Peter of Castile

Peter was born in Burgos on August 30, 1334, the son of King Alfonso XI of Castile and his queen, Maria of Portugal ^[1]. Although he was the only surviving legitimate son, his childhood was shadowed by a rival household. Alfonso XI spent most of his adult life with his mistress, Leonor de Guzmán, who bore him ten children, among them Henry of Trastámara, the half brother who would one day take Peter's throne and his life ^[2].

The young prince grew up largely at his mother's side, kept at a distance from a court dominated by Leonor and her sons. Chroniclers later described the humiliation Queen Maria endured, and historians have often traced Peter's lasting suspicion of the high nobility to these early years, when his father's favorites held the offices and lands that custom reserved for a queen's circle ^[3].

Everything changed in March 1350. Alfonso XI died of plague while besieging Gibraltar, one of the few reigning monarchs killed by the Black Death, and the fifteen year old Peter became king of Castile and León ^[1]. Within months Leonor de Guzmán was arrested; in 1351 she was put to death at Talavera on the orders of the queen mother's party, an act that fixed the enmity between Peter and the Trastámara brothers for the rest of his reign ^[2].

The first years of the reign belonged less to Peter than to the men around him. The Portuguese nobleman Juan Alfonso de Alburquerque, chancellor and favorite of the queen mother, directed policy while the teenage king recovered from a serious illness in 1350 that nearly ended the reign before it began ^[3]. The Cortes of Valladolid in 1351 addressed the economic wreckage left by the plague, fixing wages and prices and confirming municipal privileges, an early sign that Peter would look to towns and lawyers rather than to the great magnates ^[4].

Alburquerque arranged a French alliance, and in June 1353 Peter married Blanche of Bourbon, a niece by marriage of the French royal house. The marriage lasted only days. Peter abandoned Blanche almost immediately and returned to María de Padilla, the Castilian noblewoman he loved and to whom he stayed attached until her death in 1361 ^[1]. Blanche was confined for the rest of her short life, and her treatment gave France a grievance against Peter that later carried real military consequences ^[5].

The scandal broke Alburquerque's power and set off a league of discontented nobles, joined by Peter's Trastámara half brothers, who briefly held the king under restraint at Toro in 1354. Peter escaped in 1355, rallied loyal towns, and struck back hard. Executions and confiscations followed, and by 1356 he ruled without a tutor, a young king determined that no faction of grandees would manage him again ^[3].

From 1356 to 1366 the central fact of Peter's reign was the War of the Two Peters, a grinding conflict with Peter IV of Aragon that began over the seizure of Aragonese ships and grew into a struggle for dominance in the peninsula ^[4]. Castile was the larger and richer kingdom, and Peter pressed his advantage on land and at sea, attacking Barcelona with a royal fleet in 1359 and taking frontier towns in repeated campaigns. Aragon answered by sheltering Castilian exiles, chief among them Henry of Trastámara, and by hiring their swords ^[3].

At home, Peter's methods sharpened his reputation. He executed nobles he suspected of treason, sometimes without trial, and the list of victims grew to include his own half brother Fadrique, master of the Order of Santiago, killed in the Alcázar of Seville in 1358 ^[1]. In 1361 his estranged wife Blanche of Bourbon died in custody at Medina Sidonia, and contemporaries, followed by many later writers, held Peter responsible ^[5]. Enemies called him cruel; supporters answered that his severity fell mainly on overmighty lords and that ordinary subjects found in him a source of impartial justice, which is why a rival tradition remembered him as Pedro el Justiciero, the enforcer of law ^[2].

His dealings with the Muslim kingdom of Granada showed another side of his rule. Peter kept a working alliance with the emir Muhammad V, restored him to his throne in 1362 after a coup, and borrowed craftsmen and styles from the Nasrid court. The palace he built inside the Alcázar of Seville, with its Mudéjar arcades and inscriptions, is the most visible legacy of that exchange and still functions as a royal residence today ^[6]. He also protected Jewish financiers such as his treasurer Samuel ha-Levi, builder of the Tránsito synagogue in Toledo, which gave Trastámara propaganda a further weapon: the charge that Peter favored Jews and Muslims over Christian nobles ^[4].

María de Padilla was the fixed point of Peter's personal life. He met her in 1352, and though politics forced dynastic marriages upon him, he always returned to her. She bore him four children, including the daughters Constance and Isabella, before dying in 1361 ^[1]. After her death Peter declared before the Cortes that he had secretly married María before his wedding to Blanche, a claim that, if accepted, made her children his legitimate heirs. The assembled prelates and nobles endorsed it, whatever their private doubts ^[3].

His formal marriages fared badly. The union with Blanche of Bourbon collapsed within days in 1353, and a second ceremony in 1354 with the Castilian noblewoman Juana de Castro was abandoned almost as quickly, leaving Peter open to the charge of bigamy and deepening the church's hostility ^[2]. Pope Innocent VI censured him over the Blanche affair, adding papal displeasure to the coalition gathering against him ^[5].

The daughters of María de Padilla carried his blood abroad. Constance married John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, in 1371, giving the English prince a claim to the Castilian crown that he pursued for years, while Isabella married Gaunt's brother Edmund of Langley. Through Constance's daughter Catherine of Lancaster, who married Henry III of Castile, Peter's line returned to the throne it had lost, so that the later Trastámara monarchs, and through them the Habsburgs, descended from Peter after all ^[4].

In 1366 the war against Aragon merged with the wider Anglo-French struggle. Henry of Trastámara invaded Castile at the head of the free companies, veteran mercenaries of the Hundred Years War led by the Breton captain Bertrand du Guesclin and financed with French and Aragonese support. Town after town opened its gates, Henry was crowned at Burgos, and Peter fled south and then out of the kingdom entirely ^[5].

He found an ally in Edward the Black Prince, ruler of English Aquitaine, who agreed by the treaty of Libourne to restore him in exchange for money and territory. The allied army crossed the Pyrenees in early 1367 and on April 3 met Henry's forces at Nájera, where the English longbowmen and men at arms shattered the Trastámara army and took du Guesclin prisoner ^[7]. It was one of the great English victories of the century, and for a moment Peter had his kingdom back.

The recovery did not last. Peter could not pay the enormous sums he owed, the Black Prince withdrew to Aquitaine sick and embittered, and Henry returned in 1367 with fresh French backing. The war narrowed to a struggle for the loyal south. In March 1369, marching to relieve his supporters, Peter was trapped at the castle of Montiel. Lured from the fortress into du Guesclin's quarters during negotiations on the night of March 23, 1369, he was stabbed to death by Henry himself in a struggle recorded, with varying details, by the chroniclers of both sides ^[1]. He was thirty four.

Anyone asking who was Peter of Castile confronts a source problem first. The fullest account of the reign is the chronicle of Pero López de Ayala, a courtier who deserted Peter for Henry and wrote under the victorious dynasty. Ayala's portrait of a suspicious, vengeful king fixed the label Pedro el Cruel for centuries, yet even hostile readers noticed the competing memory of a stern but fair judge, and fifteenth century writers were already debating which name fit ^[8]. Modern historians, notably Clara Estow, read the reign instead as a hard fought contest between a centralizing monarchy and a nobility defending its privileges, with the propaganda written by the winners ^[3].

Any fair list of Peter of Castile achievements starts with stone and law. The Mudéjar palace of the Alcázar of Seville, largely his creation of the 1360s, remains among the finest medieval buildings in Spain and part of a UNESCO World Heritage site ^[6]. His reliance on Roman-trained lawyers, salaried officials, and the towns anticipated the governing style of later Castilian kings, and his naval campaigns showed what a Castilian fleet could do a century before the age of oceanic expansion ^[4].

The dynastic consequences ran longest. His killing at Montiel founded the Trastámara dynasty, whose descendants Ferdinand and Isabella united Spain, while his daughters' English marriages entangled Castile and England for a generation until Catherine of Lancaster's marriage stitched the two claims together ^[7]. Among the more curious Peter of Castile facts is his afterlife in art: defended by Philip II, who reportedly preferred the name el Justiciero, and dramatized by writers from Lope de Vega to Voltaire, he became a fixture of Spanish drama and romance ^[2]. Whether readers of any Peter of Castile biography settle on the cruel king or the just one, the argument itself, now more than six centuries old, is the surest measure of his hold on Spanish memory.