There were other reasons beside the growing peacefulness of the
Spaniards why Granada was left to develop in comparative security for
two centuries. It was impossible that adjacent ambitious kingdoms,
such as Navarre, Castile, Aragon, Leon, and Portugal, with indefinite
and disputed boundaries, and, on account of intermarriages between the
kingdoms, with indefinite and disputed successions, should ever be at
peace. In the perpetual strife and warfare which prevailed on
account of royal European alliances, the fate of foreign princes and
princesses were often involved, and hence European states stood ready
to take a hand.
Castile and Aragon had gradually absorbed the smaller states,
excepting Portugal on the one side and Navarre on the other. The
history of Spain at this time is a history of the struggles of these
two states for supremacy. The most eventful as well as the most lurid
period of this prolonged civil war was while Pedro the Cruel was
king of Castile, 1350-69. This Spanish Nero, when sixteen years old,
commenced his reign by the murder of his mother. A catalogue of his
crimes is impossible. Enough to say that assassination was his remedy,
and means of escape, from every entanglement in which his treacheries
involved him. It was the unhappy fate of Blanche de Bourbon, sister of
Charles V., King of France, to marry this King of Castile, and when
he refused to live with her and had her removed from his palace the
Alcazar to a fortress, and finally poisoned her, the French King
determined to avenge the insult to his royal house. He allied himself
with the King of Aragon to destroy Pedro, with whom the King of Aragon
was of course at war.
Edward, the "Black Prince," was then brilliantly invading France and
extending the kingdom of his father Edward III. He was the kinsman of
Pedro, and when appealed to by his cousin for aid in protecting
his kingdom from the King of Aragon and his French allies, Edward
gallantly consented to help him; and in the spring of 1367, for
the second time, a splendid army advanced through the Pass at
Roncesvalles, and a great battle, worthy of a better cause, was fought
and won.
So this most atrocious king--perhaps excepting Richard III. of
England, whom he resembled--had for his champion the victor of Cressy
and Poictiers. He was restored to his throne, which had been usurped
by his brother Enrique (or Henry), but in a personal encounter with
Enrique soon after (which was artfully brought about by the famous
Breton knight, Bertrand du Guesclin), he met a deserved fate (1369).
Constanza, the daughter of Pedro the Cruel, had been married to John
of Gaunt (Duke of Lancester), brother of the Black Prince and son of
Edward III. As Constanza was the great-grandmother of Isabella I. of
Spain, so in the veins of that revered Queen there flowed the blood of
the Plantagenets, as well as that of Pedro the Cruel!
Because of the number of doubtful pretenders always existing in
Spain, disputes about the royal succession also always existed. Such
a dispute now led to a long war with Portugal, where King Fernando had
really the most valid hereditary claim to the throne made vacant by
Pedro's death. If his right had been acknowledged, Portugal and Spain
would now be united; Isabella would have remained only a poor and
devout princess, and would never have had the power to win a continent
for the world. So impossible is it to remove one of the links forged
by fate, that we dare not regret even so monstrous a reign as that of
Pedro the Cruel!
Enrique's right to the vacant throne of his brother had two
disputants. Besides the King of Portugal, John of Gaunt, who had
married the lady Constanza,--by virtue of her rights as daughter of
Pedro,--claimed the crown of Castile. This Plantagenet was actually
proclaimed King of Castile and Leon (1386). For twenty-five years
he vainly strove to come into his kingdom as sovereign; but finally
compromised by giving his young daughter Catherine to the boy "Prince
of Asturias," the heir to the throne. He was obliged to content
himself by thus securing to his child the long-coveted prize. And it
was this Catherine, who at fourteen was betrothed to a boy of nine,
who was the grandmother of Isabella, Queen of Castile.
When such was the private history of those highest in the land we can
only imagine what must have been that of the rest. Feudalism, which
was a part of Spain's Gothic inheritance, had always made that
country one of its strongholds, and chivalry had nowhere else found
so congenial a soil. There was no great artisan class, as in France,
creating a powerful "bourgeoisie"; no "guilds," or simple "burghers,"
as in Germany, stubbornly standing for their rights; no "boroughs"
and "town meetings," where the people were sternly guarding their
liberties, as in England.
The history of other nations is that of the struggles of the common
people against the tyranny of kings and rulers. If there were any
"common people" in Spain, they were so effaced that history makes no
mention of them. We hear only of kings and great barons and
glorious knights; and their wonderful deeds and their valor and
prowess--excepting in the wars with the Moors--were always over
boundary-lines and successions, or personal quarrels more or less
disgraceful, with never a single high purpose or a principle involved.
It was all a gay, ambitious pageant, adorned by a mantle of chivalry,
and made sacred by the banner of the Cross. In the history of no other
European country do we see a great state develop under despotism so
unredeemed by wholesome ideals, and so unmitigated and unrestrained by
gentle human impulses.