Ferdinand of Aragon bragged about deceiving the King of France repeatedly
When told that the French king accused him of cheating him twice, Ferdinand of Aragon reportedly scoffed that the man was wrong: he had done it more than ten times. The boast suits a ruler who spent decades outmanoeuvring rivals, and who is widely regarded as Spain's first king despite never legally holding that title.
Born in 1452 in Sos, in the Kingdom of Aragon, Ferdinand married Isabella of Castile in 1469. They were second cousins, and their prenuptial agreement set out how they would share power, summed up in a motto declaring the two equal. Isabella took Castile's throne in 1474, making Ferdinand king there by marriage; he inherited Aragon, with its Mediterranean territories from Sicily to Mallorca, in 1479. The two crowns remained separate states under the same monarchs, and were formally merged only in the early eighteenth century.
The year 1492 defined their partnership. They conquered Granada, the last Muslim state in Western Europe, ending the centuries-long Reconquista. They sponsored Christopher Columbus's westward voyage, which led to Spanish arrival in the Americas, and two years later the Treaty of Tordesillas split the world beyond Europe between Castile and Portugal. They also issued the Alhambra Decree, forcing Jews to convert or leave; most either converted or resettled in the Ottoman Empire. In 1502 Ferdinand revoked the religious freedom promised to Muslims under Granada's surrender treaty, forcing them too to convert or go.
After Isabella died in 1504, Castile passed to their daughter Joanna, whom critics alleged was mentally unstable, and Ferdinand fought to stay in charge. Castilian nobles pushed him aside in favour of Joanna's husband, Philip, but Philip's sudden death in 1506 brought him back as regent. Meanwhile he waged the Italian Wars against France, with his general Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba winning Naples by 1504, and in 1512 he seized most of Navarre. A second marriage, to Germaine of Foix, produced a son in 1509 who lived only hours; had the boy survived, Aragon would probably have split from Castile again.
Ferdinand died in 1516 and lies in Granada's Royal Chapel beside Isabella. His grandson Charles, later Emperor Charles V, soon took power, inheriting a centralised, more united Spain with the groundwork for its dominant army already laid. He had even bought, before 1502, the claimed rights to the Byzantine throne, though they were never used.
Source: Ferdinand II of Aragon
