Although the institutional reforms introduced by Ferdinand involved some deep-seated changes to the administration of the hereditary states of the crown of Aragon, they were not based on some Castilian plan to impose a new and radically different form of government run along modern absolutist lines. To this extent there was no innovation, but rather a restoration of the monarchy’s lost dignity and authority. At the same time, the changes reintroduced a climate of legality and justice, compromised by a half-century of ‘pactist’ excesses and provocation by the various parties. The reforms were now introduced as and when opportunities arose (in the state of Valencia there was a greater centralising trend, since there was less resistance to the powers of the crown) and, on the whole, the overwhelming desire for an overhaul of the system by some strong and respected authority caused the innovations to be generally accepted.
However, the introduction, in 1494, of the consejo supremo de Aragon was a novelty. Its first president, Alfonso de la Caballeria, who stemmed from a Jewish family that had long ago converted to Christianity, was a strong supporter of the monarchy. The consejo, composed of the vice-chancellor, the treasurer-general of Aragon and the regents of the chanceries of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia, was the governing body common to all the states of the crown of Aragon which, in this way, managed to retain its pluralistic and federal character within the dual monarchy of the Catholic sovereigns, a monarchy based exclusively on personal and dynastic ties.
It would be a mistake to imagine that the continuing separation of Castilian and Aragonese institutions was indicative of Ferdinand’s belief that the problem of the dual monarchy would only be solved by its dissolution. It would be equally wrong to consider that evidence of this pessimism lay in his renunciation of his title to the throne of Castile on Isabel’s death (1504), in his second marriage to Germaine de Foix, niece of the king of France, in 1506, or in their naming of their son, who died only a few months old, as heir to the throne of Aragon alone. Ferdinand never doubted the validity of the union of the two crowns expressed in the Edict of Segovia and repeated in Isabel’s will. His rule was dominated by this conviction, together with the belief that the epicentre and guiding light of the new monarchy had to be Castile. However, this does not alter the fact that from the point of view of foreign policy the Catholic monarchs were guided by Aragonese interests whose traditional points of focus were the Mediterranean and Italy, in pursuit of which Ferdinand used Castile’s military and economic might. After the death of Alfonso ‘the Magnanimous’, Naples had become an independent state under the bastard line of the house of Aragon (Ferrante, or Ferdinando, 1458—94) and was treated as an Aragonese protectorate in expectation of its eventual reabsorption into the crown’s territories. This occurred in 1503, following the complicated international situation brought about by the French invasion of Italy in 1494, and thanks to the great military skill of Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba. However, when the gran capitan and Philip, Ferdinand’s son-in-law and king of Castile, made it clear that they considered Naples a Castilian appendage, Ferdinand acted decisively, travelling to Naples in 1506 and moving the gran capitan to another base. His aim was to demonstrate that the kingdom of Naples, the culmination of Alfonso V’s (his uncle’s) expansionist dreams, was an Aragonese, not a Spanish or Castilian possession. His speech before the corts at Monzon in 1510 also aroused the enthusiasm of the Aragonese and Catalans when he declared his aims of expansion into the Mediterranean and North Africa, where Algiers and Tripoli had already fallen into Spanish hands, and the struggle against Islam gave hope of further conquests to follow.
Seen from the outside, Ferdinand’s policies appear to continue the uniform approach typical of the policies of Ferdinand and Isabel. This led many of the king’s contemporaries to assume that the unification of the Spanish monarchies had already been achieved, and to a tendency to call the ‘Catholic Monarchs’ by the titles of king and queen of Spain, titles which they themselves never adopted. Machiavelli and Guicciardini also followed this trend. But Guicciardini, who had a better understanding than Machiavelli of the domestic policies of countries on the Iberian peninsula, when considering the year 1506 in his Storia d’ltalia, gave Ferdinand the title ‘king of Aragon’, and ceased calling him ‘king of Spain’, on the basis that following Isabel’s death and the passing of the validity of her will, the purely personal union of the two crowns was terminated. The kingdom of Aragon, although joined to that of Castile, could not lose its identity through total merger into a new kingdom of Spain. On the contrary, the states of Aragon and Catalonia were destined to retain their original political and institutional character within the wider Spanish kingdom until 1714.