When the infant Portuguese heir, Miguel, died, early in 1499, the issue between Ferdinand and his son-in-law was joined. Isabel was visibly failing, and it was seen would die before her husband, in which case Joan would be Queen of Castile, in right of her mother. Philip, her husband, with the riches of Flanders and Burgundy, and the prestige of the empire behind him, would come, perhaps in alliance with the French, and reduce greedy, ambitious Ferdinand to the petty crown of Aragon. Thenceforward it was war to the knife between father and son-in-law, who hated each other bitterly; and Isabel’s distrust of her daughter Joan grew deeper as religious zeal and ambition for a united Spain joined in adding fuel to the fire. With true statesmanship Isabel, under the great influence of Jimenez, clung more desperately than ever to the idea of a Spain absolutely united. Ferdinand’s object in working for the consolidation of the realms had always been to forward the traditional objects of Aragon in humbling France, but those of Isabel and Jimenez were different. To them the spread of Christianity in the dark places of the earth, for the greater glory of Castile, was the end to be gained by a united Spain, and for that end it was necessary that the people should be unified in orthodoxy as well as in sovereignty. The cruel and disastrous expulsion of the Jews[84] served this object in Isabel’s mind, though to Ferdinand its principal advantage was the filling of his war chest. The squandering of Castilian blood and treasure in Naples and Sicily was to Isabel and Jimenez a means of strengthening the Spaniards in their future Christianisation of north Africa, whilst to Ferdinand it meant the future domination of Italy, the Adriatic, and gaining the trade of the Levant for Barcelona.