by Peter Kerr
Without saying anything, Pedrito looked on as the king’s regal poise seemed to melt away, lending him the appearance of a little boy lost, with more hurt and loneliness in his heart than the lion-like courage of El Conquistador, The Conqueror, the dashing young monarch who now aspired to become Christian Spain’s greatest hero of all.
He raised his eyes to Pedrito with the look of a sad puppy. ‘Mind you, none of that necessarily means that my parents didn’t love me. Perhaps they did. I’m sure my mother did … in the little time I was with her. But she certainly didn’t love my father, nor he her.’ He thought for a few seconds before adding that theirs had been a marriage arranged for the usual purpose of expanding a monarch’s domain. ‘All my father wanted out of the relationship was a son and heir. Gambling was only one of his vices, you see, and once I arrived, I suppose he regarded me as just another stake to wager when circumstances suited. Yet despite all that, I admired him, his bravery in battle, his generosity towards others.’ The king then shook his head forlornly. ‘Maybe I’ve even grown to forgive his weaknesses. Oh yes, he had plenty of those all right – and he passed at least one of them on to me.’
King Jaume fell silent again, and although Pedrito was eager to hear more about his troubled childhood, he was aware that he was being made privy to thoughts which may never have been divulged to anyone before. He therefore showed respect for the king’s silence with an equal measure of of his own.
After a while, the king picked up where he had left off, though there was now an edge of resentment to the way he spoke.
‘The ruthless Simon de Montfort was the guaradian my father entrusted me to at the age of three.’ King Jaume uttered a sharp, mocking laugh. ‘Entrusted me to? No, threw me to would be more accurate. Sí, thrown by my father like dice loaded in de Montfort’s favour in hopes of curbing his brutal, land-grabbing ways. He was already the Earl of Leicester in England, and with extensive lands in the north of France as well. Yet he was hungry for more, and the lands he’d been seizing in the south of the country belonged to my father’s Cathar allies, close to the territory of Montpellier, which my father had received as my mother’s dowry.’
Pedrito listened enthralled as the young king related how the deal of appeasement his father, King Pedro II of Aragon, had struck with Simon de Montfort included an understanding that he, the king’s son, would marry de Montfort’s daughter, thereby extending de Montfort’s sphere of influence into the royal circles of both southern France and northern Spain. There had been nothing particularly extraordinary about any of this, King Jaume conceded, although the fact that his mother was a blood relation of de Montfort might have created ethical issues with the Church, should the marriage between himself and his ‘cousin’ ever have neared realisation. Then again, a politically blind eye might have been turned to the event. That, after all, was the accepted way of things within the religious establishment.
Pedrito could detect a note of cynicism creeping into the king’s speech. Interesting. He topped up the proffered wine beaker, from which the king took a generous slurp. Suitably refreshed, he continued with the story of his early life…
As it turned out, his marriage to de Montfort’s daughter never materialised. Despite his covenant with the tyrant, King Pedro had eventually been lured into armed conflict with him, and died on the field, as much the victim of his own debauchery on the eve of battle as the sword of the man who killed him. Prince Jaume, though by this time only six years old, became King Jaume and, his exiled mother having died earlier that same year in Italy, an orphan as well.
On being told this, Pedrito immediately offered the king his deepest sympathies.
‘Oh, don’t feel sorry for me,’ he replied with an air of insouciance, which Pedrito suspected was more well-practised than spontaneous. ‘My situation wasn’t all that different from your own, after all. You never knew your real parents, and I knew mine only briefly. Oh, yes, by the age of six, I had long forgotten how to cry for them, believe me.’
Somehow, Pedrito didn’t quite buy such a glib assertion, even from this warrior king, whose reputation for self-reliance was legion.
Regardless, King Jaume carried on with his lifestory…
Thanks to the intervention of the Pope himself, he was released from Simon de Montfort’s southern French citadel and taken to the castle of Monzón in his newly-inherited northern Spanish kingdom of Aragon. There, he was given over to the care of En Guillen de Montredon, the powerful Master of the Knights Templar in northern Spain and southern France, thereby baulking the tyrannical de Montfort’s ambitions in both areas.
The king shot Pedrito a cautionary glance. ‘As I said, the Church can be the maker and breaker of kings.’
He then revealed that, after his father King Pedro died, it emerged that, as a result of his degenerate lifestyle, all the ‘tribute’ revenues he had in Aragon and Catalonia had been pledged to money-lending Jews and and even to some Saracens of the same pursuit. More than this, however, he had sold, given away or pawned the rental income from many of his most valuable fiefdoms.
‘In short,’ said King Jaume with a frown of resentment, ‘when I inherited my father’s throne, I also inherited his empty purse.’ He bit off a chunk of bread and chewed it pensively, then swallowed it with a slug of wine. He motioned Pedro to lean in close. ‘In fact, Little Pedro,’ he confided, ‘when I first arrived in Aragon, the land was so wasted and mortgaged that there wasn’t a scrap of food to eat in the castle of Monzón for whole days at a time.’
Pedrito was flabbergasted, and it showed. ‘I’m beginning to think, senyor, that I was lucky to be born a humble peasant instead of a king!’
The king struck a sagacious pose, his wine cup raised like the torch of wisdom. ‘But luck doesn’t some into it, my friend. You see, God decreed that I should be a king, just as, in His infinite wisdom, He determined that you should be a peasant.’
There was no simple answer to that pronouncement, so Pedrito didn’t attempt one.
But the king wasn’t finished. ‘However,’ he continued airily, ‘despite God’s will being done at one’s birth, it doesn’t mean that I, for example, shouldn’t strive to be a great king, while you, by the same token, should try to make the most of whatever gifts the good Lord bestowed upon you – no matter how modest.’
There was even less of a simple answer to that one, so Pedrito gave the king an evasive little smile and waited for him to get on with his story.
6
‘A SKINFUL OF CONFESSIONS’
LATER THAT EVENING –
THE ISLET OF ES PANTALEU …
With the setting of the sun, an almost palpable peace had descended on the bay of Sa Palomera. There was a noticeable chill in the air now too, and a servant of the royal household had dutifully set a fire of dry twigs and driftwood close to where the king was reclining. Over on the shore, fires could also be seen flickering here and there within the Moorish camp; gossamer smoke spiralling lazily upward in the still evening air, the reflection of flames flitting and glittering on the water like a swarm of floating glow-worms.
Pedrito breathed in the scent of burning olive wood wafting over the bay, and he thought again of home. Automatically, his eyes were drawn to the ridge of Es Tres Picons, whose outline now rested dark and serene against an indigo sky, in which little stars had started to blink as twilight faded into night. On the wooded hillsides below, an owl hooted, heralding the first liquid trills of a nightingale, while in the air above Es Pantaleu, tiny bats dashed to and fro like fleeting splashes of shadow. Then, somewhere on a distant mountain farm, a dog barked a warning to imagined marauders skulking by his master’s gate. Mallorca was preparing to sleep.
Pedrito looked over his shoulder towards the silhouette of Sa Dragonera Island – a giant dragon, true to its name, basking on an inky-blue blanket flecked with the dying embers of dusk. It was a scene he had marvelled at many times on the way homeward from a day’s fishing with his father. Back then, their tiny boat would mo
st likely have been the only craft afloat in this remote and peaceful corner of the island, but tonight the shimmering lanterns of the great Christian fleet painted an altogether busier picture – a pretty picture, yet a stark reminder of the approach of war and all the ugliness that would follow in its wake.
The king, however, gave the impression of being too immersed in thoughts of the past to take much notice of this vast array of ships lying silently at anchor, their bellies full of fighting men awaiting the command to do his royal bidding. And Pedrito could understand why the king was wearing this cloak of detachment. Here was a young man with the weight of the world on his back, and as aware as he doubtless was of the gravity of the tasks facing him, such concerns would be best put to the back of his mind for as many precious moments of distraction as he could presently steal.
‘Yes, from the age of six,’ King Jaume said, ‘I was kept in the castle at Monzón for fully two and a half years, being taught the ways of a knight by the Templars and being educated in the ways of Christ by their priests. And I accepted it all without question, because I’d known no different way of life before that anyway.’
Pedrito was slightly puzzled. ‘But although you were only a child, you were also now the king, so how could you – ?’
‘Rule my kingdom?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well, the simple answer is that I didn’t. I couldn’t, even if I’d had the experience, which I clearly hadn’t. No, all such affairs were handled for me by a council of high-ranking barons – regents who were approved by the Church, naturally.’
Pedrito listened spellbound as King Jaume related how, in the meantime and unknown to him, his right to the throne was being fiercely contested, and by rival factions of his own close family to boot. Then, when he was only nine years old, a group of loyal liegemen took him away from Monzón with the declared intention of installing him as the rightful monarch in Aragon’s capital, Zaragoza. But treachery was afoot, and en route to the city he found himself donning his first coat of chain mail in battle against the forces of a coterie of renegade barons.
Somehow, the boy king and his supporters prevailed against all odds – not just in that encounter, but in many others during the ensuing years. His kingdom was in turmoil, and to such a convoluted extent that it became difficult at times to recognise which nobles were true to him and which were against. Consequently, by the age of fourteen, King Jaume was already a battle-seasoned campaigner, and invloved in fierce armed conflict with En Guillen de Muntcada, who had previously been one of his most infuential counsellors, but who had now turned his coat and was attempting to overrun lands in southern France bequeathed by King Jaume’s father to his cousin, the Count of Provence, the father of the king’s foremost general, En Nunyo Sans
A look of assured self-satisfaction came to the king’s face. ‘Yes, I may have been only fourteen, but I took one hundred and thirty fortresses, castles and towers from En Guillen in that campaign. Oh yes, I taught him the price of treachery, and no mistake!’
This latest revelation came as a surprise to Pedrito. ‘Forgive me, Majestat, but I’m a bit confused. Is what you’re telling me – I mean, are you really saying that the En Guillen de Muntcada you defeated in those battles is the same baron who – ?’
‘Is now one of my top commanders on this crusade? Yes, he is indeed.’
‘But I don’t understand how – ’
‘How a traitorous turncoat can become a trusted ally?’
Pedrito nodded his head.
The king hunched his shoulders. ‘I’ve seen many such changes of loyalty since the day I left the castle of Monzón as a naïve child of six. Why, even my cousin Nunyo Sans, in whose interests I risked my life fighting Muntcada, later turned against me and sided with Muntcada himself.’
Baffled, Pedrito frowned. ‘But En Nunyo Sans is now your senior general. How can you trust people like that?’
The king took a sip of wine and smiled bleakly. ‘Every man has a price, and even after En Guillen and En Nunyo had pledged their allegiance to me, I had to pay them twenty thousand morabatins – a huge amount of money – and grant them fiefdoms in Aragon in order to cement that loyalty. Then, to heap hurt upon hurt, they promptly gave those fiefdoms to their friends, simply to raise their own standing in the eyes of the beneficiaries.’ He lowered his voice with his eyes. ‘Why, even my own uncle, En Fernando, who had tried to wrest the throne from me and whom I’d forgiven, was in league with the other two in that affair. I was little more than a boy, and they took advantage of that.’ The king then squared his shoulders and stated firmly, ‘But let’s just say that I put my trust in God, and as all the nobles with me have come to fight in God’s name, I have nothing to fear from any of them.’
‘And their promised share of the lands and riches of Mallorca has nothing to do with their newfound loyalty?’
King Jaume gave Pedrito a forbearing look. ‘As I told you before, amic, no matter how just the cause, an army has to be paid, and that stands good for the generals and knights just as much as for the common foot soldiers.’
‘And for the clergy too?’ said Pedrito, though immediately regretting having put such a provocative question to the king.
His response, however, was surprisingly complaisant, for which Pedrito silently thanked the placating effects of wine.
The king readily admitted that, during the meeting of the Barcelona Cortes at which this Reconquista was initiated, he had been obliged to make a pact with the hierarchy of the Church whereby they and the fighting men whose services they contributed would receive a just share of the lands and ‘moveables’ of Mallorca. King Jaume then appeared to be struck by an appropriately pious afterthought. ‘But their real reward, Little Pedro, will come in the joy of spreading the Truth to the heathen Saracen multitudes. Sí, and the Church has spared no commitment to make sure that this will happen. I mean, even the Archbishop of Tarragona himself swore that, but for his advanced years, he would have come to fight at my side. As you know, however, the Bishop of Barcelona came instead, and with more than a hundred knights in his train! Sí, sí, and the Bishop of Gerona came too, with thirty knights!’
King Jaume’s sudden show of excitement reminded Pedrito of a child on the eve of a birthday. For, no matter how hard he was trying to suppress thoughts of the impending war, the responsibility of carrying the expectations of so many prominent people was obviously having its effect.
‘Also,’ the king added with undisguised pride, ‘you can be sure that His Holiness the Pope, God’s personal emissary here on earth, has given his blessing to my great campaign and to each and every one of his clergymen who are with me. And they in turn, according to the direct instruction of His Holiness, granted full absolution and the guarantee of eternal life in God’s house to those men who confessed their sins before joining this crusade.’
Pedrito looked over to the shoreline, pitch black now except for the glow of the camp fires, and he wondered how many mullahs attached to that massive Moorish force would be saying similar words of encouragement to their soldiers waiting tensely for battle. He also wondered what God and Allah, if either of them even existed, would think of the blood that would soon be spilt in their respective names. But these were thoughts that would have to remain unspoken, at least in the present company.
‘Well,’ he said with as much awe as he could affect, ‘little did I imagine, when tilling the land with my father’s mule, that sleepy old Mallorca would one day become such a coveted prize in the eyes of someone so important as God’s personal emissary himself.’
Ah, but Pedrito was forgetting one very important thing, the king came back. God looked after his own, be they men of the cloth spreading His word, or men of commerce creating the wealth that can help spread His word. Pedrito should understand that many rich merchants had also contributed men, ships and money towards this reconquest of Mallorca, not for the glory of God directly, it had to be admitted, but because Mallorca had become a hornets’ nest of pirates
whose galleys plundered the trading ships of Christendom throughout the western Mediterranean. Then, of course, there was the broader aspect of the crusading movement to consider; namely the strategic importance of Mallorca as a stepping stone for pilgrims and crusaders alike on their way to the Holy Land – the former to pay homage to Christ in the country where He was born, lived and died, the latter to recover and safeguard all of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from the infidel Saracens.
‘Which is why so many Knights Templar have accompanied you on this mission?’ Pedrito asked rhetorically.
‘Precisely. It’s essential for the Christian Church to have a secure haven here for the soldiers of the Cross and its followers, if their virtuous journeys eastward are to be made in reasonable comfort and safe from Saracen terror on the high seas.’ King Jaume offered Pedrito a reassuring smile. ‘Have no fear, here on Mallorca the Knights of the Temple will lay firm foundations for the sanctity and expansion of the one true faith, which is another reason why I and they will emerge victorious from the battles that lie ahead.’
With this, the king breathed in deeply, exhaled a slow, relaxing breath and raised the cup of wine once more to his lips.
To Pedrito, it seemed that King Jaume had been delivering a kind of sermon, but a sermon intended not so much to enlighted Pedrito, but to reassert in the king’s own mind the religious principles which had been instilled in him since infancy, but which nevertheless required occasional reinforcement, particularly when his unwavering trust in those beliefs was about to be put to the test – as it soon would be, and more severely than ever before.
