THE \\'ESTERN MEDITERRANEAN KINGDOMS 1200-1500thousand (including all the males in the town) were reported
to have been put to death.^13 But the fall of Otranto also
meant that the Turks were within a whisker of being able
to shut the vital sea lanes down the Adriatic. The death of
the sultan meant that the Turks suddenly lost interest in
their Italian campaign; they were chased away by Alfonso of
Calabria with the naval help of Ferrante's cousin Ferdinand
king of Aragon, and Italy (including even the irate Pope
Sixtus IV) united for once in support of Ferrante; but the
strategic issue of control of the Adriatic ports of the kingdom
of Naples remained an important one throughout the late
fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Ferrante's close political
and cultural links to Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary,
who married his daughter Beatrice, must also be seen as part
of a far-sighted wider strategy of building a vast barrier against
the Ottomans in the Balkans and the Adriatic.^14
It was natural that, as an Aragonese prince, Ferrante should
seek good relations with his Spanish cousins, who in any
case controlled the neighbouring island of Sicily, which might
also suffer badly if the Turks gained a stranglehold on the
southern Adriatic and the Ionian Sea. Relations with Aragon
were generally smooth, and there was little sense that Fer-
rante was in any way subordinate to his father's successors
in Spain; King John II of Aragon had even helped resist the
Angevin invaders at the start of Ferrante's reign. Yet Ferrante
was immune to one major feature of Spanish policy in these
years. In^1492 Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from
all their lands in Spain and Italy; there was a massive influx
of Sicilian and Spanish Jews into the kingdom of Naples
which Ferrante openly welcomed. He saw the Jews as a valu-
able source of artisan skills, for many Spanish and Sicilian
Jews were active in such crafts as cloth production; he also
reveals, in his public documents, a genuine desire to protect
the Jews in southern Italy from increasing persecution at
the hands of their Christian neighbours. Such attitudes were
rather rare by this time. In 1493 he protected the Jews against
the accusation that they had brought pestilence with them
- F. Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and his time (Princeton, NJ, 1978),
pp. 390-2. - M. Spremic, Dubrovnik e gli Aragonesi (1442-1495) (Palermo, 1986),
pp. 26-3~ 55-8, e~.