General Notes

Ferdinand V, called The Catholic (1452-1516), king of Castile (1474-1504);
as Ferdinand II he was also king of Sicily (1468-1516) and of Aragón
(1479-1516); as Ferdinand III, king of Naples (1504-16). He was the son of
King John II of Aragón.
The union of the Spanish kingdoms of Aragón and Castile was effected in 1469
by Ferdinand's marriage to his cousin Isabella I, queen of Castile.
Ferdinand had hoped by this alliance to obtain the Castilian crown for
himself, but his high-spirited and politically astute wife firmly retained
sovereign authority in her own realm.
The political philosophies of the two rulers were almost identical, however,
and their reign was inaugurated with the promulgation of energetic and
sweeping measures designed to strengthen the royal authority and to curb the
power of the nobles, who had usurped many privileges and functions of the
Crown. To this end, Ferdinand organized (1476) the Santa Hermandad, or Holy
Brotherhood, a kind of national military police. Insistence on religious
conformity was one of their basic policies. In 1478 a bull issued by Pope
Sixtus IV empowered the king and queen to appoint three inquisitors to deal
with heretics and other offenders against the church; this marked the
beginning of the Spanish Inquisition (see Inquisition). Although founded to
further religious ends, the Inquisition in Spain became a political
instrument of the absolute monarchy, further abridging the power of the
nobles.
The year 1492 was the most notable of Ferdinand's reign. It opened with the
conquest of Granada, which marked the victorious conclusion of the long
struggle against the Moors. In August Christopher Columbus, sponsored by
Ferdinand and Isabella, set sail from the small Spanish seaport of Palos on
his epoch-making voyage to America, which was the first step in the creation
of the Spanish overseas colonial empire. In 1493, by the terms of a treaty
between Spain and France, Ferdinand recovered from King Charles VIII of
France the ancient province of Roussillon (now forming the French department
of Pyrénées-Orientales), which Ferdinand's father had mortgaged to King
Louis XI of France.
Because his daughter Joanna the Mad (1479-1555) became insane after the
death of Isabella, Ferdinand assumed the regency of Castile in 1506. He
joined the League of Cambrai against the republic of Venice in 1508, and
conquered Oran and Tripoli on the North African coast in 1509. He annexed
the kingdom of Navarre in 1512, thereby extending the borders of Spain from
the Pyrenees Mountains to the Rock of Gibraltar. Ferdinand was in many ways
a competent ruler. His reign, however, was characterized by an insatiable
thirst for power, and he was both cruel and perfidious. He was succeeded by
his grandson Charles (Holy Roman Emperor Charles V).