When Joan II died in 1479, Ferdinand ascended the throne of Aragon, and set about resolving the problems of his inheritance. For some time the remenca peasants had been in revolt against their masters in the Catalan countryside. In 1484—5 there was a further, widely supported, uprising, in which some royal cities were sacked. Afterwards the peasants split into two groups, one led by Pere Joan Sala, which supported total freedom for the remences and the abolition of all feudal measures, the other, constituting the majority and led by Francesc Verntallat, which sought a peaceful solution to the problem, and therefore advocated the sincere reformist views of the monarchy. After Sala’s arrest and death (1485), and following painstaking negotiations, the Sentence of Guadalupe was proclaimed by the king on 21 April 1486. In this instance Ferdinand was not acting as a judge called in by the two parties to a conflict but rather as the sovereign whose existence had been proved to be vital to the solution of Catalonia’s tortuous problems. The Sentence legally abolished the remences as a class, along with their servile obligations, known as the mals usos. As freemen, they were permitted to exercise the use of their holdings, provided that they paid rent. The lands expropriated during the years of upheaval were returned to the nobility, who were compensated for the rents and services lost. The revenues and rents proper to a feudal system, which there was no intention of abolishing, remained in place. In the Aragonese countryside, on the other hand, where the balance of powers was different, and where the peasants had lacked real revolutionary zeal, the repressive feudal system remained in place, to be endorsed by Ferdinand in the Sentence of Celada in 1497.
Institutional and administrative reform on a wide scale was also pursued. In 1484, taking advantage of the war of Granada and the problems concerning the liberation of Roussillon, the king called a meeting of the corts at Tarazona and secured approval for a number of sweeping fiscal reforms, including the method of levying the new direct taxes (sisas). Their purpose, the pursuit of war in Granada rather than the defence of the kingdom, was, however, a breach of the Aragonese fuero, and could have led to the king’s excommunication. Ferdinand avoided this, however, by obtaining a bull from Pope Innocent VIII dispensing him from the requirement that sisas should only be levied in defence of the kingdom, an implicit recognition of his right to impose new taxes and dispose of the revenues as he saw fit.
Part of the new general policy was the plan to create some basic form of public policing in Aragon, similar to the Castilian hermandad, to replace the old inefficient municipal juntas dominated by the local oligarchic consortia. All towns and cities in the kingdom were obliged to join a hermandad for five years. It carried out the policing of rural areas which suffered from chronic banditry and noble gang war. Each hermandad numbered 150 lances and was supported from taxes levied by itself. Its principal officers were royal nominees chosen from candidates proposed, for example, by the city of Saragossa. The king thus obtained a fiscal and military body totally beyond the control of the constitutional authorities. Although approved in 1487, the hermandad was suspended in 1495 when the great Aragonese families of Urrea, Luna and Alagon, among others, who had refused to join it, undertook the financial maintenance of a new military order for the king in exchange for his suppression of the hermandad.
The reform of Saragossa’s municipal council in 1487 is also connected with Aragonese hermandad plans. The members of the council consented to a system whereby, instead of being appointed through a random selection process, they would be directly nominated by Ferdinand for three-year terms. At the same time, the procurators of the corts granted him the right to nominate the members of the kingdom’s diputacio.
The profound economic crisis in Catalonia meant that its institutional deadlock had to be broken by a radical reform of the principal self-governing bodies: the diputacio del general and the council of one hundred. Only the king could carry out this reform, as the ecclesiastical and patrician branches of bodies dominating the corts were insensitive to the problem. As a result the king and the city of Barcelona were drawn together in the realisation that the corts would never reform the generalitat, which was mainly responsible for running up the huge public debt. The reform plans were drawn up by the chief councillor (conseller en cap) of the city, the energetic Pere Conomines (1483), who had been one of the leaders of Catalan resistance to Joan II, but was now putting into operation Ferdinand’s reorganisation of the system. The plans themselves were based on the reduction of the public debt (the censals, or documents of credit issued by the generalitat), a salary cut for state officials, and the imposition of taxes on the clergy.
In 1488, at the instigation of the guilds of Barcelona, the king enacted the reform of the diputacio, suspending the legislation governing the election of deputies and, without protest (for such was the level of corruption and disorder at the time), began appointing the deputies, including their president, the Castilian Juan Payo, abbot of Poblet. He followed this up with a series of protectionist measures which set off the economic recovery (the redref): these included the reintroduction of the Catalan monopoly on coral fishing in Sardinia; the enlargement of the network of Catalan merchant consulates in the Mediterranean; the extension to Catalans of the privileges enjoyed by Castilians in Bruges; provisions against Genoese and Provencal merchants; and the protection of Catalan cloth exports to Sicily and Naples. Thanks to these measures the crisis was certainly averted. Barcelona, however, did not regain the pre-eminence she had enjoyed before the civil war. That position was now assumed by Valencia, evidence of whose economic growth and strength lay in the loans she was able to make to the crown and the reports of visitors who commented favourably on the splendours of the city.
It took longer to reform the government of Barcelona, where the gravity of the situation could be seen in the repeated, occasionally contradictory, interventions of the sovereign. As a result of the privileges granted to it by Alfonso V in 1455, the city was ruled by a government (conselleria) composed of five councillors elected annually by the council of one hundred: two by the ciutadans honrats and one each by the mercaders, artistes and menestrals. Each conselleria also had the right to nominate half the members of the council, each of whose mandates ran for two years. Finally, the government of Barcelona was in the hands of a restricted oligarchy made up of some fifteen families from the patrician class and their allies, the great merchants. As this group was unable to make decisions which accorded with the perceived general interest, it was deeply resented by the other social classes. In 1490 the king suspended the elections of the councillors and personally appointed a new conselleria, presided over by Jaume Destorrent, and made up of members of the groups favouring royal intervention in the city’s affairs. Led by an open-minded, effective president, the new government was able to approve and enact all the measures of the redref, but its excesses and abuses of power finally reached the attention of the king, who dissolved it in 1493, introducing a system of election by lottery (insaculacio) in its place.