Death
Ferdinand III had started out as a contested king of Castile. By the time of his death in 1252, Ferdinand III had delivered to his son and heir, Alfonso X, a massively expanded kingdom. The boundaries of the new Castilian state established by Ferdinand III would remain nearly unchanged until the late 1400s. His biographer, Sr. Maria del Carmen Fernández de Castro Cabeza, asserts that, on his death bed, Ferdinand said to his son "you will be rich in land and in many good vassals, more than any other king in Christendom."
Ferdinand was buried in the cathedral of Seville by his son Alfonso X. His tomb is inscribed in four languages: Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and an early version of Castilian. He was canonized as St. Ferdinand by Pope Clement X in 1671. Today Saint Fernando can still be seen in the Cathedral of Seville, for he rests enclosed in a marvelous gold and crystal casket worthy of the king. His golden crown still encircles his head as he reclines beneath the statue of the Virgin of the Kings. Several places named San Fernando were founded across the Spanish Empire in his honor.
The symbol of his power as a king was his sword Lobera.
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Famous quotes containing the word death:
“It was not death he feared—it was the disgrace of death, and the misery of the ignominious preparations. He knew in his heart that heaven could not call it murder that he had done; but he felt equally sure that man would do so.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)
“Such as the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman’s Woe!”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1809–1882)
“I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)