The Royal Palace of Olite, Seat of the Kings of Navarre
The palace-castle at Olite, built through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and one of the principal residences of the Navarrese court. A kingdom of this size kept its independence by building, marrying and negotiating rather than by fighting its neighbours.
Fifteenth-century Navarre sat between Castile, Aragon and France with a fraction of the resources of any of them, and it survived by making itself useful and expensive to swallow. The strategy failed in the end: a civil war between the supporters of Charles of Viana and his father split the kingdom, and Ferdinand of Aragon annexed the southern part in 1512. Olite was among the courts where that politics was conducted. See the kingdom's struggles for survival in fifteenth-century Navarre.
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