Peter I of Castile
Pedro I of Castilla (Burgos, August 30, 1334-Montiel, March 23, 1369), later called "the Cruel" for his detractors and "el Justicero" or "el Justiciero" by his supporters, he was King of Castile from March 26, 1350 until his assassination.
Youth
Born in the defensive tower of the monastery of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas in Burgos, Pedro was the son and successor of Alfonso XI of Castile and María of Portugal, daughter of King Alfonso IV of Portugal, and was the last King of Castile of the House of Burgundy. He was born on August 30, 1334, when his brother and heir to the throne, Fernando, had already died. His parents' marriage had been a consequence of the pact between Castile and Portugal of 1327, but the king actually lived with his lover, Leonor de Guzmán, a nobleman from one of the most prominent Castilian lineages, with whom he lived for twenty-three years and had ten children. The Portuguese king's continuous efforts to break the relationship failed.
His education was very neglected, as Alfonso XI, carried away by his love for Leonor de Guzmán, left the upbringing of his heir to María de Portugal, the queen consort, who lived with her son in the Alcázar of Seville. Pedro thus grew apart from the court, as was his mother, unlike his paternal lover and his children.In his early years he was raised by Vasco Rodríguez de Cornago, master of the Order of Santiago. Also for his education Fray Juan García de Castrojeriz, one of his tutors and confessor of his mother, translated De regimine principum by Egidio Romano.
His father promised him to Juana, daughter of the English king Edward III, but the poverty of the English treasury, unable to provide the bride's dowry, and then her unexpected death on September 2, 1348 in Bordeaux, when He was already traveling to Castile, they frustrated the marriage, a mere seal of the alliance between kingdoms.
Beginning of his reign
Alburquerque Valimiento
Alfonso XI died on the night of March 25, 1350, while he was besieging Gibraltar. His death gradually undid the network of loyalties that the influential Leonor de Guzmán had been weaving in the last years of the reign, in which she enjoyed remarkable influence. Pedro inherited the kingdom without opposition, but in a serious military and economic situation: the army had disbanded after the death of King Alfonso and the southern border was threatened, at a time of great hardship for the Castilian Treasury, harmed due to the economic crisis, poor harvests, the Black Death and the war expenses of the deceased sovereign. Consequently, the first action of the new king was to sign peace with the Nasrids and the Marinids on July 17.
Then Leonor de Guzmán was imprisoned, which did not prevent her from organizing the marriage of her son Enrique with Juana Manuel de Villena, a skilful maneuver that ensured Enrique patrimony and the prestige of the lineage of his wife, great-granddaughter of Fernando III of Castilla. The anger that the marriage caused at court made Enrique flee to Asturias and Leonor was taken to Carmona to keep her away from the Sevillian court. By the end of the year, the situation had stabilized to a certain extent: the southern border peace had been secured and signed with the Muslims, the masterships had been appeased and Leonor de Guzmán imprisoned..
The beginning of his reign in March 1350, when he was not yet sixteen years old, was marked by the struggles between the different factions that vied for power: the various children that his father King Alfonso had had XI with Leonor de Guzmán, the Aragonese infants, blood cousins of the king and the queen mother, María de Portugal.
Initially, power was controlled by the faction of the queen mother and the Portuguese favorite Juan Alfonso de Alburquerque, who had served as her tutor. This, suspecting the intentions of Alfonso's former lover, Leonor de Guzmán, advised the king to arrest his half-brothers, Count Enrique de Trastámara and the Grand Master of the Order of Santiago, Fadrique Alfonso de Castilla, which motivated their first rebellion. However, these were soon forgiven by the new monarch who, when those who carried the body of his father approached Seville, went out with his mother to receive them at a great distance from the city.
In mid-August 1350, Pedro fell seriously ill. The possible succession pointed to his first cousin, the Infante Fernando de Aragón y Castilla, Marquis of Tortosa and nephew of Alfonso XI. Others preferred Juan Núñez de Lara, descendant of the infantes of La Cerda through the male line, although they had formally renounced the succession in exchange for substantial properties in the time of Pedro's grandfather, Ferdinand IV of Castile the Summons. The recovery of the young king led to the lifting of the siege on Gibraltar and the cessation of all war with the Muslims. Convalescing from his illness, Pedro remained in Seville until early 1351, when he left for the north to celebrate Cortes.
Submission of Burgos and the Señorío de Vizcaya
Garcilaso II de la Vega had made a stronghold in Burgos, from where he tried to challenge the king who arrived in the city in May 1351 in an atmosphere of great tension between the soldiers of both sides. However, the The king called him before him and had him brutally killed, putting an end to this source of resistance, but beginning the series of deaths that caused fear and the flight of those who feared they would be the next victims of the sovereign.
Later, the monarch persecuted Nuño Díaz de Haro, a three-year-old boy, son of the late Juan Núñez de Lara, to strip him of the lordship of Vizcaya. Nuño managed to flee from Bermeo, but he died two years later. Juana de Lara and Isabel, sisters of the deceased child, remained under Pedro's guardianship.
The king made the territory of Las Encartaciones his own, a conquest carried out by Fernán Pérez de Ayala, father of the chronicler Pedro López de Ayala. Vizcaya, Lerma and Lara, along with other towns and castles, were incorporated into the royal domain. Juana married Pedro's bastard half-brother Tello of Castilla, and Isabella married the Infante Juan of Aragón y Castilla, a first cousin of King Pedro and younger brother of the Infante Fernando of Aragón.
Fernando was murdered years later by order of Pedro IV of Aragon. Juana and Isabel Núñez de Lara, the infant Juan de Aragón and the mother of the Aragonese infants Juan and Fernando and blood aunt of Pedro I, were murdered on different dates by order of Pedro I of Castile. The bastard son of King Alfonso, the future Enrique II of Castile, who was in the same place in Aragon where the infante Fernando and Enrique's brother, Tello de Castilla, Lord Consort of Vizcaya, were murdered, finally benefited from these crimes., who concealed the murder by Pedro of his wife and titular lady of Vizcaya, Juana de Lara.
In June it was agreed to negotiate an alliance with France, despite the Queen Mother's preference for England and the poor French military situation after the last English campaigns. Alburquerque, elevated in part by Maria's support, accepted the proposal of negotiations fundamentally for internal reasons: French support would entail that of the papacy and that of the clergy of the kingdom, useful to neutralize possible opposition to the new government of Pedro I.
Cuts of Valladolid
Around 1351, he received a visit in Burgos from Carlos II of Navarre, known as el Malo, to whom he gave horses and jewels. Later he traveled to Valladolid to hold Cortes that were convened at the request of his tutor Juan Alfonso de Alburquerque, where he said:
Kings and princes live and rule for justice, in which they are stubborn to maintain and rule their peoples, and they must fulfill it and keep it.
The Cortes of Valladolid lasted from the autumn of 1351 to the spring of 1352, with the King attending until mid-March 1352. In those Cortes he sanctioned an Ordinance of artisans, dated October 2, 1351, to try to alleviate the difficulties when it comes to finding labor, as a result of the Black Death, which devastated Europe in the XIV century and even caused the death of Alfonso XI. Vagrancy was condemned, begging was prohibited, wages and salaries were assessed, hours of work and rest were ordered in each season of the year and the value of articles or products was fixed.
By request, Pedro ratified what was agreed in the Partidas on the inviolability of the attorneys of the cities and towns, forbidding the Courts "to hear of the complaints that the Attorneys file before them during the time of their attorney, until be returned to their lands."
In the same Cortes, he confirmed, amending it, the Order of Alcalá, a law of the time of Alfonso XI that gave legal force to the Partidas; he sanctioned again the Fuero Viejo de Castilla that he published in 1356, and with the king's intervention, laws against criminals were approved, the administration of justice was reorganized, provisions for the promotion of commerce were dictated, agriculture and cattle raising, the headings of the towns were lowered due to the decrease in the value of the farms, efforts were made to repress public demoralization, no less than the relaxation of customs in clergy and laymen, and attempts were made to alleviate the fate of the Jews, allowing them to occupy remote neighborhoods in the towns and cities and to appoint mayors who would understand their lawsuits.
With all this, the king affirmed his alliance with the cities, which represented the merchants and artisans; which the nobles understood as an attack on his privileges, increasing his enmity with the king. From Valladolid, from where he left at the end of March 1352, he went to Ciudad Rodrigo to meet his maternal grandfather, the King of Portugal Alfonso IV, who gave him prudent advice for the government, especially recommending that he live in peace with his brothers. [citation required]
First rebellions
After the meeting with Alfonso IV of Portugal, he went to Andalusia to subdue Alfonso Fernández Coronel, who had risen up in Aguilar, although he soon had to entrust that war to others for having learned that his brother Enrique had fortified in Asturias. Enrique had Gijón, but he could not seize Avilés and Oviedo before the royal army arrived in June 1352. He did not take long to get his brother to submit to him with the greatest signs of repentance and he forgave him for the third time. With equal speed and fortune he put down the rebellion attempts of his other brother Tello, in September.
Then the Treaty of Tarazona with Aragon was agreed in October, which was to put an end to the support that each of the kingdoms gave to the noble uprisings in the other.
That same year, and at the insistence of the papacy, it was agreed that the king would marry Blanche de Bourbon, daughter of the Duke of Bourbon and niece of the French monarch. The consequent Castilian-French alliance and the marriage contract were signed at the beginning of July of 1352. Blanca passed through Aragon and arrived in Valladolid on February 25, 1353. However, by then the king was already the lover of María de Padilla, the daughter of a feudal lord from the north of Palencia whom he had met long ago. shortly, before or after the Asturian campaign.
María had the first daughter of the relationship with the king, Beatriz, on March 22, 1353. While the king slowly advanced towards Valladolid, reluctant to celebrate the wedding agreed with the pope and France. The king's attitude Regarding the marriage and the elevation of the relatives of the lover, they harmed Alburquerque, who had just taken Aguilar and returned from Portugal from arresting the rebel Juan de la Cerda there. The valid convinced him to continue advancing by reminding Pedro of the importance of securing an heir to strengthen his position, for which the marriage to Blanca was essential. The wedding finally took place on June 3 and served as justification for a brief reconciliation of the king with his bastard brothers, who participated prominently in the celebrations.
The celebrations gave way to consternation when the king abandoned his wife three days after the wedding, an act that had serious consequences. It seems that the reason was Blanche's confirmation to the king of the French inability to pay the promised dowry. The king probably felt cheated, blamed Alburquerque and went to meet his lover. He passed through Olmedo and Montalbán before settling in Toledo, where part of the nobility followed him and where he originally headed Alburquerque, who later, suspecting that the king was trying to lure him into a trap, fled to his possessions on the Portuguese border. Then the king began to dismiss the charges that had been appointed during the defense of the fugitive, among them the Calatrava's master, who had also fled to his lands. The slow process favored the relatives of María de Padilla. The king returned to Valladolid, where the main government agencies were, which had continued to admit Managing affairs in his absence, at the beginning of July, he only spent two days with his wife, whom he abandoned to return to Olmedo with his lover; he never saw Blanca again. The French delegation that had accompanied the queen to Castile withdrew and the fate of the short-lived alliance remained in the hands of papal efforts, partly due to the precarious situation in France. Blanca left for Tordesillas and Medina del Campo with her mother-in-law, but later the king ordered that she be imprisoned in Arévalo. Thus, she was able to return to Andalusia and, in 1353, have Fernández Coronel executed by execution.
Pedro then agreed with Alburquerque for his passage to Portugal in exchange for certain guarantees, but he did not stop viciously persecuting those he believed to be linked to the former favorite. He began operations to eliminate the rebels at the beginning of 1354. He marched first against the master of Calatrava, Juan Núñez de Prado, a refugee in Almagro after having fled to Aragon, who offered no resistance and was later assassinated in prison. The mastership of the order passed to Diego García de Padilla, brother of the royal lover, despite the fact that he did not meet the requirements to be one. He then went to surrender the squares of Alburquerque in Extremadura; he achieved it with Medellín, but not with others, so he preferred to retire and demand the delivery of the old ticket to Portugal, which he did not obtain.
In 1354 and after the rebellion, he dismissed the major bailiff and the other depositaries of royal authority appointed by Alburquerque, replacing them with the Padillas, his new favorites. He dispossessed Juan Núñez de Prado of the mastership of the Order of Calatrava and gave it to Diego García de Padilla, María's brother, who had his predecessor killed in the castle of Maqueda, belonging to the same order, by a certain Diego Lopez de Porras.
Destitution of Alburquerque and betrayal of the bastards of Alfonso XI
The separation of the lord of Alburquerque from the king's service was not enough and he decided to take away the places he had. Pedro besieged the plaza in Medellín. The knights who defended the plaza sent a message to Alburquerque asking for his help or to free them from the "homage" that, as guards of the plaza, they had paid to Juan Alfonso, who was unable to help them.
Pedro immediately marched against the town of Alburquerque, but they refused to open the gates for him. The commander of Calatrava, Pedro Estébanez Carpentero, was inside, against whom the king sentenced for having resisted him, although he claimed that he was not a warden of the fortress, nor was he there for any other reason than fear of being part of the fate of the fortress. his uncle, Don Juan Núñez de Prado, Master of the Order.
This was not the only castle that kept the banner of the Lord of Alburquerque, so Pedro withdrew from the border, leaving his brothers promoted by him to count of Trastámara and to the mastership of Santiago, controlled in their movements by Juan García de Villagera, brother of the king's mistress, and whom he had favored with the major charge of the Order of Santiago.
At the same time he sent his messengers to his grandfather the King of Portugal with complaints against Alburquerque, who arrived at the time when the wedding of Fernando de Aragón, Marquis of Tortosa and first cousin of Pedro I, was celebrated in Évora, with Maria, Portuguese Infanta. A part of the rebellious nobility seriously considered the infant Ferdinand of Aragon as a possible legitimate successor to the throne of Castile if Pedro died without legitimate male children, unless these were eventually assassinated or "disappeared".
This wedding was also attended by Juan Alfonso de Alburquerque, who addressed a reasoning to the Portuguese monarch about the grievances he had received and still received from his Castilian grandson Pedro. There was no shortage of soft threats against Enrique de Trastámara and his brother in the speech, which means that the deals between him and both bastards, Pedro's brothers, had not yet begun. Alfonso IV of Portugal then made his grandson Pedro understand the complaints about Albuquerque's management of the income from Castile and, finally, he was proud of having provided the king with an illustrious link and peace with Aragon, Navarre and Portugal.
The king of Portugal sided with Alburquerque, who was his guest and relative, and other nobles of his court did the same; but when some Castilian knights spoke of the groom's entourage in accordance with the ambassadors' claim, the dispute became raging, so that the festivities were about to be bloody, although the king prevented it with his authority and mandate.
The Portuguese court later went to Estremoz, and Juan Alfonso de Alburquerque went with it. There he received a message from Enrique and Fadrique, who had been placed by his brother to defend the border, in which they proposed pacts and alliances to Juan Alfonso de Alburquerque aimed at achieving advantages for all three. They met in Elvas and Badajoz, and the deals were so advanced that they arrested Juan García de Villagera, although he managed to escape after a few hours and present himself to his lord, informing her of the conspiracy.
The pact postulated that the Crown of Castile would go to the Infante Pedro, son of the King of Portugal, as grandson of Sancho IV of Castile instead of to Fernando of Aragón, first cousin of Pedro I of Castile. The Portuguese prince received the proposals from Alvar Pérez de Castro, brother of the famous Inés de Castro, and accepted them, although his father Alfonso IV of Portugal, knowing what was being planned, made him desist from it, perhaps being part of his last resolution his sister María, mother of Pedro I of Castile, who went to meet Pedro in Toro.
New marriage
Even Pope Innocent VI was informed in Avignon of the misfortunes of the queen consort Blanca de Bourbon, sister of the queen consort of France Juana de Bourbon, coming from her father Pedro I de Bourbon without the monetary dowry agreed by the negotiators Castilians of such a wedding. It was then achieved that the king spent two more days in Valladolid at Blanca's side. But it is said that he did not pay attention to such complaints because he already had marriage deals with Juana de Castro, a widow of noble lineage, despite the fact that both his wife Blanca and his lover María lived.
It seems that Juana de Castro resisted these plans for a new marriage because the widow believed that Pedro's previous one with Blanca was valid. Passion continually silenced all prudence in the king, who not only offered several places and castles as a pledge that he would celebrate the marriage, but also wanted to prove that the marriage in Valladolid was not valid. It seems that two bishops, that of Salamanca, Juan Lucero, and the one from Ávila –not Juan as some authors say, but perhaps Sancho Blázquez Dávila– were willing to analyze or repair what happened, annulling the king's previous marriage at the beginning of April 1354. Pedro and Juana were Immediately afterwards, the Bishop of Salamanca in Cuéllar married and Juana de Castro took the title of queen, although later chroniclers assure that the next day the king abandoned her to go to Castrojeriz upset by the news that one of his own brought him. Juana, who never saw the monarch again, locked herself in the only remaining castle of those obtained from her fleeting husband, that of Dueñas, where she remained until her death. It seems that it was the news that she was n the brothers of his new wife, Álvar and Inés, who had offered the crown of the kingdom to the Portuguese heir, which triggered the new abandonment.
The pope commissioned Beltrán, bishop of Senez or Cesena (the documents refer to him as episcopus senecensis) to form a canonical process against the bishops of Salamanca and Ávila, and order the king to Serious penalties for him to abandon Juana and join his wife. Failure to do so gave him full authority to proceed, not only against the monarch, but against his aid and accomplices, even if they were archbishops, bishops, chapters, monasteries, dukes, counts, vassals, castles and places. The pope also wrote to the monarch reproaching him with harsh phrases for his crimes against public honesty and for forgetting the duties of his supreme rank, hoping that he would finally return to a better life and to the affection of his consort. Thus, the pope sided with the noble side in what was essentially a struggle for power between the latter and the monarch, giving the conflict an aspect of chivalrous defense of the White Queen that served to unite the various elements that opposed it. the king. The situation was especially paradoxical in the case of the bastard brothers of Pedro I: being the children of Alfonso XI's mistress and having supported the king when he had abandoned his wife because they were interested in breaking the alliance with France symbolized in the marriage to Blanca, they already demanded that the king return with her. In reality, the queen's defense was a mere excuse to justify other interests of the king's adversaries that, however, had great resonance among the population.
The sovereign settled in Castrojeriz after abandoning his second wife, from where he tried to give a sense of normality in the government of the kingdom, study the evolution of the situation, and gather the greatest number of support, even at the cost of concessions and favors. The main of his scarce support was that of the infantes of Aragon, hostile to Enrique de Trastámara from ancient times. To one of them, Juan, he gave the hand of Isabel de Lara, sister of the lord's wife from Vizcaya, Tello de Castilla, one of the Trastámara bastards, whom Pedro already distrusted and who actually ended up joining the rebellion of his brothers, although always in an interested manner. The objective was to have an alternative candidate for the Biscayan lordship who was faithful to the king and that he could use the resources of the territory in favor of the royal cause, which was not achieved.
Noble Rebellion
Return of María de Padilla
The meetings between the king and María de Padilla ceased both because of the papal condemnation and because of the new love affairs between Don Pedro and Juana de Castro. María then turned to the Pope, requesting permission to found a monastery of Poor Clare nuns in the diocese of Palencia, where she was originally from, or elsewhere. The king favored Mary's claims, as is evident from the pontifical documents that came from Avignon, and even when, as the pope was given to understand, Mary's purpose was to lead a penitent life in the monastery. Thus, the monastery in Astudillo was founded not long after, but Maria did not enter it, but she once again became the king's lover.
Fernán Ruiz de Castro, Juana's brother, eager for revenge for what he considered the king's infamy against his sister, led a new rebellion, although his league with Alfonso XI's bastards could also be due to his desire to marry Juana. their sister, Juana. Meanwhile, the party of Doña Blanca grew, which came to have the help of the king's brothers, Alburquerque, the infants of Aragon, Fernando and Juan, of Leonor, widow of Alfonso IV of Aragon, of María de Portugal, the king's mother, of the powerful Castro family and many nobles, all of whom demanded with arms that Pedro live conjugal life with Doña Blanca. Although this was the pretext, what they were really claiming was to recover his lost influence at court. As head of the league was Alburquerque, who died in October 1354, with suspicions of having been poisoned by order of the king. The other Confederates did not give up on his plans.
The military orders were divided in the confrontation between the king and his adversaries. The monarch had the support of the master of Calatrava, Diego García de Padilla, but the senior commander of the order, Pedro Estévanez Carpenteyro, nephew of the previous master, sided with the rebels, had himself elected master in Osuna declaring the appointment of García de Padilla illegal and seized some important places (Osuna, Martos, Bívoras and Porcuna). The master of the order of Alcántara, Ferrán Pérez Ponce remained neutral in the conflict, unable to agree with the rebels. The rebels also tried to win the support of the lands of the Santiago order, whose master was the bastard Fadrique.
The rebel nobles began by trying to take Ciudad Rodrigo, unsuccessfully. Then they toured the lands of the order of Santiago to increase their forces, without getting Montiel to surrender to them, so they ended up taking refuge in the great castle of Segura de the Sierra and in that of Hornos, in the Sierra de Cazorla. The king counterattacked in Tierra de Campos, assaulting the fortresses of Isabel Téllez de Meneses, wife of Alburquerque. He could not take Montealegre, but he did take those of Ampudia and Villalba de los Alcores, who surrendered at the end of June. He then passed through Toro before marching to Sahagún at the beginning of July to go from there against the castles of Cea and Grajal. That same month the second daughter was born in Castrojeriz of the king with María de Padilla, Constanza.
Pedro left the infants of Aragon in Salamanca and Tierra de Campos to hinder the maneuvers of the enemy and marched to Toledo to try to subdue the lands of the order of Santiago in the region. He then left to try to challenge Segura de the Sierra and capture Fadrique, but the strength of the fortress prevented it, so he contented himself with encircling it, requesting reinforcements to compensate for the men he had to leave there, and returning to Ocaña to choose a new master of the order who would be loyal to him. He chose the natural brother of María de Padilla, Juan García de Villajera, despite being married and still living with the previous master, which violated the statutes of the order. This choice led to the schism of the order among those who recognized the new master and those who don't.
Toledo uprising and extension of the noble rebellion
The king decided that, given the unstable situation in the north of the kingdom, it was convenient to transfer Blanca to the Alcázar of Toledo. At that time several important Toledo citizens, such as the archbishop of the city, the bishop of Segovia Pedro Gómez de Gudiel or Tel González Palomeque had sided with the queen, who was advised to take refuge in the cathedral. Blanca chose to openly rebel and request various support, including that of Innocent IV. The city of Toledo rebelled against the king in favor of the queen almost completely at the beginning of August. Fadrique immediately went to the city with seven hundred knights, among them some of those who had remained surrounding it in Segura. Toledo was followed by several cities: Cuenca, Córdoba, Jaén, Úbeda, Baeza and Talavera. The movement, heterogeneous, used the distancing of the king from the queen as a unifying motive, which served to unite the various rebellious nobles somewhat and to attract the common people and the clergy. The pope also sided with the noble party that really sought to bring the sovereign under his control. Several nobles who until then had remained faithful to the king then went over to the rebels who in the north gathered around Montealegre. They also left the king the infantes of Aragon, who had been preparing the desertion for a long time. With them Pedro I lost the last support he had among the high nobility and a large number of knights, who accompanied them first to Montealegre and then to Cuenca de Campos. The old favorite Alburquesque, the infantes of Aragon and the bastards of Alfonso XI were strengthening ties at the end of the summer, which demanded that the king return with Blanca, the abandonment of his lover and the removal of her relatives from government posts.
The king took refuge in Tordesillas, where his meager forces were surrounded and where Queen Leonor went to present the demands of the rebels, which he refused to accept. The king's refusal caused the rebels to try to seize the squares that they were still faithful to the sovereign: they failed before Valladolid and Salamanca, but they did capture Medina del Campo at the end of September. they unfairly blamed Pedro I, and for their quarrels. They managed, however, to gather a large army of five thousand knights in Medina, which the king could not face, so he went to take refuge in the strong fortress of Toro to mid-November, where it suffered new desertions. The nobles were located around the square and the two sides agreed to parley.
False agreements in Tejadillo and captivity of the king
In Tejadillo, currently a depopulated area between Toro and Morales, Pedro conferred with the nobles of the league, although no agreement was reached. At the meeting, the opposition of the Crown, which sought to affirm the will of the king, was clear as the basis of the government, that of the nobility, who wanted royal power to be limited by their privileges. Pedro I agreed to pardon the rebels, but not to hand over the government to them as they intended, so the confrontation continued. The nobles withdrew from the surroundings of Toro, already heavily depleted, to continue the siege from Zamora.
Pedro I then made a serious mistake: abandoning the Toro fort to march to Urueña, where María de Padilla was. The queen mother waited a few hours to contact the rebel nobles, to whom she opened the doors of Toro Toro, the villa of the queen mother, became the headquarters of the conspirators. From there the nobles ordered the king to come before them and submit to their will. Peter did so after hesitating, on the recommendation of the valid Hinestrosa, who accompanied him along with the treasurer Samuel Levi and the chancellor, despite the danger he posed. Hinestrosa and Levi were imprisoned upon reaching Toro and the rebels demanded the delivery of the royal seals and the granting of courtly offices, which theoretically depended on the will of the king.
The king was imprisoned in the houses of the bishop of Zamora, although he was granted certain liberties. Pedro I was taking advantage of the clear dissensions between the different groups that made up the noble league to disrupt it and attract some of its members. The easiest to attract were the infantes of Aragon and Queen Eleanor, who had been among the last to abandon it. It is not known with certainty who facilitated the king's escape to Segovia at the beginning of January 1355, taking advantage of a day of hunting, which the king was very fond of, and the fog that covered the area. The infantes of Aragon and Tello were blamed for it, but it is not clear who they were. In any case, the flight caused the disintegration of the noble league, undermined by the suspicions among its members and by the energetic performance of the king as soon as he regained his freedom.
Defeat of the rebellion
The king's flight aggravated the conflict in which the papacy sided with the insurgent nobles: on January 19, 1355, the pope's emissary, bishop of Senez, and the bishops of Plasencia and Sigüenza excommunicated the king and placed the kingdom in question, except for the territories believed to be controlled by the rebel nobles. Many of the nobles, however, rushed to join the ranks of the sovereign, albeit in exchange for concessions. Prominent among them were the infantes of Aragón, who were once again the main support of Pedro I. The main rebels who had not yet submitted to royal authority again took refuge in their lands, while the king gathered funds to launch the offensive against them. He left first against Toro in March, which he could not take but from which Queen María released Hinestrosa, who expected him to intercede on his behalf before his son. He then marched to Medina del Campo, where he reorganized his hosts to march against Toledo and ordered to kill to the major advance of Castile, Pedro Ruiz de Villegas. Before leaving for Toledo on April 20, he dispatched a powerful host to Galicia to avoid any reaction from Fernando de Castro, for which he also had the Bishop of Lugo, a former confessor of the king.
Enrique reacted by leaving Toro and marching to Talavera to help his brother, but was attacked by the residents of Colmenar in Puerto del Pico, although he managed to reach his destination. The two brothers marched to reinforce Toledo before the imminent arrival of Pedro I, who was already in Torrijos on May 16. They thought that the population of the city would resist the monarch fiercely, but by then they were already in negotiations with him to submit, so when they arrived in the Trastámara they were denied They accessed through the San Martín gate and they had to gain access through the Alcántara gate. They tried in vain to raise the city against the king and attacked the Jewish quarter, an assault in which they killed about 1,200 Jews, with the help of the Muslim population The supporters of Pedro I requested his immediate help, to which the king came. A fierce street fight then broke out and an unsuccessful attempt by the troops of the Trastámara to defeat the real ones next to the gate of San Martín before they could take refuge in the city. The Trastámara could not prevail in the city and arrived late at the Toledo gate, so they finally decided to retreat to Talavera, leaving Toledo in the hands of the king. His troops attacked the neighborhoods in favor of the enemy, further inflaming the rivalries in the city, already intense after the previous massacres. The king then ordered a series of executions and exiled the queen, without even seeing her, to the castle of Sigüenza, from which he had stripped his bishop for having participated in the excommunication of January.
He marched at the beginning of June against Cuenca, which he preferred to submit in exchange for not being occupied by the royal army, a condition that the sovereign accepted, knowing how difficult it would have been to defend it. Enrique and Fadrique had left Talavera well garrisoned to march to defend Toro, the king's next objective. The siege of the plaza began in mid-August, when another daughter of the king, Isabel, was born in Tordesillas. She tried to subdue some smaller plazas at the same time, with relative success given the need to keep the bulk of the army around Toro. Infante Juan's attempt to seize Vizcaya from Tello failed in Gordejuela and Ochandiano, but the victor remained essentially on the defensive. On the other hand, the death of the master of Alcántara allowed to the king to appoint one of his liking on November 13, although the candidate did not meet the requirements for the position.
War with Aragon
After some time the war broke out with Aragon. The trigger was that ten Aragonese galleys and a log, armed by Mosen Francisco de Perellós, with permission from King Pedro IV the Ceremonious to go to the aid of France against England, arrived at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in search of food and captured in those waters two ships from Placenta — allies of the Republic of Genoa, which was then at war with Aragon. Pedro I, who was in that port, required Perellós to abandon his prey; and since the Aragonese did not do so, the Castilian king complained to Pedro IV, who haggled over the satisfactions. In reality, the matter of the Plasencia merchantmen simply precipitated a war between the two Crowns, hostile since ancient times, both for the opposing alliances of both in the Mediterranean as well as border disputes and dynastic rivalries. The Aragonese king, believing his Castilian namesake weak, stirred up the dispute.
However, Pedro I took the initiative: he harassed the Aragonese in the area of Molina de Aragón and on September 8, 1356 he took Alicante, given the inability of Pedro IV to defend it, deprived of the collaboration of a large part of the nobility of the kingdom. Then the failed attempt of the infant Fernando to take Biar forced them to evacuate Alicante. By then Pedro I had already left the Murcian sector of the front to go to Cuenca, although shortly he went to Seville to prepare the campaign of the following year and raise funds to pay for it. Pedro IV spent the autumn and winter trying to attract different Castilian nobles to counter the Castilian offensive. One of these, Juan de la Cerca, son-in-law of the previously beheaded lord of Aguilar de la Frontera, Alfonso Fernández Coronel, went to Niebla to try to revolt Andalusia against the king, but he did not succeed: without support, he withdrew to Gibraleón, near which he was defeated and imprisoned in March 1357. The king did so ex execute.
By then the Castilian offensive against Aragon had already begun: feigning an attack on the central area of the border, the main assault headed towards the Moncayo area; the main objective was Tarazona. To prevent the Aragonese from defending it adequately, the Castilians harassed them in the area of Teruel and Borja. Pedro IV tried to delay enemy operations with the mediation of the expert papal legate, Cardinal Guillermo de la I played; the Castilian sovereign pretended to agree to respect a two-week truce, which in reality he took advantage of to take Tarazona on March 9. Pedro I agreed to treat then, having already achieved the first objectives of the campaign and on May 8 a a one-year truce mediated by the papal legate. Despite having promised to seek peace, which they had ultimately left to the cardinal's discretion, the two sides simply wanted to take advantage of the temporary cessation of hostilities to strengthen their positions.
Peter IV took advantage of the truces to attract after lengthy negotiations the infant Fernando, who went over to the Aragonese on December 7, with the squares he dominated in the Alicante area. Some unknown event triggered another series in May 1358 of assassinations ordered by Pedro I. He lured Fadrique to the Sevillian fortress, where some of the king's crossbowmen beat him to death with a mace. This murder was followed by those of other nobles, former rebels. That same afternoon he left for the north with the intention of to also get rid of Tello, with the collaboration of the infante Juan de Aragón y Castilla, whom he wanted to use against him and then have him killed as well. The king marched at great speed towards the lordship of Vizcaya, but could not prevent Tello from fleeing France from Bermeo on June 7, nor could he catch it at sea, although he tried. Pedro I took advantage, however, to incorporate the Biscayan lordship into the royal territories, which from then on Then it depended on the King of Castile. Tello's flight and the recognition of the lordship as royal territory meant that the Infante Juan lost all use to the monarch, who had him beaten to death on June 12. At the same time he hastened to dispatch Hinestrosa to Roa to take the widow of the murdered man and Queen Leonor of Aragón from there to the castle of Castrojeriz. This arrest finished off the elimination of possible rivals in Vizcaya. The raids that Enrique de Trastámara and the infante Fernando led carried out in revenge for the death of his brothers had little consequence.
Pedro I then marched to Seville to conclude the lengthy preparations for the naval campaign he hoped to undertake against Aragon, with twelve Castilian and six Genoese galleys. The fleet seized the town of Guardamar, but before it could seize his castle was destroyed by a storm, which only spared two of the ships. The king opted to burn the town and retire to Murcia, where he was at the end of August. He reinforced the Murcian defenses and then went to Soria, where he tried to to recover some squares in Aragonese hands and after taking possession of some of the region of Calatayud. He then tried in vain to recover Monteagudo, but had to retire to Almazán sick after fierce fighting; the Aragonese took advantage of the Castilian withdrawal to evacuate the square, not believing they could defend it any longer.
The King of Castile, after declaring war, broke off hostilities, which until the beginning of 1357 were limited to skirmishes. He had previously embarked in Seville and pursued Perellós with some galleys to Tavira, but could not catch up with him. In the struggle between the two Christian kingdoms, Enrique, along with other Castilians, favored Pedro IV, and the infante Fernando, brother of the King of Aragon, helped Pedro I. Letters of defiance were exchanged between the two monarchs, which never materialized. for demanding the Aragonese that Pedro I go to the field of Nules, while the Castilian summoned him before the walls of Valencia, a city that Pedro I had besieged and to whose aid it seemed natural that the sovereign of Aragon should come.
In 1357, Pedro entered the lands of Aragon and seized the Castle of Bijuesca and Tarazona on March 9. At the request of a cardinal legate, on May 8 a one-year truce was signed between the two kings. Pedro I returned to Seville; he once again disregarded the advice of the pope, who briefly recommended respect for his lawful wife; he prepared the forces that were to continue the fight against Aragon; to provide himself with resources he desecrated the tombs of Alfonso X the Wise and Queen Beatriz of Suabia, stripping them of their crown jewels; he had love affairs with Aldonza Coronel and in vain tried to seduce a sister of hers named María, widow of the executed Juan de la Cerda.
According to a very popular legend in Seville, where she has a central street dedicated to her, María Coronel retired to the Seville convent of Santa Clara to escape the desires of the king. On a certain occasion, seeing herself besieged by him, she made use of her “valiant modesty, and seeing that she could not escape being taken to the King, she burned a large part of her body with boiling oil, so that the sores would make her horrible, and accredit her as a leper. with which he escaped his chastity at the cost of lengthy and painful martyrdom, which made him suffer for the rest of his life». After this, she María Coronel founded the convent of Santa Inés in Seville and became its first abbess. Her tomb is located in the middle of the choir of said convent and her incorrupt body can be seen in a glass urn every December 2, the anniversary of her death. It is even claimed that the remains of her action can still be seen on her body.
In 1358 he took the life of his brother Fadrique and shortly after the infant don Juan de Aragón y Castilla, son of Alfonso IV of Aragón. He arrested the latter's mother, Mrs. Leonor, his wife, Isabel de Lara, and confiscated their property. In Burgos he received the heads of six knights whom he had sentenced to death before leaving Seville.
In 1358 he learned that his brother had entered the province of Soria in the spirit of war and that the infante Fernando, Marquis of Tortosa, had invaded the kingdom of Murcia and was trying to seize Cartagena. He resisted all his enemies; He appeared with eighteen sails on the coast of Valencia and although a storm took sixteen from him, eight months were enough for him to build twelve new ones, repair fifteen and fill the stores with weapons and ammunition of all kinds, while obtaining ten galleys from the king. from Portugal and three from the Emir of Granada. Renewed by a legacy of Pope Innocent VI the negotiations for peace between Castile and Aragon in 1359, he could not reach an agreement.
The king left the Soria border well protected with some 3,400 horsemen and returned to Seville in mid-April 1359 to conclude preparations for the great naval offensive against Aragon. The failure of the negotiations upset him intensely and ordered another series of murders of his adversaries and their relatives. He had his aunt Leonor, the mother of the Aragonese infants, killed in the castle of Castrojeriz. He ordered her to move from there to Jerez de la Frontera to Isabel de Lara, widow of the Aragonese infant Don Juan, and his wife Blanca, who was brought from her prison in Sigüenza. The former died shortly afterwards, presumably by royal order. kill Tello's wife. It is believed around the same time that two of his bastard half-brothers, sons of Leonor de Guzmán, Juan and Pedro, fourteen and twelve years old respectively, who were imprisoned in Carmona, were also murdered.
A squadron departed from Seville in mid-April, which, after joining the ships contributed by Granada and Portugal, had forty-one galleys, eighty naos, three galleons and four logs. The fleet advanced slowly towards Barcelona; forced the infante Fernando to withdraw, who was running the land of Murcia and took Guardamar before stopping near Tortosa, where the Portuguese ships that were to participate in the campaign finally arrived. The cardinal legate tried in vain to stop the offensive. The Castilian fleet arrived before Barcelona, protected by ten well-armed galleys and strong defenses on the beaches, on June 9. Two days of hard fighting ended with the withdrawal of the great Castilian fleet, which returned to the mouth of the Ebro and then put heading to Ibiza, whose castle Pedro encircled unsuccessfully; the news that the Aragonese was approaching with forty galleys made him give up the new conquest, seeking refuge first in Calpe and then in Alicante and Cartagena. Three months of sterile campaign ended with the dispersal of the fleet and the march of the king to Tordesillas to spend two weeks with María de Padilla, who shortly after gave birth to another son of the sovereign, Alfonso.
The few Aragonese triumphs and the quarrels between the Castilian exiles made Enrique de Trastámara, at the time captain of the Aragonese troops, decide to launch an offensive to strengthen his position against his rivals and improve his prestige. He penetrated through land de Ágreda, devastated Ólvega and beat the Castilians near Moncayo in the battle of Araviana on September 22. The main consequence was the death in the fight of the royal favorite, Juan Fernández de Hinestrosa, who disrupted the royal administration and whom Pedro I was unable to substitute effectively. The king was in Seville, preparing to return to Tordesillas to meet his first son, when he received the news. The battle also exacerbated the vicious circle formed by royal mistrust and his reputation for cruelty on the one hand and the desertions of the nobility that feared reprisals on the other, elements that reinforced each other: the attempts of the sovereign to know if there had been fault in defeat he caused some of those who feared royal wrath to go over to the Aragonese, which in turn heightened the king's suspicion. One of those who went over to the Aragonese was the captain Tarazona assured, a trusted man of the deceased Hinestrosa who had previously refused to go over to the Aragonese, but this time he allowed himself to be bought and handed over the city to Pedro IV, who entered it on February 26, 1360.
The Castilian king passed through the lands of León at the beginning of 1360 before heading to the Aragonese border, where a new invasion was expected. He was looking to settle accounts with two noblemen who, after the defeat of the previous year, had left the border with the excuse of going to look for reinforcements without having returned to it. One, Pedro Núñez de Guzmán took refuge in his castle in Aviados, but the other, Pedro Álvarez de Osorio, trusted the king, who first entertained him and then did so. kill shortly in Villanubla. The same fate befell other nobles in Valladolid and Burgos (he had Pedro Álvarez de Osorio, two young sons of Fernán Sánchez de Valladolid and the archdeacon of Salamanca, Diego Arias Maldonado, assassinated. Pedro Álvarez de Osorio, two young sons of Fernán Sánchez de Valladolid and the archdeacon of Salamanca, Diego Arias Maldonado), where the king went after his visit to Leon and where he was at the end of March.
In 1360, seeing Enrique increase his party, he did not doubt the success of an invasion in Castile. He surrounded Haro, reached Pancorbo and sent outposts to Briviesca, advancing without clear objectives. Shortly after, he seized Nájera, where he massacred Jews. Pedro I began to harass the invaders: he went from Burgos to Briviesca and from there to Miranda de Ebro and Santo Domingo de la Calzada, on the way to Nájera, towards where the Aragonese retreated. With an army that had at least ten thousand infantry and five thousand horsemen, he marched in search of his brother, whom he He found himself near Nájera with fifteen hundred pawns and eight hundred knights. The Aragonese relied on the town to fight the hard battle, in which they bore the worst part. However, Pedro I wasted the advantage obtained, he did not dare to assault Nájera and, after maintaining the siege until April 26, he finally withdrew first to Santo Domingo de la Calzada and then Logroño, but not before having punished the inhabitants of Miranda de Ebro for having supported the count of Trastámara. Aragonese apr They took advantage of the Castilian withdrawal to retreat through Navarra, abandoning all the conquests they had made in the campaign.
Likewise by order of Pedro I, Gutierre Fernández de Toledo, Gómez Carrillo (Garcilaso Carrillo's brother) and Samuel Leví (in November or December) perished in those days, and the Archbishop of Toledo Vasco Fernández de Toledo was also exiled to Portugal, brother of Gutierre Fernández, both sons of Fernán Gómez de Toledo, chancellor and chief notary of Toledo, and Teresa Vázquez de Acuña, who had been King Pedro's wet nurse. his family had become enormously enriched at the expense of royal income, for which the king seized their assets. Gutierre, the exiled archbishop's brother, had been executed in September, for unfounded suspicions of collusion with the enemy. then almost all the main collaborators of the sovereign from the beginning of the reign had disappeared.
Pedro I resumed hostilities with Aragon at the beginning of 1361. He arrived in Almazán in February and, after waiting for the arrival of more contingents, he launched the offensive in March, following the course of the Jalón and taking Berdejo, Torrijo, Alhama and Ariza. The Aragonese seemed ready to give battle near it when they withdrew on May 7; Pedro I did the same and marched to Deza, despite having six thousand knights and copious infantry, to which six hundred Portuguese knights were added at that time. However, the alliance of Aragon with Granada meant the emergence of a threat in the south, for which the cardinal legate's mediation bore fruit: the two parties agreed to sign peace in mid-May. The signing of the Peace of Terrer allowed Pedro I to prepare the war against Granada.
Before starting hostilities, he ordered the death of his wife Blanca, who was then a prisoner in Medina Sidonia. Later, María de Padilla died in Seville in July, the last stop to the murderous outbursts of the sovereign. two women deprived the papacy of an important justification for its meddling in the affairs of the kingdom.
War with the kingdom of Granada (1361-1362)
Renewing the hostilities against Aragon, in 1361 Pedro I won the fortresses of Berdejo, Torrijo, Alhama and others; but fearing an attack by the Granadans, he agreed to the pleas of the Cardinal of Bologna and made peace with Pedro IV of Aragon on May 18, forcing both kings to restore the castles and conquered places. In that year Blanca de Borbón died, according to some poisoned by her husband, and María de Padilla, mother of three daughters and one son (Alonso, died in 1362), the first at 22 and the second at 27 years of age.
Mohamed V, the dethroned king, who was taking refuge in Ronda, the seat of the Benimerin lord of Tlemecén, made a pact with the Castilian king to help him recover the throne, under very favorable conditions for Pedro I. The Castilians attacked Antequera, unsuccessfully, and arrived with a large army under the command of the masters of the three Castilian military orders as far as Granada itself, but without achieving anything. The Castilian campaign lacked a clear objective. In retaliation, the Muslims of Granada They invaded the kingdom of Castile with six hundred knights and two thousand pawns, and set fire to the Jaén municipality of Peal de Becerro, from which they obtained copious booty. When Enrique Enríquez el Mozo, Diego García de Padilla, master of the Order of Calatrava, and Men Rodríguez de Biedma, chieftain of the bishopric of Jaén, who was in the city of Úbeda, learned of it, left said city together with the knights of his council and those of other l localities, and went to occupy the passes of the Guadiana Menor river. They intercepted the enemy who was returning with the spoils in the battle of Linuesa, fought on December 21, 1361, and the few Grenadians who survived. Subsequently, the king Pedro I seized the Muslims who had been captured and promised to pay each of them three hundred maravedis to their captors. However, the monarch did not pay the stipulated amount for the captives, thereby causing the anger of the knights who had taken part in the campaign, who began to be suspicious of the Castilian sovereign.
On January 15, 1362, the Muslim troops defeated the troops of the kingdom of Castilla y León in the battle of Guadix, due to the bad strategy of the command and the dispersion of the hosts, delivered to looting. Commanding the Castilian troops were the Knights Diego García de Padilla, Master of the Order of Calatrava, Enrique Enríquez el Mozo, Major Adelantado of the Andalusian border, and Men Rodríguez de Biedma, Mayor of the Bishopric of Jaén. In this battle, which was a disaster for the troops of the kingdom of Castilla y León, the master of the Order of Calatrava, Diego García de Padilla, was captured by the Muslims, although a few days later he was released by order of King Muhammed VI. of Granada. He freed the main captives in the vain hope of ingratiating himself with Pedro I. The latter reacted to the disaster at Guadix by seizing the squares of Iznájar, Sagra, Cesna and Benamejí in February. He then took a few more squares in the western part of the Nasrid kingdom, before returning to Seville. Shortly after, Muhammed VI of Granada, accompanied by three hundred horsemen and two hundred peons, went to the Cordovan municipality of Baena, and from there, accompanied by Gutier Gómez de Toledo, prior of the Order of San Juan, went to Seville to ask Pedro I to cease hostilities between the kingdom of Granada and the kingdom of Castilla y León, fearing that the continuation of the conflict would ruin the kingdom. The gesture was useless: Pedro I had him arrested along with fifty knights of his entourage during a banquet and a few days later he personally killed him with a spear in the Seville neighborhood of Tablada. The assassination of Muhammed VI allowed his rival to recover the throne, put an end to the war, and adopt a policy of collaboration with Castile.
Pedro I gathered General Cortes in the city of Seville in April or May 1362, in which they recognized as heirs to the crown the children of the king and María de Padilla, declared the legitimate wife of the sovereign, which invalidated the subsequent marriages with Blanca and Juana. The representatives swore Alfonso as heir to the throne and the corpse of María de Padilla de Astutillo was brought to Seville, to be buried as queen.
New war with Aragon
Carlos II of Navarra had returned to his kingdom in November 1361, which Pedro I took advantage of to sign a league with him thanks to which he intended to use the Navarrese against Aragon in the new war he was planning, which he re-signed in Estella on May 22, 1362. Carlos thought that the peace with Aragon was firm, and that the alliance with Castile would allow him to obtain Castile's help for his French claims. Portugal and the Count of Foix also joined the alliance.. Pedro I signed another with Eduardo III of England on June 22, which included English aid to the Castilian king, provided he defrayed the expenses. In June he held an interview in Soria with King Carlos II of Navarre, at the that the Castilian announced to the Navarrese his intention to resume hostilities with Aragon, to the surprise of Carlos II, who was not prepared for war.
Prepared in this way, he invaded Aragonese territory without prior declaration of war at the beginning of June, when Pedro IV was in Perpignan without troops, and in a few days he won the castles of Ariza, Ateca, Terrer, Moros, Cetina and Alhama. He arrived at the gates of Calatayud on June 11 and began his siege, while seizing other minor squares (Berdejo, Torrijo, Maluenda, Munébrega, Épila, Ricla, Torralba, Paracullos, Belmonte, Virrarroya, Cervera, Aranda, etc.). Other smaller contingents advanced towards Daroca and Ejea to avoid the concentration of the Aragonese in Calatayud. The clashes around Calatayud were very hard. Carlos II joined the campaign at the beginning of July: he advanced from Sangüesa and seized Salvatierra, Ruesta and Escó, poorly defended. Calatayud finally surrendered on August 29, due to lack of relief. Without further conquests, he consolidated what he had taken and returned to Seville. There he died on October 18 his son Al fonso, the heir to the throne, which disrupted the provisions of the Sevillian courts. The king made a will a month later, concerned about the succession; he named his daughter Beatriz heir, who was to marry the heir to the Portuguese throne, Fernando. In the event of Beatriz's death, the next of the sisters would become heir, as long as she did not marry the infant Fernando or one of his uncles the bastards. Among other provisions was the transformation of the royal palace of Tordesillas into a monastery and concessions to that of Guadalupe, highly favored by the king.
He undertook the campaign of 1363 at the beginning of the year, without the winter having ended. Before beginning the offensive, he made the knights present and the representatives of the cities swear in Bubierca the recognition as heir to Beatriz and, in in case he was missing, his sisters. The advance towards Zaragoza continued from March: Pedro I made the places of Fuentes, Arándiga and Chodes his own. He then located himself between Tarazona and Zaragoza, near Magallón and Borja, these two squares that he took in the same month of March. Tarazona then fell, after the arrival of three hundred Portuguese knights, another Navarrese contingent and six hundred horsemen from Granada, who came to participate in the campaign. The Castilian king stationed himself in Calatayud in April, to prepare for the next blow, while the enemy protected Daroca and Teruel by razing towns and forcing the population to take refuge in the fortresses. Aragon was on the brink of ruin and the treasury was exhausted. The desperate situation made Pedro IV sign with Enrique de Trastámara the secret Treaty of Monzón on March 31, by which the Aragonese monarch promised to help him seize the Castilian throne in exchange for important territorial cessions. The crisis did not It managed, however, to increase solidarity between the kingdoms of Pedro IV, which acted as the Castilian onslaught affected them. Meanwhile, in April the Castilians took over Bardallur, Épila, Rueda and Cariñena (April 16) and cut off the communications between Zaragoza and Daroca and Teruel. Pedro I avoided besieging Zaragoza, too strong a place, and limited himself to isolating it while he went against Teruel, which he seized on May 3. Leaving aside Daroca, Albarracín and Montalbán, it headed towards the Mediterranean Sea, seizing Alhambra, Villel, Castielfabib, Adamuz, Jérica and Segorbe on the way. It reached its objective, Murviedro, in early May; the square was almost impregnable after the reforms it had undergone in 1348 and was a key point for enemy communications, which were battered. Aragon had been split in two, but this was not enough to put an end to Pedro's cavalcade I, who then headed for Valencia, well defended by the Count of Denia. On the way, he seized several places: Almenara, Buñol, Chiva, Macastre, Benaguacil, Liria, Alpuche, among others. May 21 and spent two weeks cutting down its vicinity; When news reached him that Pedro IV was approaching with a relief army, he abandoned the siege and locked himself up in Murviedro, perhaps because by then the army had dwindled considerably due to the need to leave garrisons in the conquered places, due to the lack of information about the approaching army and the risk of the position, very far from the Castilian border.
Pedro I refused to fight in the open field, and the Aragonese did not assault the fortress, so finally the two sides agreed to negotiate. A truce was reached on July 2, essentially favorable to Pedro I, but he decided not to comply with the agreement, with which he lost an opportunity to consolidate his hegemony in the Iberian Peninsula. The king's motives are not clear, but they could be the existence of secret clauses by which Pedro IV promised to kill the king. Infante Fernando and Enrique de Trastámara in exchange for the Castilian evacuation of the conquered places, which were not fulfilled. In September, when the king's new lover, Isabel de Sandoval, gave him a new son, Sancho, the negotiations to transform the July truce in definitive peace had failed.
Two relevant events for Castile also happened at that time: the secret alliance between Carlos II of Navarre and Pedro IV to, among other things, divide up the Castilian kingdom, and the death of the infant Fernando when he was preparing to leave Aragon and go to France against the opinion of Pedro IV, who made the leadership of the Castilian exiles pass definitively to Enrique de Trastámara. He received the explicit support of the Aragonese and Navarrese sovereigns in October 1363.
Pedro I reacted by attacking Aragon from Murcia at the end of the year. He conquered Alicante, Elche and Crevillente before the end of December. At the beginning of January he seized Jijona, Oliva, La Muela, Callosa, Monforte, Gallinera, Rebolledo, Aspe, Elda, Denia and Gandía and continued on after Murviedro. From there he made some raids through the Ebro delta before encircling Valencia again, positioning himself between the sea and the city to prevent it from being supplied. He withdrew to take refuge in Murviedro when the relief army of Pedro IV arrived, who was able to take food to Valencia without problem at the end of April. Pedro first retook the initiative when the Castilian fleet finally arrived, accompanied by Portuguese ships; he surrounded the Aragonese squadron in Cullera, where they had withdrawn before the arrival of the enemy, but a great storm frustrated the attack and made the Castilians withdraw again to Murviedro.The failure before Cullera put an effective end to the campaign; the king remained in Murviedro until June 17 and then returned to Seville, after ordering the defenses of the conquests. Pedro IV took advantage of his departure to recover some places (Jijona, Ayora, Almenara, Castelfabib and Liria, as well as Alicante), although he could not take Murviedro, which he besieged for a week in July. The Castilian king resumed military operations at the end of August. He marched to Calatayud, where he confirmed the alliance treaty with England that had been signed in 1362 and began to negotiate with Carlos II of Navarre, interested in once again changing sides to gain Castilian and English help against France, deals that led to the signing of a league on October 18, 1364, when Pedro I was besieging Castielfabib.
Pedro IV undertook the siege of Murviedro in 1365 and recovered some nearby squares (Segorbe, Arta, Serra and Torretorres); The Castilian king refused to rescue the square by waging a pitched battle against the Aragonese, and tried to get him to abandon the site by encircling Orihuela, which he took by treacherously murdering the fortress' warden at the beginning of June. He then returned to Seville, without helping those besieged in Murviedro, who ended up capitulating on September 14. Many of those who surrendered went over to the ranks of Enrique de Trastámara, fearful of Pedro I's reaction to the capitulation.
Mercenary invasion, defeat and death
Return of Henry
Henry, later Henry II, Peter's bastard brother, hired an army of mercenaries in France, the so-called "White Companies" because of the color of their flags; Also counting on the help of Aragon, he went with his troops from this kingdom to Castile in March 1366. The mercenary companies were paid in equal parts by the King of France, the papacy and Pedro IV of Aragon. For the first two, the recruitment It fulfilled two purposes: to effectively support Enrique de Trastámara, who obtained a veteran army paid for by his allies, and to get rid of the fearsome mercenaries, whose excesses harmed Languedoc. Officially, the march of the mercenaries to the Iberian Peninsula was presented as a crusade against Granada, which supported Pedro I of Castile. Between ten and twelve thousand gathered in Montpellier, who passed through Roussillon towards Christmas to then continue upstream of the Ebro, without being able to avoid atrocities such as burning of the tower of the cathedral of Barbastro with two hundred residents inside.
Charles II of Navarre, terrified by the proximity of the fearsome mercenaries, decided to change sides again. The mercenaries actually passed by Tudela, avoiding the Castilian defenses of the Aragonese border, and, after leaving Alfaro aside, they they headed directly towards Calahorra. The town was well defended and the population was willing to do so, but those responsible for the square decided to surrender. March 1366. Logroño refused to open the doors and the Trastámara army continued towards Navarrete and Briviesca, the last protection of Burgos. Pedro I received this news in Burgos and hurriedly marched to Toledo, where he summoned the troops deployed in the border. The flight from Burgos was seriously detrimental to the cause of Pedro I, as the population had been willing to defend themselves.
He barely spent a few days in Toledo at the beginning of April before retreating again, to Seville. The Castilians abandoned the conquered territories in Aragon without further ado. Enrique followed in the footsteps of Pedro I: after having himself crowned in Burgos, he arrived in Toledo on May 11, which, divided between supporters of one and the other, finally surrendered without fighting. Various councils went to the city to offer homage to the new king: Ávila, Segovia, Talavera, Madrid, Cuenca, among others. Pedro I, intimidated by the departure of his opponent, decided not to face him, leaving Seville and seeking the help of his uncle, King Pedro I of Portugal. He intended to take the treasure with him, but the Castilian admiral betrayed him and handed it over to the enemy. Then the Portuguese king denied him asylum and informed him that his son Fernando would not marry Beatriz, the daughter of the Castilian sovereign. He tried to take refuge in Alburquerque, which closed its doors and increasingly alone, he requested then that at least his uncle would allow him to go to Galicia, one of the few territories that was still faithful to him. He achieved the acquiescence of the Portuguese with some difficulty, but he was finally able to reach Galicia, where he reinforced the powers of Fernán Ruiz de Castro and made kill -according to the final version of Ayala's chronicle, but not the first- the archbishop of Santiago de Compostela, whose loyalty he would have doubted and whose fortresses passed to Ruiz de Castro.
For the many services and kindnesses that the ones from which you come made to the kings from where I come, and you did and do every day for me, pointedly in this entrance that the traitor of Count Henry did in my kingdoms, with very great companies of French and English and German, and Brethren and Loynosines and Gascons, and of many other nations to command me to be destroyed,
Peter I then embarked in La Coruña heading to Gascony; he made a stopover in San Sebastián and on August 1 he finally arrived in Bayonne.
Alliance with the Black Prince
In Bayonne, King Pedro obtained the help of the Black Prince, agreeing to pay the expenses of the campaign. Due to the secret clauses of the Pact of Libourne, Guipúzcoa, Álava and part of La Rioja would belong to Navarre and the lordship of Vizcaya and the town of Castro-Urdiales for England. The agreed conditions represented a serious territorial and monetary loss for Castilla, but they were in practice impossible to comply with.
Charles II once again tried to agree with the different sides, promising on the one hand to collaborate with the English in their campaign against Enrique de Trastámara and on the other to prevent it. Enrique, confident in the promises of the Navarrese sovereign, fired Beltrán Duguesclín and the French mercenaries on January 12, 1367, believing that they were no longer needed. However, the Black Prince ordered the English mercenaries, who were also leaving Castile and near Calahorra, to attack the Navarrese, upon learning of Carlos II's dealings with that of Trastámara. The mercenaries seized several places in the Arga valley and cut off communications between Navarra and Castilla, which prompted the Navarrese king to go to Gascony to re-ingratiate himself with the English.
Unobstructed by the Navarrese, Pedro and his ally with an army passed through Roncesvalles at the end of February. Enrique hurried to position himself in Santo Domingo de la Calzada to protect Burgos and to call again the French mercenaries, who at that time they threatened Zaragoza to obtain from Pedro IV the compliance that he had previously made them. They met with Enrique in March. Pedro and the English lost the surprise effect when they decided to cross the Ebro through Álava and Miranda de Ebro in the middle of winter, instead of taking the direct route through Logroño. The route was rougher and worse supplied and they suffered harassment from the enemy, who defeated them in a skirmish and made them undo what they had walked and return to Logroño. Enrique posted himself first in Nájera, but then advanced to Navarrete, losing the advantage that defending Najerilla gave him.
On April 3, Pedro and the English won the battle of Nájera, in which Beltrán Duguesclín, a French knight who accompanied Enrique, and a large part of the main supporters of Trastámara were taken prisoner; He fled when he saw the battle lost and had to take refuge in Aragon. Pedro I requested that the Castilian captives be handed over to him, contrary to what was agreed in Gascony, but they were not handed over, preventing him from eliminating these dangerous enemies. On the same battlefield he had killed the unarmed knight Íñigo López de Orozco, an act that did not favor his request for the delivery of the prisoners. The victors then marched on Burgos, where Pedro I spent much of April watching the collapse of the enemy side. There he also had to face the demands for payment of what was promised, in reality impossible to satisfy. The Castilians also resisted handing over the territories that they had agreed to cede to their allies. The English had to content themselves with a solemn oath before the main altar of the Burgos cathedral of the Castilian sovereign, who promised to pay what was promised and the accumulated debts. The promise was embodied in a document of May 6, 1367 in which Pedro promised to pay half of the debts in less than four months and the other half before Easter Sunday of the following year. The English would leave the kingdom after the first payment.
Then the English marched to the region of Valladolid to get better supplies, partly through looting given the lack of pay. Pedro continued the march south and at the end of May he arrived in Toledo, without ever stopping trying to raise money, both to pay at least the first payment to the English and be able to get rid of them and to be able to finance the royal administration. In Toledo, Córdoba and Seville, believing himself safe on the throne that he had recovered, he killed those he judged enemies. A truce was then signed with Aragon on August 14, while the Black Prince, who had lost hope of collecting what Pedro I owed him, secretly agreed with the Aragonese king to divide Castile into four parts: two of them would be for the signatories and the other two for Portugal and Navarra, which were intended to be added to the project. By then the English had been greatly weakened, and they decided to leave the Iberian Peninsula in August to.
Enrique de Trastámara was already preparing his return to Castile, for which he received the explicit support of France. Pedro IV tried to prevent him from doing so for his territory, to avoid new conflicts after the recent signing of the truce with Castile, but Enrique's army avoided the blockade, passed through Ribagorza and on September 28 reached Calahorra, which opened the gates for him. Castile was again divided into two factions: the majority of the nobility, the high clergy and some cities supported Enrique, while other cities preferred Pedro I. At first, he intended to go north from Seville to face the enemy with the help of Portugal and Granada, but Córdoba went over to the opposite side. Efforts to fortify Carmona and retake Córdoba meant that the march to the north was delayed. Pedro I could not count on Portuguese help either: his uncle and namesake died on January 18, 1368 and the new king decided not to get involved in the Castilian war The English did not come to his aid either, demanding that he first pay what he owed them and even offering to fight in favor of Enrique if he paid the debts.
Despite Pedro's passivity, Enrique's march was slow and the adherence of towns and cities was scarce. However, at the end of 1367 he already dominated a large part of the northern plateau. The stalemate of the conflict in the The summer of 1368 aroused the concern of the French king, who wanted to have the Castilian fleet when the fighting with England resumed the following year. For this reason, he decided to support the Trastámara side more decisively, with whom he signed an alliance treaty on November 20 and dispatch Duguesclín to put an end to the contest and definitively defeat Pedro I.
Death of the King
Beltrán Duguesclín led his men through the Aran Valley despite Pedro IV's efforts to block it and reached the siege of Toledo, which was still resisting Enrique, in February 1369.
Pedro sent an emissary to London to seek help, which he did not receive. At the beginning of the year he had to come to the aid of Toledo to prevent it from capitulating, so he finally set out north, towards Alcántara. Enrique, who was accompanied by Beltrán Duguesclín and his White Companies, surprised the enemy army near the castle of Montiel, called de la Estrella, where he defeated it on March 14.
Pedro locked himself up in said fortress, ill-prepared to resist a siege. Besieged there by his brother, he entered into deals, through his faithful knight Men Rodríguez de Sanabria, with Duguesclín to escape in exchange for giving him several The Frenchman took him on the night of March 22 with deceit and intention to a store where Pedro and Enrique found themselves face to face, armed. He killed his brother. He ran against each other and Embraced, they fell to the ground, limited to resorting to daggers due to lack of space to pull swords, leaving Pedro on top; but Duguesclín, who had not intervened until then, seeing that the king was about to finish with Enrique, pronouncing, according to legend, the famous words "I neither remove nor set up a king, but I help my lord", grabbed Pedro by the foot I and made him fall below, a circumstance that his stepbrother Enrique took advantage of to stab him repeatedly.
Tomb of Peter I
A manuscript chronicle preserved in the National Library of Paris states that Henry II had the head of Pedro I carried on the end of a spear through various cities and castles that still defended the cause of King Pedro I.
The historian Jerónimo Zurita affirms in his Anales de Aragón that after having cut off the king's head "they threw it in the street, and the body was placed between two tables on the battlements of the castle of Montiel".
The remains of the king remained for several years in the castle of Montiel until they were transferred, on an unknown date, to the church of Santiago de Puebla de Alcocer. The remains of King Pedro I remained in this temple until, in 1446, King Juan II of Castile ordered that they be transferred to the convent of Santo Domingo el Real in Madrid, where they were placed in a sepulcher in front of the main altar.
When the convent of Santo Domingo el Real in Madrid was demolished in 1869, the mortal remains of Pedro I were taken to the National Archaeological Museum, until in 1877 they were transferred to the crypt of the Royal Chapel of Seville Cathedral, where they currently remain together with those of his son, Juan de Castilla (1355-1405).
The praying statue of Pedro I of Castile is preserved in the National Archaeological Museum of Madrid, the only surviving remains of the missing tomb of the monarch.
Biography
The chronicler Pedro López de Ayala describes Pedro I as follows:
It was King Don Peter's great amazement of body, and white and blond, and slew a little in the face. He was a very bird hunter. It was a very cool job. He was very tempted and well used in eating and drinking. He slept little and loved a lot of mugers. He was a very hard worker at war. He was greedy to search for treasures and jewels (...) And he killed many in his Regno, so he came all the damage you heard.
A study of his remains at the end of the 20th century concluded that he suffered from childhood cerebral palsy that left him lame from the left leg and was possibly the cause of his irritable and aggressive temperament, which was reflected in the crimes he ordered during his reign, favored by an atmosphere of intrigue. However, the skull that is currently preserved in Seville, with which he made said study, surely it is not the authentic one (based on the testimonies of Froissart or Pedro IV).
Offspring
Maria de Padilla
Four children were born to María de Padilla:
- Beatriz de Castilla (1353-1369), swore to succeed on the throne, but died the same year as her father.
- Constanza de Castilla (1354-1394), wife of Juan de Ghent, Duke of Lancaster and son of Edward III of England and mother of Catherine, wife of the future Enrique III of Castile.
- Isabel de Castilla (Tordesillas, 1355-1392), who gave his hand to Edmundo, Duke of York and son of Edward III of England.
- Alfonso de Castilla (Tordesillas, 1359-1362).
Joan Castro
From his marriage to Juana de Castro, he had a son:
- Juan de Castilla (1355-1405). He married Elvira de Eril and Falces. His mortal remains lie next to those of his father in the crypt of the Royal Chapel of the Cathedral of Seville.
Mary of Hinestrosa
María González de Hinestrosa, daughter of Juan Fernández de Hinestrosa and Sancha González de Villegas, first cousin of María de Padilla, bore him a son:
- Fernando de Castilla (1361-1362), to whom his father made lord of Niebla, but he must have died in childhood.
Isabel de Sandoval
Isabel de Sandoval, governess of the boy Alfonso, bore him two children:
- Sancho de Castilla (Almazán, September 1363-1371), who died eight years in prison at the castle of Toro.
- Diego de Castilla (c. 1365-c. 1440).
Teresa of Ayala
Teresa de Ayala, daughter of Diego Gómez de Toledo and Inés de Ayala, and niece of Chancellor Pero López de Ayala, gave him a girl:
- María de Castilla (c. 1367-16 of September 1424), religious and priora in the Monastery of Santo Domingo el Real de Toledo, where her mother also professed and was priora.
Ancestors
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The Justiciero or the Cruel. Transcendence in literature and the arts
Peter's reign was fruitful for arts and letters. By his order, the Mudejar palace that bears his name was erected on the remains of the Alcazar of Seville, the palace of the ancient Muslim kings. There is a legend that Fadrique's blood was left indelible on the pavement of the fortress on a marble with reddish veins. He also left a memory in Carmona, where he ordered the erection of the imposing Alcázar de Arriba, now in ruins, on the foundations of an old Muslim fortress, and endowed it with rooms similar to those of the Alcázar in Seville. He made one of his favorite residences out of it. Over half of the main parade ground, the Parador de Carmona rises, dominating a vast expanse of the neighboring vegas. He also ordered the fortification of the so-called Alcázar de la Reina near the Puerta de Córdoba in Carmona, later demolished by order of the Catholic Monarchs.
In Toledo and in many other places, the Jews decisively defended the cause of King Pedro. He protected them without hesitation and became friends with several of them. That was the case of Rabbi Sem Tob, also called Don Santos, a native of Carrión, who directed and dedicated a poem entitled Consejos et documentos al rey don Pedro, today known as Moral Proverbs. Peter's contemporary chroniclers described him as the Cruel; but in the 17th and centuries XVIII defenders appeared, and even apologists, who called him the Justiciero. This was done, in the XVII century, by Juan Antonio de Vera y Figueroa, Count of La Roca, in his work entitled < i>King Don Pedro defended (1647); and in the 18th century, José Ledo del Pozo, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Valladolid, in his Apologia del Rey Don Pedro de Castilla, according to the true chronicle of D. Pedro López de Ayala (Madrid: Hernández printing press, no year, perhaps 1780). But in the XVII century there were also those who positioned themselves against the king, such as the prestigious father Juan de Mariana, which will be reinforced even more in the XIX by an influential monograph by Antonio Ferrer del Río, Historical-critical examination of the reign of Don Peter of Castile. Work awarded by unanimous vote of the Royal Spanish Academy in the contest that opened the same on March 2, 1850 (Madrid, National Printing, 1851). Joaquín Guichot reacted against him in his Don Pedro Primero de Castilla. Essay of critical-historical vindication of the Reign of him (Seville, Printing of Gironés and Orduña, 1878).
Popular tradition has seen in this monarch a righteous king, enemy of the great and defender of the small; there are historical reasons for this, since, in effect, he ordered the preparation of the Cef of the behetrías of Castilla (1352) which consigned the rights of some subjects to choose their lord against the claims of the nobility in the Courts of Valladolid in 1351 that they be replaced by ancestral manors. In addition, the people were suspicious of the nobility, so the monarch's vendettas, which generally fell on that class, were often perceived as legitimate acts of justice. Poetry, fed by popular traditions, mostly represented the monarch as a vigilante.
It is important to remember that his reputation for cruelty is a consequence of what Pero López de Ayala expresses in his Crónica de los reyes de Castilla, written during the reign of his enemy and successor, his half-brother Enrique II, in whose service this chancellor worked. Furthermore, that fame spread to the Romancero forming a thematic cycle ("Through the fields of Jerez / king Don Pedro goes hunting...").
In later centuries, however, his figure was vindicated by his descendants in royalty and nobility, so that Isabella the Catholic forbade him to be called Cruel and already in the XVI, Francisco de Castilla, also a descendant of Pedro I, wrote in 1517 a poem about the life of the monarch. Subsequently, King Felipe II ordered that he be described as Just.
No less than eighteen pieces from the golden theater include King Pedro I as a character. In the XVII century, as José R. Lomba Pedraja points out in his study King Don Pedro at the Theater (1899), distributes the visions of Cruel and Justiciero in different pieces by Lope de Vega (La desdichada Estefanía or El rey don Pedro en Madrid, El infanzón de Illescas, Audiences of King Don Pedro), Pedro Calderón de la Barca (The doctor of his honor), Agustín Moreto (The brave vigilante and wealthy man of Alcalá), clearly in his favour, and Juan Claudio de la Hoz y Mota in his El montañés Juan Pascual, Sevilla's first assistant.
In French literature, the figure of King Don Pedro is closely linked to that of Bertrand du Guesclin, who even had his own song of deed, discovered and printed in the 17th century XIX: La Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin by Jean Cuvelier (s. XIV) was edited by Charrière in 1839; the most important plays are Blanche de Bourbon. Reyne d'Espagne. Tragi-comédie (1642) by Charles Regnault; Le triomphe de l’amour ou Don Pedro de Castille (1722), a comedy by Philibert-Joseph Leroux; Dom Pèdre, roi de Castille, tragédie en cinq actes (1761) by Philippe Lefèbvre; Voltaire's tragedy Don Pèdre, roi de Castille (Geneva, 1775); Pierre le Cruel (1780) by Pierre-Laurent Buirette de Belloy; Blanche de Bourbon, tragédie en cinq actes en vers (1783) by Charles Borde; Don Pèdre ou le Roi et le Laboureur (1818) by Antoine Vincent Arnault and Don Pèdre le Mendiant. Drama en quatre actes (1838), by Saint-Ernest Labrousse.
In the XIX century, the story of King Don Pedro is revitalized thanks to Romanticism and his return to medieval themes. In Spain, it is worth noting the figure of Ángel Saavedra, Duke of Rivas, who dedicated three of the eighteen pieces of his & # 34; Historical Romances & # 34; (1841) to the figure of Pedro I; specifically "El alcázar de Sevilla", "Una antigualla de Sevilla" and "The Fratricide". While the first and third stick more closely to the biography of the monarch -Fadrique's treacherous murder and death at the hands of Enrique, respectively-, the second romance is a clear example of a historical theme treated in a romantic way, both for its legendary character as well as its gloomy setting, especially the gloomy dungeons where they torture an old woman who has witnessed a crime committed by the king in one of his nocturnal forays through the city of Seville.
In England it already appeared in 1778 A history of the reign of Peter the Cruel by the Hispanophile John Talbot Dillon; William Sotheby's ten-canto poem Constance de Castile (London, 1810), who quotes Dillon in his notes about Constance of Castile (1354-1394), daughter of the monarch and of María de Padilla and Countess of Lancaster. The first to write legends about him, in English, was Telesforo de Trueba y Cossío, who included two, "El asistente de Sevilla" and "The Master of Santiago" among the twenty of his The romance of history: Spain (1827), translated into Spanish in 1840 as Romantic Spain. Collection of anecdotes and fictional events taken from the history of Spain , the last one about the death of his stepbrother Don Fadrique. He also wrote a historical novel inspired by this episode, The Castilian (1829, 3 vols.), translated into Spanish in 1845 as El castellano o El Príncipe Negro (1845); It is very possible that, in the field of English literature, this novel has influenced two others, first in The Lances of Lynwood (1855), by Charlotte Yonge, in which the king is presented as the protagonist of an adventure novel, and of another composed by none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The White Guard (1891), whose chronology takes place between the years 1366 and 1367 within the framework of the campaign of Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince, to restore Pedro of Castile to the throne. The famous French writer Prosper Mérimée also vindicates the monarch in Histoire de don Pèdre Ier, roi de Castille (Paris: Charpentier, 1848), previously published in installments. Alexandre Dumas was added to the list with his Le bâtard de Mauléon, 1854 and Leconte de Lisle with some of his Poèmes tragiques.
There are other historical novels, already written in Spanish (Men Rodríguez de Sanabria, 1851, by Manuel Fernández y González; Justicias del rey Don Pedro, 1858, by Manuel Torrijos) and romantic dramas La vieja del candilejo, 1838, by Gregorio Romero Larrañaga, José Muñoz Maldonado and Francisco González-Elipe, The shoemaker and the king, in 1840 the first part and in 1841 the second, by José Zorrilla appears as a king of his time. The King's Treasurer (1850) by the brothers Eusebio and Eduardo Asquerino and Antonio García Gutiérrez stages the revenge of Pedro I against his Jewish treasurer Samuel ha Leví. In María Coronel, by Francisco Luis de Retes and Francisco Pérez Echevarría (1872), the "Cruel" king does not come off very well, and neither does he in the novel El suspiro del moro of the republican Emilio Castelar. In The Archdeacon of San Gil , 1873, by Pedro Marquina, he appears as the archetype of the medieval king. The character even appears in opera (Don Pedro el Cruel, by Hilarión Eslava). Francisco M. Tubino composed his Pedro de Castilla, based on the historical episode of the murder in Seville of his half-brother, Don Fadrique, the master of Santiago, already discussed by Trueba. The legend of Doña María Coronel and the death of Don Fadrique (Madrid, 1887). The current opinion, widespread among historians, is that Pedro I of Castile was neither more nor less cruel than his contemporaries. Perhaps the best romance about don Pedro is "A los pies de don Enrique", because it balances both contenders in the duel:
- The two brothers laughed / and so fortunately they scolded / that Cain was the living / not having been the dead [...] Some say that it was just / others say that wrongly done; / that the king is not cruel, if he is born / in time that matters to be, / and that the sheep of love / are so golden and beautiful / since the beautiful Padilla / has remained for example: / that no one will see his eyes / that he does not have the King for sane. [...] Those who with vile spirits, / or by blemish or by fear, / being of the defeated side / the victor follow then, / "valent" call Henry, / and Peter "tirano and blind", / because friendship and justice / always die with the dead"
In the National Library of Spain, in Madrid, there are at least 16 manuscripts that illustrate the life of the monarch.
| Predecessor: Alfonso XI | .svg){kind=small} King of Castile 1350-1366 | Successor: Henry II |
| Predecessor: Henry II | King of Castile 1367-1369 Disputed with Enrique II de Castilla (1367-1369) | Successor: Henry II |
In fiction
- 1963: Peter the Cruel ("Sfida al re di Castiglia"), played by Mark Damon.
- 1989: Pedro I the Cruel, played by Ramon Madaula, mini series of 10 episodes of TVE.
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