and back again, spoiling much cultivated land. Despite the violent hostility of the landowners, the government upheld the Mesta privileges, since the guild paid generously for them and was supported by the merchants who exported the raw wool to the cloth industry of Flanders. The activities of the Mesta were undoubtedly harmful to the peasant economy of large parts of Castile and, by impoverishing the peasants, limited the markets for urban industries and thus the growth of some Castilian towns. A change, however, occurred in the 16th century. Just as in the rest of Europe, the population of Spain grew, rising in Castile from about 4.25 million in 1528 to about 6.5 million after 1580. To meet the increasing demands for agricultural products, the peasants expanded the cultivation of grain and other foodstuffs, and the Mesta and its migratory flocks gradually lost their dominant position in the Castilian economy. Their contributions to government finances declined as a proportion of total government revenue. The growing market also stimulated urban industries. Segovia, Toledo, Córdoba, and other towns expanded their manufactures of textile and metal. The apex of this expansion was reached in the third quarter of the 16th century, but it never matched that of Flemish and northern Italian cities. Overall, Spain remained a country that exported raw materials and imported manufactures.
In the northern provinces of Castile there lived a large class of minor nobles, the hidalgos. The inhabitants of Guipúzcoa (by the westernmost French border) even claimed that they were all of noble birth. But the south, New Castile (southeast of Madrid), Extremadura (southwest of Madrid), and especially Andalusia—that is, those provinces most recently reconquered from the Muslims—were the domain of the great nobility. There the Enríquez, the Mendoza, and the Guzmán families and others owned vast estates, sometimes covering almost half a province. They had grown rich as a result of the boom in wool exports to Flanders during the 15th-century, when there were more than 2.5 million sheep in Castile, and it was they, with their hordes of vassals and retainers, who had attempted to dominate a constitutionally almost absolute, but politically weak, monarchy.