num_pages: 306
description: Out of the turbulent, shadowed histories of the various medieval kingdoms destined to become Spain looms a strange, awkward figure—Henry IV of Castile. It is ironic that Henry was born on January 5, the Eve of Epiphany—the Feast of Kings—for no man was ever less suited to be a king. All his life he was an eccentric and a failure—the luckless veteran of futile campaigns, the bewildered victim of unending intrigue. A gentle giant who loved music and animals in an age when monarchs were generally preoccupied with conquest and slaughter, he found companionship chiefly among the lowborn. More than one young man of fair face and overweening ambition he raised to great power, only to have them rob him and betray him to his enemies. Henry’s two marriages were disasters. They provided his scornful contemporaries with a label which is still in use five centuries later; even today, he is known to most historians as Henry the Impotent. When he died in 1474, a pathetic ruin of a man, Spain’s Middle Ages died with him. It was Henry’s successor, his young half-sister Isabel the Catholic, and her husband, Fernando of Aragon, who forged the rival realms into a unified country. Henry IV of Castile: 1425-1474 is a personal drama: a penetrating study of the nature, psychological and sexual, of a hitherto little-known king. It is a drama played out against a vivid background of violence and war, with a cast of characters unequaled anywhere in the annals of history for their cunning and treachery.
language: English
title: Henry IV of Castile
titlecomplete: Henry IV of Castile
genres: Biography, History
ratings_count: 5
publisher: J. B. Lippincott Company