CHAPTER XXIV.
peculiar genius of the age. While Isabella, discarding all the petty artifices of state policy, and pursuing the noblest ends by the noblest means, stands far above her age.
Gloomy close of his life. In his illustrious consort Ferdinand may be said to have lost his good genius.[1] From that time his life. fortunes were under a cloud. Not that victory sat less constantly on his banner; but at home he had lost
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends."
His ill-advised marriage disgusted his Castilian subjects. He ruled over them, indeed, but more in severity than in love. The beauty of his young queen opened new sources of jealousy; [2] while the disparity of their ages, and her fondness for frivolous pleasure as little qualified her to be his partner in
- ↑ Brantôme notices a sobriquet which his countrymen had given to Ferdinand. "Nos François appelloient ce roy Ferdinand Jehan Gipon, je ne sçay pour quelle dérision; mais il nous cousta bon, et nous fist bien du mal, et fust un grand roy et sage." Which his ancient editor thus explains: "Gipon de l'italien giubone, c'est que nous appellons jupon et jupe; voulant par là taxer ce prince de s'être laissé gouverner par Isabelle, reine de Castille, sa femme, dont il endossoit la jupe, pour ainsi dire, pendant qu'elle portoit les chausses." (Vies des Hommes Illustres, disc. 5.) There is more humor than truth in the etymology. The gipon was part of a man's attire, being, as Mr. Tyrwhitt defines it, "a short cassock," and was worn under the armour. Thus Chaucer, in the Prologue to his "Canterbury Tales," says of his knight's dress,
"Of fustian he wered a gipon
Alle besmotred with his habergeon."Again, in his "Knighte's Tale,"
"Som wol ben armed in an habergeon,
And in a brest-plate, and in a gipon." - ↑ When Ferdinand visited Aragon, in 1515, during his troubles with the cortes, he imprisoned the vice-chancellor, Antonio Agustin; being moved to this, according to Carbajal, by his jealousy of that minister's attentions to his young queen. (Anales, MS., año 1515.) It is possible. Zurita, however, treats it as mere scandal, referring the imprisonment to political of fences exclusively. Anales, tom. vi. fol. 393.—See also Dormer, Anales de la Corona de Aragon, (Zaragoza, 1697,) lib. 1, cap. 9.
derne." Varillas, Politique de Ferdinand, liv. 3, disc. 10.
