THE WESTERN MEDITERR~NEAN KINGDOMS I ~00-1500At the end of his life (he died in 1484, the year after
Louis XI), Rene's political hopes met yet another dead end.
He had no surviving male heir, and those he nominated to
succeed him proved incapable of resisting French royal pres-
sure, and Louis XI took advantage of his weakness to seize
Lorraine, Bar and Anjou itself by 1474. In 1486 Provence
too, though technically outside France, passed to the French
crown. It was the young king of France, Charles VIII, who
inherited from Rene not just his lands across France, but
also the fateful claim to the crown of 'Jerusalem and Sicily'.
But it is now necessary to turn back to the Aragonese con-
quest of Naples in order to understand Charles VIII's own
plans.
THE CONQUEST OF NAPLES
Ferdinand I was succeeded by a son, Alfonso V of Aragon,
IV of Catalonia, II of Sicily, I of Naples, who was slowly to
bring together under his rule all the lands which have
been discussed in this book: southern Italv, Sicilv, Sardinia,
the Spanish territories of the Crown of Ar~gon.^1 / During his
long reign (1416-58), he thus established the framework
within which later rulers, such as Ferdinand the Catholic
and Charles V, would exercise dominion in the western
Mediterranean. Alfonso the Magnanimous was arguably the
first beneficiary of a gradual upturn in the Mediterranean
economy, which became visible by the middle of the fifteenth
century. Indeed, he may have done something to stimulate
this upturn, by creating an Aragonese-dominated lake in
the western Mediterranean across which the Catalans and
their allies could sail and trade. But it is necessarv to turn
back to the earliest stages of his involvement in southern
Italy in order to identify the main currents of his Mediter-
ranean policy.
Very soon after becoming king of Aragon in 1416 he made
it plain that he intended to complete the work of Martin
the Elder, looking out from Spain towards the Mediterra-
nean islands. His first target was a new focus of interest that
- A. Ryder, Alfonso the Magnanimous King oj Aragon, Naples, and Sicily
1396-1458 (Oxford, 1990) is the unrivalled account of the reign.