We usually link the term imperialism with Castile. However, long before Hernán Cortés took Tenochtitlán, an Aragonese monarch, Alfonso V the Magnanimous (1396-1458), conquered Naples, one of the great kingdoms of the Mediterranean. On the other hand, as a Catholic sovereign, he defended the ideal of crusade and confronted the Muslims for the domination of North Africa. This leads us to think that, perhaps, when Cardinal Cisneros took over Oran at the beginning of the 16th century, he was doing more than just complying with the will of Isabel I the Catholic. His policy linked perfectly with traditional Catalan-Aragonese expansionism.
Alfonso, according to his eulogists, stood out for his sensitive character, his culture, and his elegance. But let’s not get too excited. Like any conqueror of any era, he could be a perfect beast if violence suited his interests. Thus, in Sardinia, he did not hesitate to order that, if necessary, the independence rebels were sold as slaves.
At that time the pen was closer to the sword than we now imagine: we only have to think of the classic archetype of the writing soldier. Alfonso was not only a great warrior, but also a patron of letters and the arts, which he used, of course, to promote his figure. A recent biographer, Josep Brugada, highlights Alfons el Magnànim. Three crowns per a un king (Base, 2023) his great contribution to the world of culture and art, both for the writers he sponsored and for the buildings he had built. In fact, we are facing one of the great princes of the Renaissance.
As Ernest Belenguer indicated in Los Trastámara (Past
In this way, the king could present himself to the world as a fashionable sovereign, protector of avant-garde intellectuals. Otherwise, he would most likely have fallen into disrepute. Not in vain, Boccaccio had written that the inhabitants of remote Hispania were semi-barbaric people.
Today, we remember, above all, the bond that united Alfonso with Ausiàs March (1400-1459), one of the great poets in Catalan of all time. Very young, March was at the monarch’s court when he was in Valencia. Later, he participated in expeditions to Corsica, Sardinia and North Africa. He obtained, thanks to his services, the position of royal falconer. He later returned to the lands under his rule, as a member of the small nobility, and ended up settling in Gandia. Despite the distance, he maintained a very interesting epistolary relationship with the Magnanimous that reflects an evident cordiality, as do the verses that the poet dedicated to Trastámara.
Alfonso V and Ausiàs March shared a taste for reading the classics. Although it was somewhat paradoxical, the future then involved a return to the sources of Antiquity. The writers and thinkers of the time, in the pay of the Aragonese king, strove to present him as a new Julius Caesar, due to his warlike virtues, or as a new version of Octavius ??Augustus due to his great ability to carry out the government.
Naples, thanks to Alfonso V, became one of the most outstanding cultural centers in Europe, where authors in Italian, Catalan and Spanish coincided. Brugada describes Magnanimous as a very restless man in the cultural field, passionate about art and literature. There is something of that, without a doubt. Still, historians should avoid hagiographic temptations. Abel Soler, in La cort napolitana d’Alfons el Magnànim (Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2017) already put limits on the myth of the rex litteratus. The Milanese diplomatic reports show us an individual concerned, above all, with hunting. That was his priority during the fall and winter. He had to wait until spring so that he would deign to focus on books and humanists.
Humanism, at least on a theoretical level, implies a certain form of secularism. As Soler reminds us, this was not the case with Alfonso, always concerned about appearing in public as an example of devotion. That’s why he went to mass three times a day and put a lot of emphasis on religious readings.
It seems clear that the king was a lover of books. He set out to hoard them every time he obtained a military victory, and he had a team of copyists and miniaturists at his disposal. However, it is difficult to distinguish the scholarly passion, the desire for knowledge, from the desire to collect objects that gave intellectual prestige and, in addition, had economic value. Likewise, to what extent was his interest in interacting with the wise men genuine, beyond the use of his works to promote his image? Tommaso Chaula, one of the humanists at his service, praised him through the roof in his Gesta Alfonsi Regis. Antonio Beccadelli, better known as the Panormita, was not stingy with his praise either. From the biography he wrote in Latin, De dictis et factis Alphonso regis, a contemporary specialist, Jordi Llovet, would criticize his excessive praise.
Of all the intellectuals whom the Magnanimous protected, Lorenzo Valla was the most important. His problem was his character, an arrogance on par with his infinite knowledge. He had such a high prestige that it was said that he used Latin better than even the writers of ancient Rome. In his most famous work he demonstrated the falsity of the supposed donation by which Emperor Constantine, in the 4th century, gave the Church the territories that constituted the Papal States. Valla thus made a contribution to knowledge while providing his patron, Alfonso V, with an instrument to combat Pope Eugenius IV, with whom he never came to an understanding.
Let us not forget, on the other hand, fictional literature. Curial e Güelfa, the classic chivalric novel, used to be considered anonymous. However, Abel Soler, in a monumental investigation of more than five thousand pages, cited above, defended the authorship of Iñigo Dávalos, a Toledo native who served as a great chamberlain at the Neapolitan court.
While some writers, like Davalos, came to Naples from the West, others were of Eastern origin, such as the Greek philosopher George of Trebizond, a supporter of Plato over Aristotle. After a period in Rome, at the service of the Pope, he settled at the court of Alfonso, whom he tried to convince, without success, to undertake the recovery of the Holy Land from Muslim rule. The monarch, aware that he did not have international support, put that old dream on hold.
Alfonso never returned to his Iberian domains, where he left a wife, María de Castilla, for whom he did not feel any kind of affection. Upon his death, his brother John II succeeded him to the crown of Aragon. Ferrante, his illegitimate son, did the same on the throne of Naples. It is clear that the Magnanimous felt more comfortable in Italy, where he could maneuver to make his dreams of glory come to fruition. There has been discussion about which was his true homeland, but that question, in the 15th century, is anachronistic. The king, simply put, is the lord of a collection of kingdoms. An astute warrior and politician, he knew how to use intellectuals for his own purposes. He thus starred in a cultural splendor for which he was going to achieve more recognition than for his war exploits.
