The royal feud raged on, but despite the politics and the battles of these years, the infant kingdom’s economy flourished. Agricultural methods were improved, a textile industry was launched, and ship-building developed to the point where the keels of an independent galley-fleet could be laid. Castles and palaces were built, notably the circular Bellver Castle on Mallorca, and the Palace of the Kings at Perpinya. Above all, commerce boomed. Mallorca became the entrepôt for the seaborne trade between Europe and North Africa. It was the place where the small coastal boats transferred their cargoes to larger seagoing vessels. It was equally the entry point for rare commodities – oriental spices, gold and ‘porcelain’ shells. New routes were exploited with Sicily and Sardinia, and even (since Jaime III had been brought up in his mother’s home of Achaia) with Greece and with Mamluk Egypt. Expeditions explored ocean routes to the Canaries and to north-west Europe and independent Mallorcan consulates were set up in the Berber states of North Africa. Genoese merchants were welcomed, creating the Lonja dels generesos in Palma, and Mallorcans muscling in on the Atlantic trade appeared in London and Bruges. The records of Francesco Datini, ‘the Merchant of Prato’, reveal that he was importing Iberian wool to Italy, not from the Spanish mainland but from the islands. Naval facilities were expanded for the Aragonese fleet.75
As part of their strategy to maximize income from trade in their own ships, the kings of the Greater Island sought to close their ports to Barcelonan and Valencian vessels. In 1301, for example, they tried to step up the anchorage tax on Catalan ships entering Collioure, signalling their intention of treating them as foreigners. The scheme failed and was replaced by an attempt to make Barcelona pay a flat annual fee of 60,000 silver pounds. That ploy failed, too, when Barcelona argued that a similar sum should be paid to Aragon as a feudal fee for approval of the king’s marriage. The cat was playing with the mouse. In due course, the Mallorcans minted their own coinage in Rosselló, and in 1342 they even launched an independent expedition to explore the Canaries. In the eyes of their Aragonese cousins, they were building an empire within the Empire.76
In Balearic society, the balance between Christians, Muslims and Jews was different than elsewhere. A few free Muslims remained in Mallorca, though the majority were enserfed. The Jews, in contrast, prospered mightily. They belonged to the same cultural network as their co-religionists in Barcelona, Perpinya and Montpellier; they enjoyed the right of alyama or self-government; and they participated energetically in the commercial boom. The Call or ‘ghetto’ in Ciutat de Mallorca was a prosperous quarter surrounding a single prominent synagogue. Apart from the solitary pogrom in 1391, generalized persecution would not set in until the fifteenth century.77
The kingdom’s best-known subject by far was Ramón Llull (1232–1315). Philosopher, novelist, linguist and reconciler of religions, he was born in Mallorca soon after the conquest, served as a page in Jaime the Conqueror’s court, studied at the University of Montpellier, and later rose to serve as seneschal of the ‘Greater Island’ in Perpinya. His first book, Le Llibre de la cavalleria, dealt with the principles of chivalry. A moment of religious ecstasy followed. The rest of his life was spent trying to harmonize the three great monotheist religions. Llull knew Arabic as well as he knew Latin, and had been trained in the work of Muslim and Jewish philosophers. He laboured for many years at the Franciscan monastery at Miramar on Mount Randa, before setting out on long tours to meet popes and princes, journeying as far afield as Georgia and Egypt and teaching in many foreign universities. At the Council of Vienne in 1311, he witnessed the nominal acceptance of his cherished proposal for the teaching of oriental languages. He undertook repeated missions to Muslim North Africa, where he engaged in learned disputations with the ulemas (religious scholars), and where his remarkable life reached its term.
Llull’s works were frowned on by the Church, but never lacked admirers. His Ars major and Ars generalis contain a mass of speculative philosophy. His Blaquerna is sometimes cited as the world’s first novel. His poetry, in El Desconort or Lo Cant de Ramon, is beautifully simple. He even invented a sort of cybernetic machine that claimed to unravel the mysteries of universal knowledge. Llull has rightly been called ‘a great European’.78
Sardinia first came into Aragon’s sights during the suspension of the Kingdom of the Greater Island, when Pope Boniface VIII, seeing Aragon as a useful ally against the troublesome Republic of Genoa, tried to transfer both Sardinia and Corsica to Barcelona.
Medieval Sardinia was divided into four Giudricati or ‘Judgeships’, Gallura in the north, Cagliari in the south, Logudoro in the north-west and Arborea on the west coast. The ruling judges were military as well as judicial officials, who passed much of their time contesting control of the castles of the island’s mountainous interior. By the turn of the fourteenth century, Gallura and Cagliari were in the pockets of the Pisans, and Logudoro of the Genoese; Arborea was the only Judgeship to remain fully independent.
Aragon’s claim was revived by the Infante Alfonso of the Trinacrian line. His expedition, having sailed from Mallorca, landed in the spring of 1323:
And the Lord Infante En Alfonso had fine weather and assembled all the fleet at the island of San Pietro. And they went to Palmas dels Sols and there all the chivalry and the almugavars landed. And, immediately, the Judge of Arborea came there with all his power, to receive him as lord, and a great number of Sardinians… [from] the city of Sassari surrendered to him. And there they made an agreement, by the Judge’s advice, that the Lord Infante should go and besiege Iglesias…
The Lord Infante, besieging Iglesias, attacked it every day with catapults. But [he] and all his host had so much sickness, that the greater part of his followers died… and he, himself, was very ill. Assuredly he would have been in great danger of dying, if it had not been for the great care of my Lady the Infanta…
However ill the Lord Infante was, for no physician would he leave the siege. Many times with the fever upon him he would put on his armour and order an attack. By his good endeavour… he reduced the town to such a state that it surrendered. So all the host entered… and garrisoned the fort well. And then he came to Cagliari, and built a castle… opposite Cagliari and gave it the name of Bonaire.79
On 24 April 1326 the foundation of the Kingdom of Sardinia was proclaimed. Arborea alone offered coherent resistance.
Aragonese rule in Sardinia was not entirely even-handed. The Coeterum statute of 1324 abolished Pisan law, introducing legislation that favoured the newcomers. All public offices were reserved for Catalans, Mallorcans and Aragonese. As from 1328, a trumpet was sounded at nightfall from the battlements of Cagliari, warning all Sardinians to leave. A parliament opened, similar to the Corts in Barcelona. The three estates of feudal lords, clergy and royal officers met in separate chambers, and exercised an advisory role. In 1354, the port of Alghero was settled by Catalans, and their descendants speak Catalan to the present day.
The life and reign of Pedro IV (1319–87) form the centrepiece to the whole Aragonese fourteenth century. The son of Alfonso IV and of Teresa d’Entença, heiress of Urgell, he succeeded in 1336, inheriting a domain that stretched right across the Mediterranean from Valencia to Athens. He was known as El Ceremonioso from the rigid etiquette of his court, and also as El Punyalet, ‘the Poignard’, after furiously cutting up both a proposed charter of noble liberties and his own finger. His life was filled with warfare: against his relatives, against his nobles, and against his neighbour and namesake, Pedro the Cruel of Castile. Prior to 1348, he prevailed against an armed insurrection of nobles, survived the plague which killed his queen, Leonora of Portugal (the Black Death split his reign into two clear halves), and suppressed the Kingdom of Mallorca. Many of the events of the reign were voluminously recorded in the chronicle which he personally commissioned.80
The two branches of Jaime the Conqueror’s family repeatedly intermarried in the first half of the fourteenth century in the hope of reaching reconciliation, but it never work
ed. The final suppression of the Kingdom of Mallorca came about through a culmination of complaints. The commercial policy of the Mallorcans irked Barcelona. Their continuing links to France, through Montpellier, aroused suspicions. And the last straw was delivered by news of intrigues with the Genoese. Pedro decided to act. In 1343 troops carried by the Catalan fleet invaded the Balearics. In 1344 an Aragonese army stormed Perpinya. The Mallorcan court was driven into exile. In 1349 the last, desperate Mallorcan ruler, Jaime III, sold Montpellier to raise funds, then staked all on an expedition to recover Mallorca. His gamble failed. He was killed on the field of Llucmajor in southern Mallorca, and his ‘Ephemeral Kingdom’ died with him.81 Though the legal claims of the Mallorcan line were kept in circulation for the lifetime of Jaime III’s immediate heirs, his son the nominal Jaime IV lived in Naples as the consort of the notorious Queen Joanna I (see below, p. 211).
Pedro’s decisive action completed a process of monarchical consolidation. To prevent the fragmentation of the Crown, it had been decided in his father’s time that ‘whoever rules in Aragon rules in Catalonia and Valencia as well’. The king now reincorporated the lands of the ‘Greater Island’ also.
Both in its origins and in its outcome, the noble revolt of the (second) ‘Union of Liberties’, which came to a head in 1347, reflected deep unrest that was no less social than political. The royal justiciar had ruled that ‘a lord can maltreat his vassal whenever there is just cause’, and the nobility’s control over their serfs, who had no recourse beyond the mercy of their oppressor, had become near absolute. Such court records as remain of complaints against lordly malpractices are expressed in the ‘tormented voices’ of a virtually invisible underclass.82 In best Aragonese fashion, the Union’s leaders also added the legal right of rebellion against the king to their usual litany of petitions and demands. The rebels’ sense of omnipotence was increased by the support of the king’s half-brothers, who feared for the loss of their top positions in the royal line of succession.83
Yet the Union had picked an agile and obstinate opponent, and one who possessed ready allies, especially in Catalonia. Initially, the rebels made deep inroads into Valencia and Aragon, but they grew disunited when unexpected concessions were made. While they hesitated, the king turned to the prosperous merchant class of Barcelona, which supplied him with money and professional soldiers. The rebellion collapsed in a sea of blood at the Battle of Epila near Zaragoza in July 1348. After his victory, the king rescinded the Privilege of Union of 1287 together with all other charters making reference to the nobles’ right of rebellion. At the same time, he took an oath to respect his subjects’ traditional liberties, while strengthening the powers of the justiciar, whose constitutional pre-eminence dates from this time. He reached a sensible compromise, resisting the temptation to introduce a royal despotism.84
In the midst of these preoccupations, the Black Death struck like the Hand of God. The king was still struggling to restore order after the Union of Liberties:
The great plague began in the city of Valencia in the month of May in the year of Our Lord 1348… By the middle of June over 300 persons died each day. We decided to leave the city and go to Aragon…
As soon as We arrived in Teruel We heard that the Prince En Ferrando was in Saragossa with many [others], discussing the affairs of the Union… All that was discussed tended to Our great disgrace. But [after] some days in Teruel, the great plague began there [too], and We had to leave. And We made Our way to (Saragossa) via Tarazona, where the noble En Lop de Luna was, with an Aragonese armed company, waiting for the troops [which] the king of Castile was to send for Our assistance…
Then We directed Our way to Our Aljaferia… We sentenced thirteen persons to death, with confiscation of their goods, as they had committed the crime of lèse majesté. Those condemned were hanged, some at the Gate of Toledo and some in other places…
The jurats [magistrates] of the city [then] begged Us that We should be pleased to discuss the state of the kingdom. Having talked with Our council, we at once agreed to hold Cortes generals in the city… The first thing that We [did] was that all the acts made by the Union were judicially condemned; and, in the main building of the monastery of the Preachers, where the Cortes were celebrated, all the documents and legal processes made by the Union were burnt… so that nothing of its acts should remain…
We went to the Church of Sent Salvador and, standing in the pulpit… We spoke to the people. Our discourse was, in sum, that We considered Ourselves prejudiced and injured by the Union, but that, remembering the mercy [which] the bygone kings of Aragon had been accustomed to show to their subjects, We pardoned them… This was done in the month of August.
During the [continuing] discussions, the great plague began [again]… and increased daily… The Cortes being in agreement, We prorogued them [to] the city of Teruel… And then the Cortes graciously accorded Us a morabati or monedatge [tax], which We had collected in all parts of the kingdom.
We left the city of Saragossa with the queen, Our wife, who was ill. Many days had passed since the illness started but she was better… [So] We went to Exérica. And the illness of the queen increased so much that in a few days she passed from this life in Exérica. As soon as she was buried and We had dined, We mounted and went to Segorbe where the plague had come to an end.85
The king was obviously too busy to tarry or to mourn. It is notable that the Cortes waited until the end of the session before ‘graciously’ granting the king his taxes, which were payable in a seven-year cycle. (In Castile, as in England, the king demanded his taxes before agreeing to hear representations.) In the opinion of one leading scholar, this practice explains why the royal power in such a rich country suffered from financial weakness.86
In the second half of his reign, Pedro IV’s troubles were religious as well as financial; he fell into a lengthy feud with the inquisitor-general and head of the Dominican Order in Aragon, Nicolau Eymerich (1320–99), author of Directorium Inquisitorium (1376), an authoritative handbook for defining and combating witchcraft, which was defined as a form of heresy.87 The inquisitor was a zealot who refined the use of torture and persecuted both the Jews of Aragon and the followers of Ramon Llull. He was twice banished to Avignon, and twice returned.
A century after its birth, the Aragonese navy was the third biggest in the western Mediterranean, after those of Genoa and the Moorish emirates of North Africa. Its galleys were half as big again as in the thirteenth century, carrying an average complement of 223 rowers and crewmen; its shipyards at Barcelona, Valencia and Palma, drawing on the oak woods of Montseny, were virtually self-sufficient except for oars. Its increased capacity made it possible for a fleet to extend the standard four-month tour of summer duty to twelve or even eighteen months. A fleet of twenty-eight galleys, for example, which put to sea in 1341 under Admiral Pere de Moncada (grandson of Ruggiero di Lauria), wintered on station, only returning to Barcelona the next year.
The main threat at that time came from the North African Moors. The Christian navies, commanded by Admiral Boccanegra of Genoa, joined forces to isolate Muslim Granada from the Marinid rulers of Morocco and to keep the Strait of Gibraltar open. The Castilians in particular suffered great losses, and were obliged to hire fifteen replacement galleys from Genoa at 800 gold florins per month. For logistical reasons, however, the Aragonese were unable to fight for long without allies, since their plans to assemble a fleet of forty heavy and twenty light galleys were not realized. The prospect that Genoa might ally itself with the Moors proved especially worrying. Aragon remained a major naval force until the utility of galleys declined through the introduction of gunpowder in the late fifteenth century.
Aragon’s overseas territories suffered not only from the Black Death but also from the social ills that had wracked the heartland. The most distinguished historian of Sicily, for example, has written of the rise of a ‘New Feudalism’.88 The barons rampaged with impunity; the serfs toiled without relief; the towns withered; a
nd the monarchy was helpless. In 1377, Pedro IV of Aragon invaded Sicily in order to bring it under direct control.
Conditions in Sardinia, where Aragon waged three wars against Arborea, were no healthier. Arborea received support from Genoa, but not enough to produce a clear victory. Remarkably, despite the upheaval, one of the most talented women of the Middle Ages, Eleonora d’Arborea (1347–1404), was able to flourish both in government and in science.89 Wife of a Genoese, and mother of successive Sardinian judges, she defended her birthright with spirit both against Aragon and against local republicans. She was an unlikely pioneer of ornithology and bird-protection – the falco eleonora is named in her honour – and she is remembered as the author of a famous law code, the Carta de Logu, which remained in force from 1395 to 1861.90
The death of Pedro IV in 1387 marked the culmination of a century-long period of evolution in the institutions of the Crown of Aragon. The monarchy, the administration and the political culture of the state had all been forced to respond to the growing ‘empire’, and all had been systematically transformed. The ‘Arago-Catalan Court’, as one historian calls it, provided the key to ‘the rise of administrative kingship’.91 The Royal Chancery, the ‘King’s Memory’, kept copies of all laws and letters, leaving a vast store of documentary treasures in Barcelona’s Arxiu de la Corona d’Arago.92 Its paper-based technology can be traced to Jaime the Conqueror’s capture of Europe’s first Muslim-owned paper factory at Xativa in Valencia.93 The Royal Treasury, the ‘King’s Purse’, kept detailed, daily records of all financial transactions. And the Royal Household, the ‘King’s Body’, revealed ‘a discreet society’ of royal relatives, specialized bureaucrats and highly trained servants, who ran the state. One scholar’s conclusion, which seems to regret the polity’s ultimate demise, is unnecessarily pessimistic:
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