KINGS OF CASTILE AND ARAGON.
We have been hitherto tracing the course of several streams which,
rising in various parts of Africa and Spain in the south and in the
north, yet have mingled their currents somewhat; but we shall soon find
that the stream which had its source in the north became eventually a
resistless torrent that swept all before it.
At or near the close of the twelfth century we find three Alfonsos
on as many thrones: Alfonso VIII, surnamed the Noble, in Castile;
Alfonso IX in Leon and Oviedo; and Alfonso II ruling in Portugal, which
had become separated from Spain in 1095. Navarre was under Sancho
VII, while Aragon and the greater portion of Catalonia acknowledged
Pedro II. At the same time the Moslems were governed by Mohammed
abu Abdallah, the son of Yacoub, who had won the great battle of
Alarcos. These are names merely, some of which have hardly survived, in
connection with great deeds, the lives of those who bore them. But it
was permitted Alfonso VIII, in the year 1212, to inflict a defeat upon
the Moors from which they never recovered. This was at the great battle
of Navas de Tolosa, when, according to the statements of the victors,
at least one hundred thousand Moslems fell, victims to Christian
prowess, and, sad to relate, after the victory was assured, objects of
Christian bigotry; for they treated with shameful barbarity those who
survived.
The battlefield of Tolosa was the turning point of Moslem fortunes,
for from the date of that great event the followers of Mahommed lost
steadily in Spain, retreating ever nearer the southern coast, whence
their ancestors had invaded the peninsula five hundred years before.
Alfonso the Noble survived this achievement but two years, and died in
1214, leaving a reputation not only as a great warrior, but as a lover
of learning, having established, it is said, the first university in
Spain in the year 1209. He left his throne to his son Henry I, and
under the regency of his daughter Berenguela, who, when Henry was
accidentally killed, secured the kingdom for her own son Ferdinand.
Two momentous events came to pass at this time—the battle of Tolosa,
which drove back the Moslems, and the union of the kingdoms of Castile
and Leon under one ruler; for at the death of Alfonso IX of Leon the
kingdom passed to Ferdinand III, who was thus placed in possession of
resources and armies which he could unite toward the expulsion of the
Moors.
He was later canonized for his great services to Christendom, and
is known to history as St. Ferdinand. It is a curious fact that his
cousin, Louis of France, son of his mother’s sister, and likewise
a grandson of Alfonso VIII of Castile, was also canonized; and the
grandmother of both was Eleanor of England, daughter of Henry II.
Well, St. Ferdinand, to call him by the title bestowed upon him three
hundred years after his death, was a flaming sword as toward the Moors.
He captured their capital, Cordova, in 1236, the city of Jaen in 1246,
and at last the “Queen of the Guadalquivir,” beautiful Seville (ancient
port of the Phœnicians, the Roman Hispalis), where he died in 1252, and
where his tomb and many precious relics of his time may be seen in the
great cathedral there.
Almost equally renowned was Jayme I, the King of Aragon, who took the
Balearic Isles from the Moors in 1229, Valencia in 1237, the province
of Murcia in 1266, and who, before he died in 1276, had gained thirty
pitched battles with the enemy, and had founded, some say, more than
two thousand Christian churches. But he has the credit of having
introduced into Spain the terrible Inquisition (in 1232), and that goes
far toward counterbalancing his meritorious work for the freedom of his
country.
Alfonso X, called “the Wise,” because he was more a scholar than
soldier, succeeded St. Ferdinand, and under him, it is recorded, the
Castilian became the national language. Slowly but steadily the ancient
Gothic had been changing, and it was now in a sense crystallized when
Alfonso caused the Bible to be translated into the Castilian, as well
as works on chemistry and philosophy, and wrote a chronicle of Spain
down to the time of Ferdinand, his father and predecessor. The “Fuero
Juzgo, or Forum Judicum,” the ancient Visigothic code of laws, which he
translated and codified, became the law of the land and the model of
yet existing laws in Spain.
But, though quite learned, Alfonso was not morally much in advance of
his time, for he caused his brother to be strangled, and provoked a
rebellion of his sons, by which he was driven from his throne two years
before his death. His son, Sancho IV, who was as vigorous as his father
was feeble, drove the Emir of Morocco back to Africa in 1291, and after
a short reign left the kingdom to his son, Ferdinand IV, who, dying in
1312, was succeeded by Alfonso XI of Castile. He was the last of that
name to sit on the throne until Alfonso XII, father of the boy king of
our time, Alfonso XIII, after an interval of five hundred and sixty
years.
Ferdinand IV was an infant too young to reign at the death of his
father, but affairs of the kingdom were ably managed by the queen
regent, his mother, and when he reached man’s estate he nobly devoted
himself to the great work bequeathed him by his ancestors. Under him
the Castilian frontiers were extended to Gibraltar, the fortress of
which he took, in the year 1302. But his reign was likewise short, and
at his death he left the kingdom to an infant son, and the regency
to his mother, Maria, who a second time assumed the cares of royalty
without its remunerations.
Alfonso XI showed the lack of parental guidance during youth by the
errors of his early manhood, among other indiscretions forming an
illegitimate alliance with a lady who became the mother of Don Enrique
of Trastamara, who later slew his half–brother Pedro “the Cruel.” By
the great victory of the Rio Salado, in 1340, Alfonso retrieved his
damaged reputation in the eyes of the people and firmly established the
kingdom upon an impregnable basis. The combined hosts of Spanish Moors
and Africans had assembled and laid siege to Tarifa, the southernmost
town in Spain. The Christian armies, under the lead of Alfonso and the
king of Portugal, met and overthrew them near the plains of Algeciras,
inflicting such slaughter that the dead lay piled in heaps, the slain,
it was estimated, amounting to two hundred thousand.
This was the last invasion from Africa, which had been so prolific
in barbarian and semi–barbarian conquerors; and if any other was in
contemplation it was prevented the following year, when Alfonso’s fleet
destroyed that of the Moors in the Straits of Gibraltar. King Alfonso
besieged the fortress of Gibraltar itself—which had been in Moorish
possession since 1333—but failed to dislodge the enemy, and it was not
until more than a hundred years later, in 1462, that it again fell
into the hands of the Spaniards. Alfonso doubtless held the ambitious
project of ridding the peninsula entirely of the Moors; but his
country was not sufficiently united, and one hundred and fifty years
were to elapse before the consummation of this object, under King
Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. That he was a valiant warrior, despite
his many failings, is shown by his death in the field, while besieging
Gibraltar, when he fell a victim to the terrible pestilence known as
the “black death,” in the year 1350.
His son and successor, Don Pedro of Castile, is known to history as
“Pedro the Cruel,” which name well illustrates his character. Cruel
and licentious to a degree never before shown in any occupant of the
throne, Pedro followed his father’s pernicious example, his amour with
Doña Maria de Padilla being maintained while his lawful wife was a
prisoner by his command. Though for a time popular with the masses,
owing to his inclination rather toward the people than the nobility,
his lust, covetousness, and cruelty caused a revolt. He overcame his
opponents, but signalled his return to power by the murder of his
half–brother, Don Fadrique, his mother, many of his relatives, and his
wife. It is charged against him that he cut the throats of the Emir of
Granada and fifty of his nobles, while they were his guests under a
flag of truce, and committed other atrocious deeds. His half–brother,
Henry, having escaped to France, returned with an army, but Pedro
appealed to the son of the English Edward III, the “Black Prince,”
and that gallant adventurer, then fighting in France, came to his
assistance. By his aid he discomfited his enemies, but his cruelty to
prisoners so disgusted his noble ally that he retired and left him to
his fate. Henry then appeared with a small force, around which the
people eagerly gathered, and Pedro was defeated and taken prisoner.
The last act of this terrible drama took place in a tent where the
half–brothers, sons of the same father, met in deadly combat, which
ended by Pedro’s being stabbed in the back, and pouring out his
life–blood at the fratricide’s feet. Thus were the sins of Alfonso XI
quickly visited upon his children, and the kingdom which he had founded
threatened with disruption.
Pedro the Cruel was killed in 1369, and as Henry II his half–brother,
the regicide, assumed his place, claimants arose to contest his dubious
title to the throne, and among them John of Gaunt, the English Duke
of Lancaster, Pedro’s son–in–law. At the same time, as enemies, he
could count the Kings of Moorish Granada, Aragon, and Navarre. But he
defeated the machinations of all these opponents and eventually reduced
the kingdom to a state of peace, in which it continued till his death,
in 1379, which was occasioned by a pair of poisoned boots, sent him as
a present by the treacherous Emir of Granada.
His son, John I, reigned eleven years, or from 1379 to 1390, though in
1385 the Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt, assumed the title of king,
with the arms of Castile, Leon, and France. He was, however, dissuaded
by the promise that his daughter Catherine (whose mother was Constance,
daughter of Pedro the Cruel and Maria de Padilla) should marry Henry
III, who succeeded to the throne of Castile in 1390, and reigned until
1406. The heir of this union was John II, who was King of Castile from
1406 to 1454, and whose chief claim to distinction is as the father of
Isabella, who, after her brother, Henry IV, had died, in 1474, became
Queen of Castile. Thus in the veins of the woman who was to become the
greatest of her line ran the blood, not only of Pedro the Cruel, but of
his bastard brother, Henry of Trastamare.
But the resultant issue of her marriage with Ferdinand of Aragon,
in 1469, was to be yet more deeply tinctured with the blood of the
regicide; for the son of Henry of Trastamare had married a daughter of
Pedro of Aragon, who was almost as cruel and implacable as Pedro of
Castile. Ferdinand, son of John I, and grandson of Henry, became King
of Aragon, and was succeeded by his son, John II of Aragon, through
whom at his death the throne passed to Ferdinand, later called the
Catholic, and who became the royal consort of Isabella.
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