The prince who didn’t want to marry the princess

Alfonso IV, King of Aragon and Valencia, was the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather of Perucho Figueredo.  He inherited the throne of Aragon due mostly to the bizarre behavior of his brother, Prince Jaume, the oldest son and heir of King Jaume II of Aragon, their father.

A political marriage had been arranged between a certain Princess Leonor of Castile and Leon, and Prince Jaume.  As was the custom of the time, when Princess Leonor was not even five years old, in January of 1312, she was sent to the Aragonese court, so that she might grow up learning the customs of the people she would one day rule as their queen.  The actual marriage was scheduled for shortly after her twelfth birthday, in the autumn of 1319.  [According to medieval church law, a girl could marry, being then considered legally adult, at age twelve, and a boy at age fourteen.]

By 1317, however, there were hints of trouble.  The princess’s intended husband, Prince Jaume, was a confused and rebellious young man who seemed to be forever in serious conflict with his father.  There were rumors that the prince wanted neither to get married nor to follow his father upon the throne; rather, he wanted to enter a religious order.  The king of Aragon, of course, was having none of this nonsense, and began to put pressure on his eldest son to start acting like the heir to the throne and carrying out his princely responsibilities, one of which was to marry the Castilian princess and thereby cement an alliance between the two neighboring countries.  Not honoring the arrangement would lead to, at the very least, a major diplomatic incident, perhaps even a war.

So King Jaume II began a campaign of browbeating his heir into proper behavior, which finally resulted in the prince’s reluctantly showing up at church in the Aragonese town of Gandesa on the appointed day, 17 October 1319.  The wedding ceremony and nuptial mass were duly celebrated - only to have Prince Jaume stand up immediately after the conclusion of the mass and declare before the entire assembled Aragonese court that he renounced both his bride and his rights to the throne.  As everyone, including the bride and King Jaume, was standing there in utter shock, the prince walked out of the church, got on his horse, and rode away.

To say that King Jaume II was mortified would be to put it mildly.  His worst fears had just come true, in the most public manner possible, and now he had to find some way of explaining this to the bride’s formidable grandmother, the dowager-queen María of Castile and Leon, that would not immediately start a war; for rumors of the Aragonese prince’s reluctance had been filtering back to Castile, where the natural assumption was that Aragon was trying to break the alliance.  That was in addition to the enormous insult that the prince’s behavior had given Princess Leonor of Castile and her whole family, which was reason enough in itself, in those days, for a war.

Fortunately for King Jaume, the Castilians had recently suffered a major military disaster  which meant that Castile was in no position to avenge with armed force the insult to its princess.  The Aragonese king did some politic groveling to Queen María via letters, explaining that he was just as horrified and outraged by his son’s actions as she was, that the alliance was still in place nonetheless, etc., etc.  It worked.  There was no war, and King Jaume personally escorted Princess Leonor back to the Castilian border, with profuse apologies.  The princess thereafter joined her brother under their grandmother’s tutelage in the town of Valladolid.  Also fortunately, Jaume II had several more sons, and the second of them, Prince Alfonso, was quickly named the new heir to the Aragonese throne.

King Jaume really had no choice at this point but to allow his oldest son to become a monk or friar, but he could at least make sure the wretched young man did not have an easy time of it; the king gave his permission for Prince Jaume to enter a very strict house of the Hospitaller Order, and then wrote to the prior of that house, instructing him to see to it that Jaume took vows immediately and then to treat the young man just as he would any other friar, no special consideration - if young Jaume longed for the ascetic religious life, then by all means let him have it.  As it turned out, the new friar had just as much trouble in his religious life as he had had in his secular one, starting with the requirement for complete obedience to his religious superiors, which he apparently violated time after time, although the historical record, alas, does not provide many details of his defiances.  The Hospitallers soon had about as much as they could take of him, and vice-versa, whereupon he was transferred to an even stricter Cistercian monastery.  He did no better there.  By 1323, he had run away from his monastery and was reported to be living a life of disgraceful dissoluteness in the red-light district of Valencia City, shacked up with some lower-class female.

But the story doesn’t end there.  In 1327, the second son, Alfonso became king on the death of his father and, since his (Alfonso’s) wife had died just days earlier he was in obvious need of a queen to share his throne.  Alfonso XI, now king of Castile and Leon, had the perfect candidate: his sister Eleonor.  After all, she was supposed to have married the next king of Aragon back in 1319, so why not rectify that diplomatic gaffe now?  The prospect of the alliance with Castile, as well as that of wiping out the stain on the family honor put there by his older brother’s bizarre behavior, appealed to King Alfonso - not for nothing was he known as Alfonso the Benign - and he quickly agreed.  On February 5, 1329, in Tarazona, in the province of Zaragoza, Eleonor, Princess of Castile and Leon finally became queen of Aragon, although with a different husband than had been planned a decade earlier.