Germain de Foix

After the death of Karl Viansky in 1461, his younger brother, Ferdinand the Catholic, did not give up hopes of joining Navarre to his possessions, which with the hand of his sister Eleonora had departed to the house of Foix . In 1483, the young Francis Phoebe de Foy was poisoned, and his uncle Jean de Foy declared himself heir to the Navarre crown. A civil war broke out in the country.

Ferdinand Catholic, after the death of his wife Isabella (in 1504) decided to take advantage of the infighting, and agreed with the French king about marriage with Germain de Foy, who was the native niece of the French king, and Ferdinand - the granddaughter (he was the brother of her grandmother ). According to the terms of the agreement concluded in Blois, in the case of the birth of Germain’s male heir, the French king yielded his (fairly elusive) rights to Naples and Jerusalem ^[2] . The marriage contract was executed at Blois Castle on October 19, 1505.

Ferdinand hoped for the birth of an heir and regularly resorted to love potions, but the only son of Germain, Juan Zhironsky , died a few hours after birth. Had this not happened, Juan, as a male heir, would have inherited the Aragonese crown , which Ferdinand did not wish to yield to the unloved son-in-law Philip the Fair . In this case, the unification of Castile and Aragon into a single Spanish kingdom could be avoided ^[3] .

In 1512, having slandered the excommunication of the Navarre King John from the church and hiding behind the rights of Germain to inherit Navarre, Ferdinand annexed part of Navarre , located south of the Pyrenees. The paradox was that the Germain’s rights were motivated precisely by the impossibility of inheriting the Navarran crown through the female line ( salic law ).

After the death of Ferdinand, a new king arrived in Spain - his 17-year-old grandson Carlos . In honor of his 29-year-old "grandmother", Germain de Foix, he arranged tournaments and rastani. Contemporaries note that the two got along well with each other. When Germaine had a daughter Isabella , it was rumored that her father was the young king ^{[4] [5]} .

In order to avoid a scandal, Carlos hurried to come to the widowed queen of her husband. The choice fell on Margrave Johann Brandenburg-Ansbach . After the marriage (June 1519), the newlyweds moved from Barcelona to Valencia as governors of the lands of the Valencia crown . There Germain brutally suppressed the fraternal uprising of the Catalans; her hand signed dozens of death sentences.

After the death of her husband in 1525, Germaine entered into a third (also childless) marriage with the Duke of Calabria , the eldest son of Neapolitan King Federigo , who was at one time removed from the throne by Ferdinand the Catholic.