Alfonso V of Aragon
Alfonso V of Aragon, called the Magnanimous, reigned forty-two years and spent the last twenty-six of them in Italy, where he took Naples after a war of twenty years, entered it in 1443 through a breach in the wall in a gilded chariot like a Roman triumph, made it the most brilliant court of the Renaissance south of Florence, and never went back to Spain, leaving his brother and then his wife to govern Aragon in his name. He was a Castilian, a son of the Trastamara Ferdinand whom the compromise of Caspe had made king of Aragon in 1412, and he inherited the Crown of Aragon with Sicily and Sardinia in 1416. The childless queen of Naples, Joanna II, adopted him as her heir in 1421 when she needed a fleet against Louis of Anjou, and disowned him two years later in favour of the Angevin, which set the war going. He was captured at sea off Ponza by the Genoese in 1435 with two of his brothers and taken to Milan, and talked the duke, Filippo Maria Visconti, into becoming his ally instead of his gaoler. That is the deed the name Magnanimous is usually hung on. Naples fell in June 1442 after a siege in which his men entered by an aqueduct, and the pope invested him with the kingdom the next year. He kept the Catalan parliament at arm's length and the Aragonese nobles quiet by absence, and paid for Italy with the taxes of Sicily and the banks of Barcelona. At Naples he built the triumphal arch of the Castel Nuovo, collected manuscripts, kept Lorenzo Valla, who wrote the exposure of the Donation of Constantine in his service, and the Panormita, who wrote up his sayings, and paid the humanists more than any prince alive. Vespasiano da Bisticci says he had Livy read to him at meals. His wife Maria of Castile, whom he saw for the last time in 1432, governed Aragon as his lieutenant and died there without him. He died at the Castel dell'Ovo in June 1458 and divided what he had, Aragon and the islands to his brother John II and Naples to his bastard Ferrante, which is why the two crowns had to be reunited by Ferdinand the Catholic.
- Lived: 1396 CE – 1458 CE
- Nationality: Aragonese
- Roles: king, monarch, patron
