Ferdinand was the son of
John II of Aragon by his second wife, the Castilian noblewoman
Juana Enriquez whose family was a cadet branch of Trastamara. He married
Infanta Isabella, the half-sister and heiress of
Henry IV of Castile, on
October 19, 1469 in Valladolid and became king consort of Castile when Isabella succeeded her brother as Queen of Castile in
1474. Isabella also belonged to the royal House of
Trastamara. The two young monarchs were initially obliged to fight a civil war against
Juana, princess of Castile (also known as Juana la Beltraneja), the purported daughter of Enrique IV, but were ultimately successful. When Ferdinand succeeded his father as King of Aragon in
1479, the Crown of Castile and the various territories of the Crown of Aragon were united in a personal union creating for the first time since the 8th century a single political unit which might be called
Spain, although the various territories were not properly administered as a single unit until the 18th century.
The first decades of Ferdinand and Isabella's joint rule were taken up with the conquest of the
Kingdom of Granada, the last Muslim enclave in the Iberian peninsula, which was completed by
1492. In that same year, the
Alhambra Decree was issued, expelling the
Jews from both Castile and Aragon, and
Christopher Columbus was sent by the couple on his expedition which would ultimately discover the New World. By the
Treaty of Tordesillas of
1494, the extra-European world was split between the crowns of Portugal and Castile by a north-south line through the
Atlantic Ocean.
The latter part of Ferdinand's life was largely taken up with disputes over control of Italy with successive Kings of
France, the so-called
Italian Wars. In
1494, Charles VIII of France invaded Italy and expelled Ferdinand's cousin,
Alfonso II, from the throne of Naples. Ferdinand allied with various Italian princes and with Emperor
Maximilian I, to expel the French by
1496 and install Alfonso's son, Ferdinand, on the Neapolitan throne. In
1501, following the death of
Ferdinand II of Naples and his succession by his uncle
Frederick, Ferdinand of Aragon signed an agreement with Charles VIII's successor,
Louis XII, who had just successfully asserted his claims to the
Duchy of Milan, to partition Naples between them, with
Campania and the
Abruzzi, including Naples itself, going to the French and Ferdinand taking
Apulia and
Calabria. The agreement soon fell apart, and over the next several years, Ferdinand's great general
Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba conquered Naples from the French, having succeeded by
1504. Another less famous "conquest" took place in 1503, when
Andreas Paleologus, de jure Emperor of the
Eastern Roman Empire, left Ferdinand and Isabella as heirs to the empire, thus Ferdinand became de jure Roman Emperor.
