HENRY III. (1390-1406) king of Castile, called _El Doliente_, the Sufferer, was the son of John I. of Castile and Leon, and of his wife Beatrice, daughter of Ferdinand of Portugal. He was born in 1379. The period of minority was exceptionally anarchical, even for Castile, but as the cities, always the best supporters of the royal authority, were growing in strength, Henry was able to reduce his kingdom to obedience, and, when he took the government into his own hands after 1393, to compel his nobles with comparative ease to surrender the crown lands they had seized. The meeting of the Cortes summoned by him at Madrid in 1394 marked a great epoch in the establishment of a practically despotic royal authority, based on the consent of the commons, who looked to the crown to protect them against the excesses of the nobles. Henry strengthened his position still further by his marriage with Catherine, daughter of John of Gaunt and of Constance, elder daughter of Peter the Cruel and Maria de Padilla. This union combined the rival claims of the descendants of Peter and of Henry of Trastamara. The king's bodily weakness limited his real capacity, and his early death on the 25th of December 1406 cut short the promise of his reign.
HENRY IV. (1453-1474), king of Castile, surnamed the Impotent, or the Spendthrift, was the son of John II. of Castile and Leon, and of his wife, Mary, daughter of Ferdinand I. of Aragon and Sicily. He was born at Valladolid on the 6th of January 1425. The surnames given to this king by his subjects are of much more than usual accuracy. His personal character was one of mere weakness, bodily and mental. Henry was an undutiful son, and his reign was one long period of confusion, marked by incidents of the most ignominious kind. He divorced his first wife Blanche of Navarre in 1453 on the ground of "mutual impotence." Yet in 1468 he married Joan of Portugal, and when she bore a daughter, first repudiated her as adulterine, and then claimed her for his own. In 1468 he was solemnly deposed in favour of his brother Alphonso, on whose death in the same year his authority was again recognized. The last years of his life were spent in vain endeavours, first to force his half-sister Isabella, afterwards queen, to marry his favourite, the Master of Santiago, and then to exclude her from the throne. Henry died at Madrid on the 12th of December 1474.