John II of Castile
John II of Castile was king for forty-eight years and governed for none of them, and is remembered for the favourite who governed instead, for the poets he paid, and for a daughter. He became king in December 1406 at twenty-one months, under the regency of his mother Catherine of Lancaster and his uncle Ferdinand of Antequera, who took the crown of Aragon in 1412 and left his sons, the Infantes of Aragon, planted in Castile with estates and a claim on its government. John's reign was their attempt to run Castile and the attempt of Alvaro de Luna, a page who had become the king's inseparable companion, to stop them. The king preferred hunting, music and the poetry of the court, where the Marquis of Santillana wrote the first sonnets in Castilian and Juan de Mena the Laberinto, and let Luna become constable and the richest man in the kingdom. Luna was exiled twice by the Infantes and came back twice, and at Olmedo in May 1445 he beat them in the field and the king's cousin died of the wound. The one royal campaign was against Granada in 1431, a victory at La Higueruela that took nothing. Then the king remarried. Isabella of Portugal, a girl of nineteen, resented the constable's control of her husband, and in 1453 the king let Luna be arrested, tried and beheaded in the square at Valladolid, after thirty years; he wept afterwards and died within the year, in July 1454, saying he wished he had been born a labourer. His son by his first marriage succeeded as Henry IV, whose reign was worse, and the daughter Isabella had borne in 1451 became the Isabella who married Ferdinand of Aragon, took Castile in 1474, and finished the Reconquista. The Laberinto de Fortuna that Mena dedicated to him is still the poem the reign is remembered by.
- Lived: 1405 CE – 1454 CE
- Nationality: Castilian
- Roles: king, monarch
