He was now fifty-three and the bride selected by him a girl of eighteen, Germaine de Foix, a daughter of the Count of Narbonne, who with her brother Gaston represented the younger branch of the House of Navarre. Such a union was naturally attractive to Aragonese ambitions, ever watchful to establish dynastic links with that northern kingdom, though at the moment as it happened the Navarrese connection was of merely secondary importance. Germaine de Foix was a niece of Louis XII., and by his marriage with her (October, 1505) Ferdinand succeeded in breaking the dangerous combination of France and Flanders that might otherwise have proved his ruin. By no arguments on his part, however subtle, could he evade Joanna’s right of succession to the Castilian throne; yet in her state of mental weakness its acknowledgment handed over the practical control of public affairs to her King-Consort; and with the Archduke Philip established as a hostile element in Castile, and Louis XII. an enemy hovering on the Pyrenees, Aragon and her King would have fared ill indeed. [Illustration: FERDINAND OF ARAGON CARVED WOODEN STATUE FROM CATHEDRAL AT MALAGA ] Ferdinand’s marriage relieved the immediate tension of such a possibility; but its achievement courted even greater national disaster. The birth of a son could only mean the destruction of the union between Castile and Aragon, on which the foundations of Spanish empire had been laid; while by the terms of the marriage treaty Ferdinand also risked the dismemberment of his own dominions. Louis XII. was willing to cede as dowry for his niece the rights over Naples which he had failed to maintain by force of arms; but the price he demanded in return was the restoration of that half of the Kingdom which was guaranteed to him by the original Partition Treaty, should Germaine and the Spanish monarch have no heirs. This bargain made and cemented by large quantities of Spanish gold to indemnify Louis for the expenses to which he had been put during the Neapolitan wars, the French King proceeded to forbid the Archduke and Joanna a passage through France, until they had arrived at some amicable understanding with Ferdinand as to the future government of their kingdom. Philip, seeing himself outwitted, sulkily complied, and, in the Treaty of Salamanca (signed in November, 1505) agreed that he, his wife, and father-in-law should “jointly govern and administer Castile,” Ferdinand receiving one half of the public revenues.