HABSBURG SPAIN - Spain and Portugal: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 11

H ABSBURG S PAIN
In addition to the Portuguese marriages, two other daughters of the
Catholic Kings had also married strategically. Catalina (Catherine of
Aragon) wed the Prince of Wales and after his death his brother, who
became Henry VIII of England, creating an alliance that ended when he
repudiated her and took his country into the Reformation. Joanna, as
the bride of Philip the Handsome, duke of Burgundy, became the ances-
tress of a new Spanish ruling house—the Habsburgs. Inheriting the
Netherlands from his mother and heir to the Austrian lands of his
father, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, Philip linked Spain with a
whole new range of European domains and commitments. After the
death of Isabella the Catholic in 1504, he was briefly cosovereign of
Castile with Joanna, as Philip I. On his death two years later, Castile
passed to their eldest son, Charles I. Although Ferdinand was now the-
oretically only king of Aragon, Joanna's mental incapacity and the
youth of his grandson (born in 1500 and still living in the Netherlands)
left Ferdinand with effective control of the Castilian realm until his own
death in 1516. As evidence of his increasing regard for Castilian pride,
he arranged for the hitherto independent kingdom of Navarre to be
attached to Castile rather than Aragon when he snatched it from French
dominance in 1512. He continued to concentrate on intermittent war-
fare with France over Italian territory, securing the position of what
was now effectively a united Spain as one of the three great centralized
despotic monarchies dominating Renaissance Europe. In securing this
position, Spain would thus become a contender in the struggle for mas-
tery of the Continent for the next 200 years.
The adolescent Charles I made his first visit to Spain as an outsider,
surrounded by foreign advisers and insensitive to regional traditions.
Neither his Castilian nor his Aragonese subjects were particularly
pleased with his desire to obtain as much of their money as possible in
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