THE WESTERN MEOITERRA.NEA!\ KINGDOMS 1200-1500on a foreknowledge of the relationship between Spain's two
main parts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Cer-
tainly, there were striking contrasts between the two entities:
Castile had few centres of industry, though Segovia possessed
some importance as a textile producer; the major resource
of Castile was the wool of its millions of sheep, and there
was an active export trade in iron and other raw materials.
Despite the years of crisis, the Catalan cities, and the rising
commercial centre ofValencia, had no obvious competitors
within Castile; even Seville, the great entrepot linking the
Atlantic and Mediterranean trade routes, was dominated by
Genoese rather than local business interests. Although the
monarchy in Castile was unfettered by the pactist constitu-
tional theories in vogue in Catalonia and Aragon, exception-
ally powerful noble families dominated large tracts of the
countryside in a manner foreign to Catalonia. Thus the mar-
riage was not one of natural partners, nor even one of newly
reconciled competitors, but of unlike with unlike.
Politics, not economics, dominated discussion of the mar-
riage. The terms of the marriage alliance between Ferdinand
and Isabella are still seen by many historians as humiliating
to Aragon, as in some sense they were; but they reflect a state
of affairs where neither party to the marriage was universally
recognised as future monarch, and where it was important
for Isabella to be able to call on the resources of Aragon to
defend her against her rival Juana, and for Ferdinand to
have support against the French pretender Rene of Anjou;
even King Henry IV of Castile was unhappy about the Ara-
gonese marriage. Thus under the agreement Ferdinand
was to spend his time mainly in Castile and he was only to
reign as co-ruler in Isabella's lifetime.~' Another side to these
stipulations was surely the fear that Aragon would lord it
over Castile, rather than, as commonly supposed, the other
way round. No one was in a position to say that Catalonia's
once strong economy was in irredeemable decline; its Medi-
terranean empire remained intact, and the social tensions
that afflicted Barcelona, Majorca, Sicily were not completely
absent in Castile, which, after years of inter-noble conflict, was
also wracked by tension in the towns between jews, converted
- J.H. Elliott, lmpmal Spain 1469-1716 (London, 1963), pp. 6-12, 30-
2; H. Kamen, Spain 1469-1714. A sorif'ly rif ronjlirt, 2nd edn (London,
1991), pp. 1, 9-10.