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Jul 5, 1990 · 9780198219545. Oxford University Press. Book. Alfonso the Magnanimous: King of Aragon, Naples, and Sicily 1396-1458. Alan Ryder. Published: 5 July 1990. Cite. Permissions. Share. Abstract. This is a biography of one of the most brilliant 15th century monarchs, Alfonso V of Aragon, who won from his contemporaries the title ‘the Magnanimous’.
- Overview
- Life
- Legacy
Alfonso V (born 1396—died June 27, 1458, Naples) was the king of Aragon (1416–58) and king of Naples (as Alfonso I, 1442–58), whose military campaigns in Italy and elsewhere in the central Mediterranean made him one of the most famous men of his day. After conquering Naples, he transferred his court there.
Alfonso was born and brought up in the brilliant Castilian court at Medina del Campo. When he was 16, his father became king of Aragon, and he himself went to live there. Three years later (1415) he married his cousin María, the daughter of Henry III of Castile, but she produced no children, and they were separated for many years. The marriage was a failure and perhaps helps to explain Alfonso’s reluctance to return to his peninsular kingdoms after he had conquered Naples, where he was encouraged to remain by his mistress, Lucrezia de Alagno.
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He succeeded his father as king of Aragon in 1416 and, at the beginning of his reign, had political difficulties with both Catalans and Aragonese, because he retained some Castilian counsellors and deprived the justicia, the supreme law officer of Aragon, of his position.
From the moment of his accession, Alfonso continued the traditional Aragonese policy of Mediterranean expansion. Thus, in 1420 he set out with a fleet to pacify Sardinia and Sicily and to attack the Genoese possession of Corsica. The queen of Naples, Joan II, then sought his help against Louis III of Anjou and adopted him as her son and heir. Alfonso was received as a liberator in Naples on July 5, 1421, but the volatile character of the queen, who soon afterward began to make overtures to Louis of Anjou, obliged Alfonso in 1423 to return to Catalonia to seek reinforcements.
After intervening in the internal politics of Castile to defend the interests of his brothers Henry and John in the near civil war that existed during the weak rule of John II, Alfonso set out again for Italy, from where, as it turned out, he was never to return. He was receiving tempting offers (1432) to intervene again in Naples and spent two years in Sicily preparing his fleet and army. His opportunity seemed to come in 1435, after the deaths of Louis III of Anjou and Queen Joan II, but while blockading the port of Gaeta, a key citadel from which to launch an attack on Naples, he was defeated off the island of Ponza by a Genoese squadron. Alfonso was captured, with many others, and sent as a prisoner to Genoa and then to Milan, whose duke, Filippo Maria Visconti, ruled both cities. Alfonso, however, charmed his captor into an alliance and then continued his fight to gain possession of Naples against the opposition of Venice, Florence, and the pope. He took Naples on June 2, 1442, and transferred his court there permanently in 1443. It became a brilliant centre of art and culture, fed by the fertile interaction of Italian Renaissance and Spanish Gothic influences and forming a cultural bridge between the two peninsulas of the western Mediterranean.
Alfonso was praised, respected, and admired by the writers of his own time and also by those of the next generation. The latter were still close enough to him to draw upon a living tradition but were free of the desire to flatter that affected his contemporaries. Among Alfonso’s apologists were the Italian humanist scholars Antonio Beccadelli, Aene...
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When people think of Sicily, rarely do they ever think of it as the heartland of a kingdom. Sicily is often seen merely as a part of Italy, leading its rich, unique, and multicultural history to fall by the wayside. Sicily was indeed the center for the formation of a Norman kingdom and a multicultural heartland during the late 1000s into the 1100s.
Title / Office: king (1295-1327), Aragon. king (1285-1295), Kingdom of Naples. James II (born c. 1264—died Nov. 3, 1327, Barcelona, Aragon [Spain]) was the king of Aragon from 1295 to 1327 and king of Sicily (as James I) from 1285 to 1295.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Over a thirty-year period (1061–1091), Norman factions also completed the initial Byzantine attempt to retake Sicily. However, it would not be until 1130 that both Sicily and southern Italy were united into one kingdom, formalized by Roger II of Sicily. Conquest of Naples, 1077–1139
The kingdom of Naples; By Francesco Senatore; Edited by Andrea Gamberini, Università degli Studi di Milano, Isabella Lazzarini, Università degli Studi del Molise, Italy; Book: The Italian Renaissance State; Online publication: 05 August 2012; Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511845697.005
