THE '-'\'ESTERN MEDITERRANEAN KINGDOMS 1200-1500suggests, was known for his affable generosity; and his pol-
icies in Naples showed a statesmanlike willingness to accom-
modate the baronage, despite a long history of disruption
and of preference for Anjou over Aragon. At the same time,
he brought to his court at Naples many Catalan advisers, and
looked beyond southern Italy towards the creation of a new
Roman Empire in the Mediterranean. Ferrante's objectives
were, as he confessed in the first days of his reign, far more
modest; his claim to the crown of Hungary was to all intents
forgotten, and, far from saving Skanderbeg's Albanians from
the Turk, it was the Albanians who came to southern Italy to
save him from his enemies. In restricting himself to Italian
politics, he naturally became entangled in bitter rivalries
within the peninsula, and his ability to make friends with
Florence after long years of hostility is testimony to his polit-
ical sense as well as to his consistent pursuit of the goal of
a wider Italian peace. But this was impossible to achieve
without the acquiescence of the south Italian barons, whose
continual sympathy for the Angevin cause threatened his
power at the start of his reign, and again during the baronial
rebellion of 1485, in which other Italian powers were also
soon implicated. Seeking to strengthen the crown's finances,
he initiated an imaginative economic policy, not unlike the
policies adopted by his ally the duke of Milan; but the more
he leaned towards the cities and merchants for support, the
more he was seen by the barons as hostile to their interests.
At the end of his reign, this atmosphere of suspicion between
crown and nobles proved a dangerous legacy to his cruel
and much disliked heir Alfonso II.
The contrast between Ferrante of Naples and Ferdinand
of Aragon is also instructive. There is not simply the differ-
ence of character that enabled Ferrante to show sympathy
for the plight of the Jews his cousin had expelled from Spain;
it also seems that Ferdinand the Catholic was the one who
completed several of Alfonso's own projects, emancipating
the unfree serfs in Catalonia, and helping further to stimulate
the trade of Barcelona and Valencia. There was a degree of
pragmatism that he shared with Ferrante: he expelled the
Jews from his lands, while allowing the Muslims to stay put
in Aragon and Valencia, aware as he was of the financial loss
that would ensue from their expulsion. Ferdinand's Medi-
terranean policies were aimed, in the ancient Aragonese