Ferdinand V

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 (1504-1516). 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, in 1476 Ferdinand organized 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. The Inquisition targeted non-Christians, especially Marranos, Jews who had insincerely converted to Christianity for their own security. 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 and bringing the monarchy closer to the church.

The year 1492 was the most notable of Ferdinand's reign. It opened with the conquest of the province 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 de la Frontera on his epoch-making voyage to America, which was the first step in the creation of the Spanish overseas colonial empire. Also in 1492 the monarchy cruelly expelled about 150,000 Jews. 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 was insane, 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).