Navarre Civil War
The Navarre Civil War from 1451 to 1455 was the War of Succession caused by the usurpation of the Navarre throne by John of Aragón , the widower of Queen Blanka . It ended with the victory of John and in the medium term led to the loss of Navarre's independence .
prehistory
John of Aragón had been King of Navarre since 1425 as the husband of Blanka, who had inherited the kingdom from her father. The marriage contract of 1419 stipulated that Johann and Blanka's eldest son should ascend the throne when Blanka's death. When Blanka died in 1441, Johann kept the government in his own hands and thus pushed his eldest son Karl (* 1421), Prince of Viana since 1423 , aside. Johann tried to appease his son with the office of a deputy (lieutenant), but without success: Charles' allies, the Beaumonteses , succeeded in bringing the two into opposition. Opposite them stood the Agramonteses as allies of John.
war
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Open war was waged on this issue from 1451 to 1455. As early as autumn 1451, Charles was defeated in the battle of Aibar. He was captured and only released after almost two years. Johann tried to disinherit Karl by appointing his daughter Eleanor of Navarre , who had been married to Gaston IV of Foix since 1436 , as heir to the throne. Gaston IV had previously provided military support to his father-in-law Johann in 1455.
Charles tried in vain to win over the French King Charles VII or Pope Kalixt III. to gain allies. In 1455 he fled to the court of his uncle, King Alfonso V of Aragon in Naples .
aftermath
The defeat of the Beaumonteses in the civil war did not lead to an end to the conflict. John ruled Navarre until his death in 1479, followed by his daughter Eleonore for less than a month, then her grandson Franz Phoebus von Foix (1479–1483) and Katharina von Navarra (1483–1517), who married Jean d'Albret in 1484 .
After Franz Phoebus' death, his uncle Johann von Foix claimed the crown for himself as the closest male relative, but was unable to assert himself. He had to give up his claims in 1497 and died in 1500. His heir was his son Gaston , who died in 1512 at the Battle of Ravenna . Gaston's heiress, in turn, was his sister Germaine de Foix , the second wife of Ferdinand the Catholic , King of Aragon and Regent of Castile (for his daughter Joan the Mad ), who used Gaston's death to establish military facts and, later that year, Navarre up to the Pyrenees (the rest of the country north of it remained formally sovereign, but was de facto dependent on France for that reason alone because its kings had much more extensive possessions than subjects of the French king). Ferdinand did this as regent of Castile, not as king of Aragón, so that he was sure of the support of the Beaumonteses, with whose help he reached his goal relatively quickly and easily.
As a result, the Beaumonteses were the only ones who obeyed the call of the newly appointed viceroy to recognize Ferdinand the Catholic as king in the Cortes de Navarra in Pamplona in 1513 - and thus of all things got in the way of the son of their arch enemy John of Aragón had directed.
Ferdinand the Catholic died in 1516, his daughter Johanna was his successor in Navarre, so that the unification of the Iberian kingdoms (except Portugal) was now complete.
Footnotes
- ↑ After Thomas N. Bisson: The Medieval Crown of Aragon. A short history. Clarendon Press et al., Oxford et al. 2000, ISBN 0-19-820236-9 , p. 147, this approach was Blanka's will
- ^ Thomas N. Bisson: The Medieval Crown of Aragon. A short history. Clarendon Press et al., Oxford et al. 2000, ISBN 0-19-820236-9 , p. 148.