THE END OF THE HOUSE OF BARCELONAMention must also be made of a rare change in out-
look among the kings of Aragon on one issue: Ferdinand
was less keen to resist attempts to coerce the Jews into con-
version than his predecessors or his successor proved to be;
the Disputation of Tortosa in 1413 was held in a difficult
atmosphere, in which leading Churchmen unashamedly
denounced Judaism in a spirit some way removed from that
of Ramon Llull a century earlier. Royal support for the con-
versionist campaign was itself stimulated by the enthusiasm
shown by the antipope Pedro de Luna for anti-Jewish meas-
ures. Such pressures, in the wake of the pogroms over twenty
years before, greatly accelerated the decline of the Jewish
communities of Aragon, so that by the middle of the fifteenth
century Castile greatly overshadowed Aragon-Catalonia in
numbers of unconverted Jews. The loss of the Jewish admin-
istrative and even intellectual elite to Christianity was a
dire blow from which Aragonese Jewry failed to recover.
For this reason, Ferdinand II in 1492 could contemplate the
expulsion of the remaining Aragonese Jews with relative
equanimity; the major Jewish centre in the fifteenth-century
Crown of Aragon was probably Sicily, rather than any of the
Spanish lands.
The difficulties faced by an outsider in understanding the
ancient and generous privileges accorded to the Catalans
became obvious when the new king refused to pay to the city
of Barcelona a tax on the food supplies needed by the royal
household, objecting that all clerics, as well as all the nobility,
were exempt from such a tax. Ferdinand had the good sense
to settle up before leaving Barcelona, but the incident left
a sour taste. Soon after this incident he died at the age of
about thirty-seven. His achievement lay in simply managing
to have himself accepted as king without Aragon undergoing
great convulsions. He did not solve Catalonia's problems;
but he survived the crisis of his accession, and in doing so
enabled the federation of states that he ruled to survive as
well. The Compromise of Caspe must, in any case, be seen
as a crucial moment in a much longer transition from the
end of Peter IV's long reign to the vigorous reassertion of
Aragon's Mediterranean interests under Ferdinand's suc-
cessor Alfonso the Magnanimous, a period not just of polit-
ical but also of economic uncertainty, in the wake of the
Black Death and vicious trade wars.