Ferdinand II of Aragon

Ferdinand II, called Ferdinand the Catholic, was king of Aragon from 1479 to 1516 and, as the husband of Isabella I of Castile, co-ruler of Castile. Their marriage joined the two largest kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula under one couple and laid the foundations of Spain. Together they conquered Granada, set up the Spanish Inquisition, expelled the Jews and sponsored Columbus, and after Isabella's death Ferdinand won Naples and Navarre and ruled Castile as regent. Machiavelli held him up as the model of a shrewd modern prince.

Ferdinand was born on 10 March 1452 at Sos, a small town in Aragon now called Sos del Rey Católico, the son of King John II of Aragon and his second wife, Juana Enríquez, a Castilian noblewoman. Both his parents belonged to the Trastámara dynasty, which ruled in both Castile and Aragon. The Crown of Aragon was a federation of separate states, the kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia and Mallorca, the principality of Catalonia, and the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, each with its own laws and parliament.

His childhood was dominated by the Catalan civil war of 1462 to 1472, in which the Catalan authorities rebelled against his father. As a boy of ten he was besieged with his mother in Girona, and he learned soldiering early. In 1468 his father made him king of Sicily, a title he held for the rest of his life.

In 1469 Ferdinand married Isabella, half-sister and heir of King Henry IV of Castile, in secret at Valladolid, without the king's permission. They were second cousins, and needed a papal dispensation that was probably forged. When Henry died in 1474 and Isabella claimed the throne, a marriage agreement made clear that she was queen and he king consort, but in practice they governed jointly, sharing the motto "Tanto monta", "they amount to the same". Together they won the war of succession against Henry's daughter Joanna and her Portuguese allies, with a decisive battle at Toro in 1476, and peace with Portugal in 1479. In the same year Ferdinand's father died and he became king of Aragon.

The two crowns remained separate states with their own laws, coinage and institutions, and the Aragonese realms kept their parliaments and privileges. Still, the union of Castile, by far the larger and richer partner, with Aragon created the political core of modern Spain.

Ferdinand and Isabella restored order in a Castile weakened by noble feuds. They set up the Santa Hermandad, a rural police force, took control of the military orders and strengthened royal courts and councils. In Catalonia, Ferdinand ended the long conflict over the servitude of the remença peasants with the Sentence of Guadalupe of 1486, which abolished their worst obligations.

In 1478 a papal bull allowed the monarchs to create the Spanish Inquisition, under royal rather than papal control, to investigate conversos, Jews who had converted to Christianity, and their descendants, suspected of practising Judaism in secret. The first public burnings took place in Seville in 1481, and Ferdinand imposed the tribunal on his Aragonese realms despite strong local opposition. Thousands were executed in its early decades.

From 1482 the couple waged a ten-year war against the Emirate of Granada, the last Muslim state in Iberia, in which Ferdinand led the armies in the field. Granada surrendered on 2 January 1492, completing the Reconquista. In March of the same year they ordered all Jews who would not be baptised to leave their kingdoms within four months. Tens of thousands left, many to Portugal, North Africa, Italy and the Ottoman lands, and many others converted. In April 1492 they agreed to back Christopher Columbus, whose voyage that autumn opened the way to the Castilian conquest of the Americas. In 1496 Pope Alexander VI gave the couple the title of Catholic Monarchs. The terms of surrender that had guaranteed the religion of Granada's Muslims were broken within a decade: after revolts, Muslims in Castile were ordered in 1502 to convert or leave.

Ferdinand's main interests lay in the Mediterranean, where Aragon had long competed with France. When Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494 and seized Naples, Ferdinand joined the alliance that drove him out. In 1500 he agreed with Louis XII to divide the kingdom of Naples between them, then turned on the French. His commander Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the "Great Captain", won at Cerignola and the Garigliano in 1503, and by 1504 Naples belonged to Ferdinand. In these campaigns Spanish infantry, combining pikes and firearms, began to earn the reputation that would make it the most feared in Europe. Ferdinand took part in the leagues and counter-leagues of the following years, against Venice and then against France, and his forces seized coastal towns in North Africa, including Oran in 1509 and Tripoli in 1510.

Isabella died in November 1504, leaving Castile to their daughter Joanna, the wife of the Habsburg archduke Philip of Burgundy. Ferdinand lost control of Castile to Philip in 1506, and married Germaine of Foix, a niece of the French king, hoping for an heir for Aragon; their only son died within hours of his birth in 1509. Philip died suddenly in September 1506, and Ferdinand returned in 1507 as regent for Joanna, whose mental state was said to make her unfit to rule and who was confined at Tordesillas.

In 1512, with the support of his son-in-law Henry VIII of England, Ferdinand invaded the kingdom of Navarre and annexed its lands south of the Pyrenees, completing the territorial shape of Spain. He died on 23 January 1516 at Madrigalejo, in Extremadura, and was buried beside Isabella in the Royal Chapel at Granada.

Ferdinand's grandson Charles, the son of Joanna and Philip, inherited all his kingdoms and, as Charles V, combined them with the Habsburg lands to form the greatest empire of the age. In The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli praised Ferdinand as a ruler who had risen from weakness to become the first king in Christendom by bold enterprises cloaked in religion, a judgement that was half admiration and half criticism. Spanish historians long saw the reign of the Catholic Monarchs as the founding of the nation and of the Spanish Empire. Later historians have stressed its darker side: the Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews and the forced conversion of Muslims, which created a society obsessed with religious conformity and "purity of blood".