RISE OF ABSOLUTISM 633 bella he himself married a niece of the French king. Upon the death of Isabella, Joanna and Philip had claimed the throne of Castile which Ferdinand reluctantly relinquished to them. But Philip soon died and Joanna was literally crazed with grief, so that Ferdinand recovered Castile and ruled it until his death. Portugal had with some difficulty maintained its inde- pendence of Castile during the later Middle Ages. It had increased its territory in the fifteenth century by the acquisition of Ceuta and by further conquests in Moorish northwestern Africa and exploration along the coast and settlement in the islands of the Atlantic. The king who did most to increase the power of the monarchy within Portugal was John II (1 481- 1495). The voyage of Vasco da Gama opened the prospect of a Portuguese com- mercial and maritime empire in Africa and the Indian Ocean in the next century, stimulated national spirit and enterprise, and increased the power of the Crown, since the Eastern trade was made a royal monopoly. Last in our survey of the states of western Europe at the close of the fifteenth century we come to the Italian pen- insula. In a way the French invasions of Italy The French at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the invasions of sixteenth century were nothing new. Goths and Lombards, Byzantines and Saracens and Normans, Hohen- staufens and Angevins and Aragonese, had been invading Italy throughout the Middle Ages and much of the penin- sula had always been under foreign rule. These new French invasions, however, led to important political changes in the peninsula and determined that instead of Italy's be- coming a strong state under the rule of one king like Spain, France, and England, or remaining like Germany divided into small states ruled by native princes, it was to become for the next three centuries the frequent battlefield of for- eign monarchs and to be partitioned in treaties by them. These invasions closed the political period which had been at the basis of the Italian Renaissance, just as the voyages of discovery destroyed the economic prosperity upon which
