Ferdinand I of Aragon

Ferdinand I of Aragon (Medina del Campo, November 27, 1380-Igualada, April 2, 1416), also called Fernando de Trastámara and Fernando de Antequera, the Just and the Honest, was a prince of Castile, king of Aragon, Valencia, Mallorca, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica; Duke of Neopatria and Athens; Count of Cerdanya, Roussillon and Barcelona; and regent of Castile. He was the first Aragonese monarch of the Castilian Trastámara dynasty, although he was of Aragonese origin on his maternal side, since his mother Leonor of Aragón was the sister of Martín I of Aragón, called the Human .

Family origins

Fernando was the second son of Juan I of Castile and Eleanor of Aragon, sister of the Aragonese King Martín the Human, and grandson, therefore, of King Pedro IV the Ceremonious through his mother, and of King Enrique II of Castile, for the paternal branch.

When he was only ten years old, his father, King Juan I, shortly before dying, invested him in the Cortes held in Guadalajara in 1390, and in the presence of his older brother Enrique, with the dominion of Lara, the duchy of Peñafiel and the county of Mayorga as well as ceded the towns of Cuéllar, San Esteban de Gormaz and Castrojeriz and assigned an income of half a million maravedís at the expense of the royal treasury. During the ceremony, the king placed a "pearl garland" on her head, a symbol of ducal preeminence. This "inheritance" was extended after the king's death, since he ceded the towns of Medina del Campo and Olmedo in his will. His subsequent marriage with his aunt Leonor de Alburquerque, five years older than him, considerably expanded his territorial heritage, for it was not without reason that Leonor was called the "Rich Female". She owned the lands of Haro, Briones, Cerezo and Belorado, in La Rioja; Ledesma and the so-called Cinco Villas in the Bajo Tormes region; Alburquerque, Medellín, La Codosera, Alconétar, Azagala and Alconchel, in Extremadura. She also owned the territories of Villalón and Urueña by concession from the king. Thus, the possessions of the couple formed a strip that from the border of Aragon to the border of Portugal divided the kingdom of Castile in two, without forgetting that it included some of the most important strongholds: Medina del Campo, Olmedo, Peñafiel and Alburquerque.. Thus, having become the most powerful lord of Castile "it is not difficult to imagine the splendor of the princely court in Medina del Campo", as the historian Jaume Vicens Vives has highlighted.

Regent of Castile

Despite the fact that, given his status as a second son, the throne of Castile was occupied by his brother, the future Enrique III in 1390, his poor health (he suffered from diseases such as typhus and smallpox, which earned him the nickname el Doliente) and the fact that he was unable to conceive a male who would inherit the throne, allowed Fernando to harbor hopes of obtaining the Castilian throne, as evidenced by the fact that he married in 1393 with his aunt Leonor de Alburquerque, thus reinforcing his dynastic rights in the event that his brother died. However, the birth of a male heir, the future Juan II, in 1405, a year before the death of Enrique III, ended Ferdinand's hopes of occupying the throne of Castile.

When Henry III the Suffering died in 1406, he established in his will that during the minority of his son Juan II, who was then two years old, they would assume the regency of the kingdom his widow and mother of the latter, Catalina de Lancáster, and his brother Fernando, "both for two together." However, the education and custody of the child king would be the responsibility of the mayor waiter Juan de Velasco, the mayor justice Diego López de Estúñiga and Pablo de Santa María, bishop of Cartagena.

The disagreements between the two co-regents, instigated by the nobility, did not take long to appear, so they reached an agreement to divide the territory into two halves, with Fernando corresponding to the southern part of the Kingdom, which extends through the territories located to the south of the Sierra de Guadarrama to the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, which will allow him to resume the war against said kingdom that the death of Enrique III had paralyzed.

With the resumption of military actions against the Nasrid kingdom of Granada, Fernando manages to take Pruna and Zahara de la Sierra, but fails in the conquest of Setenil, after which he is forced by the Regency Council to sign the truce that for two years the Nasrid king Yusuf III had offered.

After the period of truce, Fernando resumed the Granada campaign and conquered, on September 16, 1410, the important square of Antequera that would give it its best-known nickname.

During his regency, Fernando took advantage of his position to magnify his house and ensure the position of his many children, as he revealed in a letter addressed to his private Sancho de Rojas, Bishop of Palencia: «Thank God, I have five fixed and two fixed, and every day I hope to see more, according to the inheritance of the infanta, my wife, and mine, the reason is that I begin to look for what they inherit. Thus, using all kinds of pressure, favors and bribes, he managed to get two of his sons appointed masters of the two most important military orders in Castile and that "constituted a territorial, economic and military power within the State", according to Jaume Vicens Vives: the order of Alcántara, for his son Sancho —who was invested in January 1409 when he was only eight years old—; and the order of Santiago, for his son Enrique, also invested in 1409 at the age of nine. He also obtained the necessary papal dispensation so that the marriage of his eldest son Alfonso could be celebrated with the sister of Juan II and his niece, María, who was granted the Marquesate of Villena by the Courts of Castilla meeting in Tordesillas, with the ducal title. Alfonso's marriage to Princess María, according to Jaume Vicens Vives, "closed with a firm brooch the absolute domain that Don Fernando, thanks to his regency, his own possessions and the masterships held by his children, exercised in the wide solar of the Mediodía Castilian". And on the other hand, "this is how the faction of the infantes of Castile was formed", who after Ferdinand's accession to the throne of the Crown of Aragon, will be known as the infantes of Aragon.

Caspe Pledge

In 1410, when his uncle King Martin I of Aragon died without direct and legitimate descendants, Fernando presented his candidacy for the succession to the Aragonese throne and, although initially up to six candidates for the throne were presented and Fernando is not from the most favored, the fall from grace of Luis de Anjou (who could not respond to the requests for military aid from his supporters due to the distance from Naples) promoted his candidacy, which became the most powerful along with that of Jaime of Urgell.

Fernando, who had great economic power (his network of lordships was enormous), solid military prestige and the Castilian army at his disposal, had the support of the Valencian family of the Centelles, of the Aragonese family of the Urreas and of a substantial part of the Barcelona bourgeoisie. This, together with the errors of Jaime de Urgel, including the conspiracy to assassinate the Archbishop of Zaragoza, García Fernández de Heredia, and the support of both Benedict XIII, as well as his confessor, Vicente Ferrer, to which must be added the payment of the bribe corresponding to the nine representatives of the three kingdoms, will tip the balance towards the candidacy of Fernando, who will be endorsed, on June 28, 1412, in the so-called Compromise of Caspe when he is proclaimed king of Aragon, Valencia, Mallorca and Count of Barcelona

According to Jaume Vicens Vives, «the delegates [meeting in Caspe] measured the military glory, the wealth and the political ability that the Regent Don Fernando had demonstrated; but they did not take into account the voracious restlessness that germinated in the family". An assessment of the latter that had also been made at the time by the Aragonese Jerónimo Zurita, who also highlighted that with Fernando came the "government of foreign people":

And that this kingdom was very poor for five infant sons that the king had, raised in that greatness and wealth of states and in supreme dominion, where every qual of them had an infantry. And when the poverty of things here did not satisfy their ambition, it was true that the general contempt for everything and the hatred and abhorrence of our laws and customs were born of it.

King of Aragon

Florin de Fernando I de Aragón. Museo de Prehistoria de Valencia.

After taking the full oath as king on September 3 before the Cortes of Aragón meeting since August 25, 1412 in Zaragoza, where several of his former rivals to occupy the throne, such as Alfonso de Aragón the Elder, Fadrique de Luna and Juan de Prades, will pay homage to him, he will go to Lérida, where representatives of his great rival, Jaime de Urgel, pay vassalage to him, in exchange for the dukedom of Montblanch and the arrangement of a marriage between his children Enrique and Isabel.

Ferdinand I then went to Tortosa to meet with his great supporter Benedict XIII who, on November 21, 1412, invested him as King of Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia in exchange for royal support in the dispute that Benedict was maintaining with the other two popes who simultaneously governed the Christian world: Gregory XII and John XXIII, in the middle of the Western Schism that divided the Catholic Church.

On November 19, Ferdinand convened the Catalan Courts in order to swear their uses and customs; on December 15 they were summoned, but they would not conclude until August 31, 1413, due to the need to quell the revolt of Jaime II of Urgell that began in the spring of this last year; The start of those in Valencia had been scheduled for April 15, 1413, but the uprising of Jaime II and the coronation in Zaragoza (which took place in 1414) prevented its start. With the help of all the estates of the Crown he quelled the revolt and besieged the count of Urgell in the castle of Balaguer, which was taken on October 31, after which the former claimant to the throne of Aragon was stripped of all his titles and possessions, as well as those of his family, and taken to the prison of Urueña in Castilla. In 1413 he would propose to the Catalan Courts to make the first compilation of the Constitutions.

According to a traditional interpretation, in the Cortes that he had convened in Barcelona, Ferdinand I had to give in to the so-called Catalan pactismo, a doctrine that limited royal authority in favor of the Cortes and the Diputación del General of Catalonia. This movement, headed by Joan Fivaller, stated that privilegi atorgat tollent ley pacionada de dret, non val and that privilegi atorgat contra ben publich is null, for which they were «Determined to give him his life rather than freedom». However, the entire alleged “Fivaller case” or “vectigal affair” and the elaboration based on it of a theory of Catalan pactismo is currently considered a mythical tale. Firstly, because in any case it would be a claim by the municipality of Barcelona and not by the Diputación del General de Catalunya, and local complaints to the king were common both in Barcelona and in other municipalities, and secondly, because an exhaustive analysis of the documentation, carried out by Ramón Grau, reveals that what has been reported since the chroniclers of the XV century (in works of great literary component, such as the biography of King Fernando by Lorenzo Valla) is completely inaccurate, as there is not even documentation about a dispute between the municipality and the king. Fernando also named Fivaller executor of his will, which he granted on October 10, 1415 in Perpignan. Regarding this episode, Verdés Pijuan points out:

We find ourselves, therefore, above all a historiographic myth, elaborated after the events with a clear political intention. [...] As I said, they were the romantic historians of the Renaixença those who had just given a letter of nature to the story and, by action or omission, contemporary historiography (except for some specific exception) has done little to correct this interested interpretation of the facts.

Pere Verdés Pijuan, art. cit., 2011, p. 150.

After eliminating or neutralizing all internal opposition, Fernando I went again to Zaragoza, where he will be crowned in 1414 in a ceremony that started from the Aljafería Palace and arrived at La Seo, after which he turned his attention to politics abroad.

Domestic policy

Ferdinand I of Aragon reigned for a short time; Despite this, in the approximately three years and nine months that his government lasted (bearing in mind, moreover, that the revolt of the Count of Urgell kept him busy putting it down until October 31, 1413] he reorganized the Treasury and cleaned up the economy and the administration of the Crown. He worked on citizen security, tried to prevent persecution against Jews and tried to fight corruption. He also undertook a reform of the municipal governments seeking greater participation of their representatives. Regarding the political institutions, he did not introduce structural changes in the organization of the Crown, but instead maintained the previous system, ensuring that the king participated as a more integrated element in the established government agencies, which contributed to the strengthening of royal power. in this area was to restore order after the unstable period of the Interregnum.

I also support the maintainers of the Gaya science, with 40 florins per year and by the rule of their elections

Foreign Policy

He normalized the internal situation of Sicily with the appointment in 1415 of his son Juan as Viceroy of Sicily, managing to put an end to the civil war that since the death of Martin the Younger faced the widow of this man, Blanca I of Navarre, with his illegitimate son, Fadrique de Luna. He also directed his son Juan towards Naples, proposing his marriage to Queen Juana, proclaimed on the death of her brother Ladislao I of Naples on August 6, 1414, but the marriage did not prosper and Juan ended up marrying Blanca. The rest of those called by Don Juan Manuel "infants of Aragon", Enrique, Pedro and Sancho placed them as grand masters of the military orders of Santiago, Calatrava and Alcántara; for their part, the infantas of Aragon María and Leonor ended up being queen consorts of Castile and Portugal respectively. In addition, as belonging to the Trastámara lineage, Fernando I had large assets in Castile, where he was also regent, which allowed him de facto to govern in both Crowns, since he did not renounce the Castilian regency after reaching the Aragonese throne.

In the matter of the Western Schism, he soon broke ties with Benedict XIII (Pope Luna or antipope) and tried to get him to renounce the pontificate, for which he met with him in Morella (1414) and in Perpignan (1415).. After the decision taken at the Council of Constanza, meeting on November 5, 1414, which dismissed the three popes, and the interview that Ferdinand I had with Emperor Sigismund, the King of Aragon decided to help put an end to the Schism by leaving support Pope Luna, which allowed the Crown of Aragon to once again occupy the center of decisions at the European level and recover its position at the forefront of politics in the Mediterranean.

He ensured the continuity of the monarchy, an aspect that had caused so many problems with the death without an heir of Martín I el Humano, naming his eldest son Alfonso royal heir.

Death

Poblet Monastery. Tombs of the Casa de Aragón

In the middle of 1415 the symptoms of the serious disease that would lead to his death began and was diagnosed as arenes de ronyons. Thus, at the beginning of 1416, concerned about his possessions in Castile —whose regency he still held and which he exercised through four delegates: the bishops Sigüenza and Cartagena, the count of Montealegre and the adelantado of Andalusia—, he informed his second son Juan, that he was in Sicily as his lieutenant, that as soon as he had news of his death he immediately went to Seville to take "at his hand, the part of government that he could in that province due to the king's younger age".

On March 14, 1416, his illness worsened in Igualada, where he would die on April 2 of the same year.

In his will, he bequeathed most of his Castilian possessions and titles to his second son Juan, in addition to the duchy of Montblanch, while his other son Enrique received the county of Alburquerque and the county of Ledesma. On his part, his son, Pedro received the Catalan cities and towns of Tarrasa, Vilagrasa and Tárrega and the Valencian ones of Elche and Crevillente.

Offspring

From his marriage to Leonor de Alburquerque he had seven children:

• Alfonso el Magnánimo (Medina del Campo, 1394-1458), king of Aragon, with the name of Alfonso V, and of Naples and Sicily, with the name of Alfonso I.
• María de Aragón (Medina del Campo, 1396-1445), first wife of Juan II de Castilla.
• John the Great (Medina del Campo, 1397-1479), king of Aragon and king consort of Navarre.
• Enrique (1400-Calatayud, battle wounds, 1445), II duke de Villena, III count of Alburquerque, Count of Ampurias, Grand Master of the Order of Santiago.
• Leonor (1402-1445), who married Eduardo I of Portugal. One of his daughters, Leonor, was the wife of Emperor Frederick III of Habsburg.
• Peter (1406-1438, Italy, in battle), IV count of Alburquerque, Duke of Noto.
• Sancho (1400-1416).

Ancestors

Predecessor: Queen of Henry III	Regent of the Crown of Castile Minority of John II 1406-1416 Next to Catherine de Lancaster: 1406-1418	Successor: Catalina de Lancaster
Predecessor: Martin I	King of Aragon and Valencia Count of Barcelona 1412-1416	Successor: Alfonso V
Predecessor: Jaime II	Count of Urgel 1413-1416	Successor: (Incorporation to the Crown of Aragon)