John II of Aragon
John II of Aragon fought his own son for a kingdom, fought Catalonia for ten years, went blind and had the cataracts couched, and at seventy married his second son to the heiress of Castile, which is why there is a Spain. He was born in 1398, a younger son of Ferdinand of Antequera, who became king of Aragon by the Compromise of Caspe in 1412, and he got Navarre in 1425 by marrying its heiress Blanche. When she died in 1441 the crown should have gone to their son Charles of Viana and John kept it, and the quarrel between father and son became a civil war in Navarre and then, when John inherited Aragon from his brother Alfonso in 1458, a war with Catalonia, whose Corts took up the son's cause. Charles died in 1461, poisoned according to the Catalans, and from 1462 to 1472 the principality fought its king. It offered the crown to three foreign princes in turn, and John pawned Roussillon and Cerdagne to Louis XI for the money to fight it. He was over sixty and by 1468 blind, and a Jewish physician, Abiathar Crescas, restored his sight by needling the cataracts, an operation the court recorded in detail. His second wife, Juana Enríquez, the Castilian admiral's daughter, had given him a son in 1452 whom he made king of Sicily at sixteen and used as his general, and in 1469 he arranged for that son, Ferdinand, to marry Isabella, the half-sister of the king of Castile, against her brother's wishes and with a forged papal dispensation. Barcelona surrendered on terms in 1472 and he pardoned it. He spent his last years trying to get Roussillon back from France and died in Barcelona in January 1479 at eighty, and Ferdinand became king of Aragon five years after Isabella had become queen of Castile. Roussillon came back to Aragon in 1493, under Ferdinand, by treaty with the next French king.
- Lived: 1398 CE – 1479 CE
- Nationality: Aragonese
- Roles: king, monarch
