Italy
Spanish acquisition of Naples

History > Early modern Italy (16th to 18th centuries) > From the 1490s through the 17th-century crisis > French and Spanish rivalries after 1494 > Spanish acquisition of Naples

Louis XII had not given up French pretensions to the Kingdom of Naples, and the acquisition of Milan strengthened his supply position. Powerful aristocrats within the kingdom, led by the pro-French princes of Sanseverino in Calabria, fomented dissension and weakened the already tenuous rule of King Frederick (1496–1501) to the point that both the French and Spanish saw an opportunity to satisfy their ambitions. In the Treaty of Granada (1500) they agreed to invade and partition the kingdom between them into a northern French sphere of the Abruzzi and Campania (including the city of Naples) and a southern Spanish sphere of Calabria and Puglia. Yet the most wily diplomat of the age, Ferdinand II (the Catholic) of Aragon, the king of Spain, hoped not only to forestall French ascendancy and outsmart Louis XII in Italy but also to assert his own claims as the legitimate heir to the Aragonese empire founded by Alfonso V (the Magnanimous) in 1442. In addition, he hoped to resist Ottoman advances that were threatening his possession of Sicily. In 1501 a French and Spanish invasion divided the Kingdom of Naples according to plan, and Frederick of Naples lived out his life in French exile together with his faithful servant, the great Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazzaro. When hostilities broke out in Puglia in 1503 over the large revenues of the sheep customhouse at Foggia, Spanish forces under Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba (the “Great Captain”) outfought the French and occupied the entire Kingdom of Naples by the end of that year. France abandoned its claim to Naples in 1505. During the next 30 years Naples spearheaded Spanish policy in Italy.

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