ARAGON IN ITALY AND SPAIN, 1458-94to recover Naples and to launch from there a crusade for
the recovery of Constantinople and jerusalem. The history of
the French invasion and of the fall of the Neapolitan house
of Aragon will be examined in a moment. What needs to be
asserted here is that the destruction of the Aragonese dynasty
resulted in a propaganda victory for Ferrante's enemies. He
was illegitimate by birth; but so were many contemporary
Italian rulers, and he had the benefit of papal sanction as
they generally did not. He was duplicitous and cruel; but his
enemies gave in equal kind; he was, after all, a contemporary
of Louis XI and Richard III. Yet he also had ideals which
were not simply self-centred: the preservation of peace within
Italy, which only occasionally proved achievable; the stabil-
isation of his kingdom in the face of baronial power; the
prosperity of his subjects. He was conscious enough of the
precarious nature of south Italian politics not to allow him-
self, in imitation of his father, to be bewitched by vainglory
and grandiose ambition. However, the high price Ferrante
paid was to have an altogether nastier reputation, as the
antithesis of the knightly virtues Alfonso had supposedly
sustained.
RECOVERY IN ARAGON
The intention in the following section is to look at the restor-
ation of royal authority in Aragon-Catalonia at the end of the
fifteenth century, before examining in the final chapter the
last phase of Aragonese involvement in Italy and the incor-
poration of the kingdom of Naples into the Spanish empire,
at the start of the sixteenth century. It is not easy to write
about Ferdinand II of Aragon without also writing about his
formidable wife Isabel or Isabella, queen of Castile, whom he
married in 1469 when they were both hoping to succeed to
crowns which they could not be certain ofwinning.^26 It is not
simply a question of disentangling the history of Castile and
Aragon at this stage: one problem in the existing literature
on the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella is the sheer assump-
tion that Spain's destiny lay with Castile, an assumption based- P. Liss, Isabel the Queen (New York/Oxford, 1992) is one of several
recent biographies of Isabella.