ARAGON IN ITALY AND SPAIN, 1458-94in 1511). Most of these places were placed under the Castilian
flag, and seized with Castilian resources, but Tripoli was
not unreasonably attached to the nearby Sicilian kingdom.^36
Ferdinand forced the Jews out of these territories, acting
consistently in the wake of his expulsion ofJews from Spain.
The problem was that conquering the outer edge of the limit-
less expanse of Mrica was not like conquering Spain: for one
thing, the population consisted only of Muslims and Jews;
for another, the further east the Spanish fleets moved, the
nearer they came to the advancing Turkish armies which
were shortly (1517) to overwhelm Egypt.
The Catholic Monarchs saw the expeditions as crusades,
and Pope Alexander VI was generous with grants of crusade
taxes. Yet the Mrican conquests must also be seen as the fruit
of centuries of Catalan-Aragonese ambition in the western
Mediterranean, of which Ferdinand II of Aragon was now
the standard bearer, even if it now proved easier to achieve
results with Castilian armies. The basic conception of secur-
ing control of the prosperous ports of Morocco, Algeria and
Tunisia, which had long served as termini for the gold cara-
vans crossing the Sahara, went back centuries. It is possible
too that the Mrican conquests were thought necessary to
secure the safety of the sea routes bringing Sicilian grain
and other produce of the island kingdoms of the Crown of
Aragon to the Spanish mainland.^37
The other major concern of fifteenth-century Aragonese
kings in the western Mediterranean was, of course, southern
Italy. But to explain Aragonese intentions there it is neces-
sary first to see how they reacted to the fall of the kingdom
of Naples, held by their cousins, to the kings of France, suc-
cessors to the Angevins.
CONCLUSION
Ferrante of Naples makes an interesting contrast with
his father Alfonso. Alfonso, as the epithet 'Magnanimous'- A.C. Hess, The forgotten frontier: a history of the sixteenth-century Ibero-
African frontier (Chicago, 1978); Elliott, Imperial Spain, pp. 41-4;
Ramsey, Spain, pp. 232-7. - F. Braude!, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age
of Philip II, trans!. S. Reynolds, 2 vols (London, 1972-73), vol. 1,
pp. 117-18.