Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  And… the Lord King himself took the crown from the altar and placed it on his own head… And… the said Lords Archbishops and Bishops and Abbots and Priors and the Lords Infantes with them, cried in a loud voice: Te Deum laudamus. And as they were singing, the Lord King took the golden sceptre in his right hand and put it in his left and then took the orb in his right…

  And when… the Gospel had been sung, the Lord King again, with a low obeisance offered himself and his sacred crown to God, and knelt down very humbly. And… he went to seat himself before the altar of San Salvador, on the royal throne, and he sent for all the nobles… and dubbed them knights.43

  Famously, Christianity and Islam coexisted in several parts of the Crown of Aragon. ‘Nowhere was contact between the two cultures closer than on the Gulf of Lyons,’ wrote Christopher Dawson; the County of Barcelona in particular ‘was a kind of bridge between the two worlds’.44 Yet the patterns were not uniform. In the lands newly occupied by the Reconquista, the Moors still dominated numerically. In most towns and cities of Aragon and Catalonia, they lived in closed wards, where, nonetheless, linguistic assimilation accelerated. In the countryside, they were often left to the supervision of the Knights Templar. The Jews, too, lived apart, as their own Talmudic rules required, but played a fruitful role in intellectual, medical and commercial life. Questions of tolerance and oppression, however, are almost impossible to quantify. A well-known study of the convivencia of Moors and Christians in fourteenth-century Aragon reports that the well-organized mudéjar communities experienced good times and bad, and concludes: ‘the general situation of Muslims, whether desirable or undesirable’, was not due to ‘the justice or injustice of the Christian authorities’.45

  Similar conclusions can be applied to the Jewish community. Prior to the end of the fifteenth century, apart from in Poland-Lithuania, the kingdom-county and its subject lands were one of the few parts of Europe where Jews flourished. They were particularly prominent in the reign of Jaime the Conqueror. Benveniste de Porta (fl. 1250–70), the king’s banker, advanced loans on the security of royal taxes, and, with the Crown finances in debt to the tune of over 100,000 sous, became the royal tax-farmer. Moses ben Nahman Gerondi (known as Nahmanides, 1194–1270), was a famous Catalan rabbi and philosopher from Girona. He starred in disputations both among Jews and between Jews and Christians. In the 1230s he acted as a conciliator in the conflict between Solomon of Montpellier and Maimonides, and in 1263 he took part in the heated Disputation of Barcelona with the convert, Paul the Christian. He had a lasting influence through his commentary on the Torah, which offered alternative interpretations of controversial biblical passages. Exiled through the machinations of his Dominican opponents, he founded a synagogue in Jerusalem that still survives.

  Pilgrims were omnipresent among medieval travellers. There was plenty to see. The foremost pilgrimage took thousands to the Benedictine abbey of Montserrat, in the hills behind Barcelona, where one could see the miraculous Verge negra – the Black Madonna, La Morenta, the Patroness of Catalonia. The abbey of Ripoll near Girona was famous for the tomb of Count Wilfred the Hairy, for its library and for its community of learned monks, who studied Arabic manuscripts, transmitted ancient knowledge to posterity, and compiled the chronicles of the counts of Barcelona.46 The Cistercian abbey of Poblet, in the district of Tarragona, was enthusiastically patronized by the king-counts. Its royal pantheon, surmounted by a magnificent Gothic octagon, sheltered the tombs of almost all the monarchs.

  All the cities of Aragon and Catalonia boasted grand cathedral churches, while the countryside was dotted with colossal castles that proclaimed the victorious pride of the reconquistadores. In the heyday of castle-building, Aragon and Catalonia had manned the ramparts of Christendom; and the moving Moorish frontier had called for line after line of castles as it went forward. Some of the fortresses, like Loarre in Huesca or the mighty Aljaferia in Zaragoza, were royal foundations. Others, like Cardona, or Peratallada or the Alcañiz in Teruel, were constructed by noble warlords. All served to underline the medieval truism that the Faith went hand in hand with the sword. The Crown of Aragon was also graced by seven universities: Montpellier, Perpignan, Barcelona, Valencia, Catania and later Palermo and Naples.

  Many pilgrims passed through Aragon or Catalonia on their way to Santiago di Compostela and the shrine of St James; one of the stops on the ‘seashell road’ was at the monastery of San Juan de la Peña near Jaca. Built in the eleventh century under an overhanging rock at the bottom of a gorge, the monastery was home to the chronicler-monks of Aragon and housed Aragon’s first royal pantheon. Its tombs would certainly have challenged their visitors’ knowledge of history, as they still do. One inscription reads: ‘HIC REQUIESCIT FAMULUS DEI GARCIAS XIMENEZ PRIMUS REX ARAGONUM, QUI AMPLIAVIT ECCLESIAM SANCTI IOHANIS IBIQUE VITA DEFUNCTuS SEPELITUR.’ It refers to a ‘first king of Aragon’, probably the semi-legendary Garci Ximenez, who ruled in Sobrarbe in the eighth century under the supremacy of Navarre long before Ramiro’s time. Another inscription is less obscure: ‘HIC REQUIESCIT EXiMINA, MULIER RODERICI CID’ (‘Here lies Eximina, the wife of Rodriguez, El Cid’).47

  Jaime I was the king whose long reign permitted him both to extend and to consolidate a still-vulnerable polity. Born, as we have seen, in Montpellier during the Albigensian Crusade, he seems to have spent time at the court of Simon de Montfort, the crusaders’ commander. His reign started badly, though, thanks to an ill-starred scheme to merge the kingdom-county with the Kingdom of Navarre, and it was some years before royal authority could be firmly asserted. But then, in the late 1220s, Jaime sidelined domestic problems by adventuring overseas. In 1229 he invaded the Moorish-controlled Balearic Islands, declaring himself ‘king of Mallorca’. Three years later, he entered the old stomping ground of El Cid in Valencia. After two decades of campaigning to secure the new conglomeration, he signed the Treaty of Corbeil with the king of France in 1258, gaining mutual recognition of the frontiers and of all sovereign titles.

  In later life, Jaime was to compose the famous Catalan Llibre dels Fets or ‘Book of Deeds’, an autobiographical chronicle about his life and times. The manuscript, now in the national library of Barcelona, is written in a vernacular similar to Occitan. He made generous provision for his ten legitimate children, and for numerous illegitimate ones. His testament, drawn up in 1262, envisaged the division of his realms between his two eldest sons. One of them was to inherit Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia. The other, with the title of ‘king of Mallorca’, was to inherit the Balearics, Rosselló, Cerdanya and Montpellier.

  Jaime I’s realms presented a kaleidoscope of languages, religions and cultures. The religious spectrum stretched from ultra-fervent Catholicism to Judaism and Islam. The urban culture of the great cities was worlds apart from the life of Pyrenean pastoral communities, and nothing impressed so strongly as the dynamism of medieval Barcelona. The old city, overlooking the port, was dominated by the cathedral or seu of Santa Eulalia and by the densely inhabited public quarter, the Barri Gótic. On one side stood the ancient but none-too-imposing Palau Reial, the residence of the counts, and on the other side, the Call or ‘Jewish Quarter’. A tangle of narrow streets, where the Ramblas was yet to be built, ran down to the waterfront, or rather to a sandy beach. In the time of Jaime I, the city, though already a bustling metropolis, lacked many of its later adornments. At the northern end, the Lonja, seat of the Consulado del Mar and resort of foreign merchants, occupied a temporary building. At the southern end, the Drassanes or Royal Dockyard, a spectacle of ant-like activity, was in the early stages of its expansion. The imposing palaces of the Generalitat and of the Ajuntament, where municipal assemblies would be held, were a dream of the future. Behind the docks, the church of Santa Maria del Pi served the city guilds, while the Hospital de la Santa Creu housed a medical complex. Around them, to landward, ran the unbroken line of the city walls. In front of them, a mass of merchant ships and military galleys rode at anchor, or rested on the open beach.4
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  Anyone who saw Barcelona would have understood that increasing naval power underpinned the increasing wealth and strength of the state. The Drassanes in Barcelona’s port was but the visible base of an expanding network. The policy of constructing a permanent royal fleet is attributed to the Conqueror’s father, Pedro II, who dreamed of a regne dins el mar, ‘a kingdom in the sea’. But it demanded long-term commitment, and huge resources in money, men and materials. The chosen weapon was the seagoing galley powered by a combination of sail and oar, the latest variant on ancient Greek biremes and triremes. When the oars kicked in, these galleys could show a devastating turn of speed. The largest of them were driven by 100 or even 150 oars, each oar manned by two or three rowers. Each carried a bow-mounted battering ram, an arsenal of catapults for attack, and a strong company of crossbowmen for self-defence.49

  Sea battles were a regular occurrence. One in particular stuck in the memory of a popular chronicler:

  And when the galleys of En Conrado Lansa saw the ten galleys coming, they left the place. And the Saracens, who saw them shouted in their Saracen language ‘Aur, Aur’: and they came [on] with great vigour. And the galleys of En Conrado Lansa formed in a circle, and all four collected together and held council. And En Conrado Lansa said to them: ‘You, my Lords, know that the favour of God is with the Lord King of Aragon and you know how many victories he has had over Saracens… Therefore I pray you all that you remember the power of God and of Our Lady Saint Mary, and the Holy Catholic Faith, and the honour of the Lord King and of the city of Valencia and of all the Kingdom; and that, roped together as we are, we attack resolutely, and that, on this day, we do so much that we be spoken of forever.’

  And all began to shout: ‘Let us attack them! Let us attack them! They will all be ours!’… And with that he ordered trumpets and [drums] to be sounded, and with great shouts they began a vehement attack. And the four galleys, most beautifully, and without any clamour, went to the attack in the midst of the ten galleys and there the battle was most grievous and it lasted from the morning until the hour of vespers, and no one dared to eat or drink.

  But Our Lord the true God and His blessed Mother, from Whom come all favours, and the good luck of the Lord King of Aragon, gave the victory to our men, in such manner that all the galleys were defeated and the men killed or taken… [And so,] with great honour and triumph, they returned to Valencia with the galleys which they brought there, and with many Saracen captives who had hidden below deck, of whom they had much profit.50

  In the chronicler’s eyes, it was evidently a sin for Saracens to hold Christian slaves, but not for Christians to enslave Saracens.

  The Balearic Islands – in Roman times, the Gymnesiae – have been described as ‘a strategic imperative’ for Aragon. Lying some 100 miles off the coast of Catalonia, they commanded the coastal trade, the approaches to the Strait of Gibraltar, and the crossing to North Africa. They provided both the stepping stones for small-scale shipping and the grand harbours which could act as naval bases. Yet they had remained in Moorish hands long after the union of Catalonia and Aragon. To Catalan sailors, this infidel stronghold must have felt like a thorn in Christian flesh. In the mind of King Jaime, it presented the most urgent of challenges.

  The conquest by Jaime I, which began in 1229, absorbed formidable logistical resources. The initial attack on Mallorca (the ‘Greater Island’) was led by a fleet of galleys towing armoured troop-transports, whose bows opened – like those of landing-craft on the Normandy beaches – to release waves of advancing infantry. The king himself wrote a description of the operations in the Llibre dels Fets:

  One portion of the fleet was deployed at Cambrils, but the larger part, in which we found ourselves, was in the port of Salon and on the beach, and the remainder at Tarragona… We had 25 capital ships, 18 tarides, 12 galleys, and 100 buzas and galliots…

  Bovet’s ship, in which Guillem de Montcada sailed, was to act as a guide, and had to carry a lantern as a light whilst Carro’s ship had the rearguard… I was in the galley of Montpellier towards the rear.

  We set sail on Wednesday morning from Salon, with a land breeze… It was a wonderful sight… The whole sea appeared white with sails.

  The hour of vespers came. And near the first watch, we overtook the ship of Guillem of Montcada… and we climbed up the lantern and hailed them… The crew responded that it was the King’s ship, and that we were welcome one hundred thousand times… And sailing by night and at the front of the fleet, we did not lower sail or change course, but let the galley run as fast as it could… There was a beautiful moon and breeze from the south-west, and we said that we could go to Pollença…51

  Having ignored the bad weather forecast, and surviving a squall, during which he prayed to the Virgin Mary, the king landed safely. The troops disembarked without opposition. They then saw that they were not alone:

  The Saracens were ranged before them with some five thousand footmen and two hundred horsemen. And Ramón de Montcada came and said that he would go to survey them, [adding] ‘Let no one come with me.’ And when he got near them, he called, [saying] ‘Let us attack, for they are nothing!’ And [Montcada] was the first to attack. And when the Christians came up to the Moors, at four lances’ length at most, the Moors turned tail and fled. But they were pursued with such speed that more than one thousand, five hundred Saracens died, as there was no desire to take prisoners. This done, our men returned to the seashore.52

  Thus was the voyage to Mallorca and the first engagement completed. That evening, the bishop of Barcelona delivered a sermon: ‘Barons… take heed. Those who die in this task will do so in the name of Our Lord and will receive paradise, where they will have everlasting glory. And those who live will have honour and renown for all their lives and a good end in their deaths…’53

  The main city of Madina was then besieged, and on its capitulation, the Almohad rulers submitted on condition that the population be spared. Madina’s harbour, renamed Ciutat de Mallorca (now Palma), could henceforth act as partner for Barcelona and deny all the adjacent waters to hostile shipping.

  Menorca (the ‘Lesser Island’) was captured in 1231 by guile. Huge fires were built on the cliffs of Cap de Formentor on Mallorca, to create the illusion of a massive armed camp. The Menorcans surrendered without a fight, buying their survival as a vassal Islamic state with the promise of annual tribute. The twin islands of Evissa (now Ibiza) and Formentera were captured in 1235 by a private crusade of the archbishop of Tarragona. According to local legend, the ruling sheikh’s brother quarrelled with him over a woman in the harem, and told the besieging Catalans of a secret tunnel. The Arab mosques were torn down and replaced by Catholic churches.

  Valencia, an ancient port and Roman settlement and the centre of the Moorish tarifa of Balansiya, now formed the focus of the king’s attention. Its conquest started slightly later than that of the Balearics, and the ongoing land battles were not completed until 1304. Aragonese forces were employed almost constantly for three generations in simultaneous campaigns in the Balearics and on the Valencian coast.

  The conquest of Valencia has traditionally been seen as Aragon’s contribution to the religious crusade against the Moors. Yet other motives can also be identified. By fighting the Moors, the Aragonese were also rebuffing the Castilians, who had lodged an earlier stake in the area. Furthermore, by winning new royal lands King Jaime was able to strengthen the Crown against the nobles. His careful management of colonization allowed him to create new estates and new sources of revenue from which the nobles could be excluded.

  The campaign advanced in spasms. Much of the fighting was defensive. In the first phase, 1232–3, Aragon captured the districts of Morella, Burriana and Peñiscola. In 1237–8 Jaime I entered the ‘city of El Cid’ and formally created the Kingdom of Valencia. In the third phase, in 1243–5, the Aragonese drove on into districts claimed by the Castilians, and a line of demarcation had to be established. The onset of the fourth and final phase was
delayed to 1296, and lasted for eight years. The Arbitration of Torrellas (1304), as later amended, assigned Alicante to Valencia and Murcia to Castile.

  The colonization of the Kingdom of Valencia, as reflected in subsequent linguistic patterns, followed twin routes. The king brought large groups of Catalan settlers into the coastal strip, thereby deciding that the future Valencian language would be a dialect of Catalan. Noble adventurers, on the other hand, set up private holdings in the inland districts, bringing settlers in from Aragon. Their descendants still employ a form of speech that is close to Aragonese.54

  Two issues loomed large. One was the fate of the Muslim Moors, the other the form of government. The Christian population of Valencia formed a distinct minority for many years to come, but the defeated Muslims were badly needed to work the land of the new territories. There could be no question of a general expulsion. Instead, Islam was tolerated subject to the political loyalty of local leaders. In this way, the mudéjars of Valencia came to represent a solid Muslim enclave within Christian Iberia.55

  The government of the Kingdom of Valencia was modelled neither on Aragon nor on Catalonia. Kingship was permanently invested in the Crown of Aragon, but the Furs de Valencia or ‘Charters of Valencia’ were produced through a lengthy process of bargaining between the Crown and the local (Christian) community. In these negotiations, occupying much of the fourteenth century, the municipality of the city of Valencia played a prominent role. Once the Furs were established, Valencia’s power and wealth forged ahead. The wool trade supported extensive textile manufactories and underpinned the overseas commerce which made the city a worthy partner (and competitor) to Barcelona. The elegant Lonja de la Seda or ‘Silk Exchange’, which still stands, attests to the port’s far-flung contacts, and the Taula de canvis (‘table of exchange’) acted both as a bank and a stock exchange.56