ARAGON IN ITALY AND SPAIN, 1458-94Jews (or 'New Christians') and Old Christians. Ferdinand
was of Castilian descent, and the memory of the Antequera
hegemony in Castile in the early fifteenth century was still
fresh; the brother of Alfonso of Aragon had acquired the
crown of Navarre, thereby boxing in Castile on its Pyrenean
frontier. (Admittedly he did little to serve Aragon's wider
interests thereafter, until he became king of Aragon and
surrendered Navarre.) The conclusion seems to be that the
marriage was a good proposition for Aragon, even though it
perpetuated the tendency of the Aragonese kings to reside
outside their core territories; for Castile, or rather the would-
be heiress Isabella, it was a straw at which to clutch in the
hope of making real a claim to the crown that, in 1469, not
all the nobles of Castile were prepared to countenance. Even
after King Henry died in 1474, at the end of a tumultuous
reign in which the authority of the monarchy had been
derided, it took some years to convince the Castilian grandees
that Isabella's claims were irresistible.
Isabella's message was one of unstinting moral reform;
it was on the firm basis of the rechristianisation of Castilian
society that her kingdom would be rebuilt; both kingdoms
were evidently in need of reconstruction after Ferdinand and
Isabella saw off their enemies in the^14 70s. What is note-
worthy is the great conservatism of Ferdinand's policies in
Aragon-Catalonia. To restore himself as king, he must restore
the monarchy as it had always been. He was not aiming to
establish a 'modern', absolutist form of government, but
to re-establish a medieval, consensual form of rule that was
the only basis for legitimacy in Catalonia and Aragon. In
1480-81 he confirmed the traditional powers of the Catalan
Carts and its permanent committees; even when, in 1494, he
put together a Council of Aragon for the whole group of
kingdoms that made up the Crown of Aragon, he was only
returning to methods that had been laid down by Alfonso
the Magnanimous in the 1440s; the lands of the Crown of
Aragon remained, as they were long to do, an assortment of
five kingdoms and one principality.^28 In freeing the remen(a
peasants of Catalonia, with the Sentencia de Guadalupe of
- A. Ryder, The evolution of imperial government in Naples under
Alfonso the Magnanimous', inJ.R. Hale,J.R.L. Highfield, B. Smalley,
eds, Europe in the late Middle Ages (London, 1965), a point not suffi-
ciently appreciated by Elliott, Imperial Spain, pp. 71-2.