Vanished Kingdoms

by Norman Davies

  One of the side effects of the conquest of Valencia was to strengthen Aragon’s hold on the inland province of Teruel that lies on the direct line between Zaragoza and Valencia. The intervening terrain is exceptionally hostile. The colonists’ trail was blocked by range after range of stony mountains – including the wonderfully named Sierras Universales. The winters are notably inclement. Even today, the roads are few and far between. The remoteness of Teruel had made it a favoured place of refuge for Iberian Jews.

  The fame of medieval Teruel, however, is for ever associated with a tale of star-struck lovers, Diego and Isabela, who lived there in the thirteenth century. Their tomb still stands in the parish church (no matter that Boccaccio reports an almost identical tale from Florence). The Marcillas and the Segaras of Teruel resembled the Montagues and Capulets of Verona. The Seguras were wealthy; the Marcillas impoverished. So, when Diego Marcilla asked for Isabela Segura’s hand in marriage, her stern father told him that he had five years – and not a day longer! – to go away and make his fortune.

  Five years passed, and Diego hadn’t returned. On the day after the deadline, Isabela was ordered to wed an elderly knight. During the wedding feast, a commotion was heard. Diego had arrived, laden with riches and longing for his lady. He had counted the five years from the day of his departure, not, like the Seguras, from the day of his dismissal. That night, Diego crept into Isabela’s bridal suite and begged for a kiss. ‘Besame,’ he pleaded, ‘que me muero’ (‘Kiss me, for I’m dying’). Isabela, remembering her vows, turned away, and Diego fell dead at her feet. So the wedding was followed by a funeral. Isabela bent over Diego’s bier, kissed him tenderly on the lips, and fell dead herself. The amantes de Teruel, separated in life, were united in death.57

  In that same era, the heir apparent of the kingdom-county – the future Pedro III El Grande – married the heiress of Sicily, Constanza di Hohenstaufen. The fourteen-year-old bride, who arrived in Barcelona in 1262 with a fleet of galleys, laden with jewels and surrounded by an extravagant retinue, was to introduce the royal court to unaccustomed levels of opulence. The king’s table, for example, abandoned its previous austerity, which had dictated a standard diet of mutton, with fish on Fridays. Detailed pantry receipts have survived to show that the royal household’s culinary repertoire rapidly improved. Beef, goats’ meat, poultry and salt pork with cabbage were served on ordinary days, not just at banquets, and roast pigeon figured so frequently it may have been the princess’s favourite. Milk, butter, white sugar, spices, onions, spinach and other vegetables became items of daily expenditure, while large quantities of nuts and fresh fruit were consumed at breakfast. Extraordinarily intricate rules were laid down to allocate particular cuts of a carcass to particular grades of cook in lieu of salary. Soap appears on the shopping lists, indicating a dramatic step change in washing habits.58

  Meanwhile, fifty years of royal warfare brought the nobility into a strong bargaining position. The traditional warrior caste fought the king’s battles without demur, and was richly rewarded by grants of land and honours. Yet in the last years of Jaime I’s reign, they increased their demands. They formed a ‘Union of Liberties’, calling for a charter of their rights and privileges, a definition of the powers of the justiciar, a guarantee of the rule of law, and a promise of annual parliaments. Jaime I’s successor conceded their demands, issuing a General Privilege (1283), which successive kings were obliged to reconfirm. The document is rightly known as Aragon’s ‘Magna Carta’.59

  The growing territorial base of the kingdom-county supplied the flow of manpower and taxes which facilitated further overseas conquests. Once the Balearic Islands had been pacified, the galleys could be sent on longer expeditions. In the two decades after 1282, they descended on Sicily, on the isles of Malta and Gozo, and even on Greece.

  Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean. Because of its triangular shape, it had been known since Greek times as ‘Trinacria’, and it had lived through wave after wave of colonizations, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Norman. It is dominated on the eastern side by the volcanic hulk of Mount Etna, and for the rest by rolling hills interspersed with fields of vines and olives. The easternmost port of Messina is separated by a narrow strait from southern Italy, while the westernmost port, Marsala, is equidistant to within 100 miles from Sardinia and Tunisia. In the early thirteenth century, the chief city, Palermo, had furnished the camels and the harems of the exotic and itinerant court of the Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (r. 1215–50), the so-called Stupor Mundi. Thanks to the rivalry between the German houses of Guelph and Ghibelline, however, the Emperor Frederick was drawn into a feud with the (pro-Guelph) Papal States, and he and his sons, Conrad and Manfred, were excommunicated. In 1266 the Hohenstaufens’ Kingdom of Sicily, consisting of southern Italy as well as the island itself, was awarded by papal decree to the papal favourite, Charles d’Anjou.60

  Aragon’s link to Sicily came about as an unforeseen consequence of popular discontent with Angevin rule. In 1282 the citizens of Palermo turned on the Angevin-French garrison, and massacred them in a nocturnal outrage that came to be known as the ‘Sicilian Vespers’.61 In the ensuing struggle, a group of former Hohenstaufen supporters appealed for aid to Aragon, offering the throne to Pedro III, the husband of Manfred’s daughter, Constanza. The appeal signalled confidence in Aragon’s newfound military and naval standing; the offer was a result for which the Aragonese court had long been angling.

  The War of the Sicilian Vespers, which lasted no less than twenty years, pitted the king of France against anyone and everyone. The fighting was concentrated on a series of naval campaigns in which the Aragonese galley-fleet successfully denied the Angevins a safe passage for their troops.62 Supreme command of operations fell to Jaime II El Justo (1267–1327), Pedro III’s son, who assumed the royal claim to Sicily on his father’s death in 1285. The architect of success was, without doubt, Admiral Ruggiero di Lauria (c. 1245–1305), a Calabrian sailor in the Aragonese service who fought six major sea battles against preponderant enemy odds and repeatedly prevailed through a mixture of daring, guile and superior seamanship.63

  The final outcome, in 1302, saw a compromise in which the Angevins kept their lands on the Continente, while the Aragonese kept the island. In order to confuse posterity, the reduced Angevin realm, centred on Naples, continued to be called the Kingdom of Sicily. The new Aragonese realm, based on Sicily, was initially called the Kingdom of Trinacria. Charmingly, in reference to the faro or ‘lighthouse’, which stood on the island shore of the Straits of Messina. the Angevin realm now became known in Sicilian parlance as ‘La Sicilia di qua del faro’ or ‘Sicily beyond the lighthouse’. The Aragonese realm was ‘La Sicilia di qui del faro’ or ‘Sicily on this side of the lighthouse’. To compound the confusion, the Calabrians adopted the opposite perspective. For them, the tip of their country stood at the lighthouse at Reggio, and for them Sicily became ‘di qua del faro’.

  The coronation of Jaime El Justo of Aragon-Catalonia, which took place in Palermo on 2 February 1286, long before the war was won, was more than a sacred and symbolic ceremony: it was the occasion when the new king could win over his new subjects.

  Summoning, therefore, the prelates, barons and syndics of the cities and townships throughout the island, [the notables of the kingdom] assembled in parliament in Palermo… Thither James repaired, with the Queen and the Infant Don Frederic, and was crowned in the name of God and of the Virgin, by the Bishop of Cefalù, the Archimandrite of Messina and many other Sicilian prelates, as well as the Bishops of Squillaci and Nicastro.

  During the subsequent days of festivity… James at his own cost conferred the honour of knighthood on four hundred Sicilian nobles: distributed many favours; and granted many fiefs which had lapsed to the exchequer on the expulsion of the French barons, both to do honour to this joyful occasion and to increase the number of his supporters…

  For the same reason, during the sitting of parliament on the 5t
h of February, he promulgated the constitutions and immunities, as they were then called, incorporated with the laws of the Kingdom of Sicily under the head of the acts of King James, and written in the language of concession…64

  For Dante Alighieri, writing in the early fourteenth century, the Sicilian Vespers and its consequences were contemporary events that he incorporated into the Divina Commedia. On the shores of Purgatory, for example, Dante meets the shade of Manfred, son of the Emperor Frederick II, who like his father had died excommunicate. Manfred explains that ‘despite the Church’s curse’, repentance had given him the hope of salvation; and he begs Dante, if restored to the land of the living, to tell his ‘lovely daughter’ of the good news:

  ond’io ti priego che, quando tu riedi,

  vadi a mia bella figlia, genitrice

  de l’onor di Cicilia e d’Aragona,

  e dichi’l vero a lei, s’altro si dice.

  (‘I pray, when you return to the world, / that you go to my lovely daughter, mother / of kings in Sicily and Aragon / and tell her the truth, lest she’s heard something different.’)65 As well as being the wife of Pedro III of Aragon, Manfred’s daughter Constanza (still alive in 1300 as Queen Mother) was mother both of Jaime II of Aragon and of Frederico II of Sicily.

  In a valley ‘where nature was a painter’, Dante meets the shades of negligent princes, who squandered their birthright. The setting is idyllic. The riot of flowers – ‘Oro e argento fine, cocco e biacca, indaco legno lucido sereno, fresco smeraldo’ – is mixed with a choir of souls intoning the ‘Salve Regina’. But the lesson is severe. The shades of Pedro III and Charles d’Anjou, rivals for the Sicilian throne, sing in harmony. Others receive the poet’s lash. The Nasetto, ‘the Snubnose’, who ‘fled and dishonoured the Lily’, is Philippe III of France, who had died in Perpignan at the end of his campaign in Catalonia.66

  Not surprisingly, the original Aragonese candidate for the thone of Sicily was long dead by the time that peace came. Pedro III’s third son, Frederico, was eventually confirmed as the long-term holder of the throne. He gave rise to a new Sicilian line of the House of Aragon, ruling in parallel to their relatives in Barcelona and Majorca for more than a hundred years.67

  The islands of Malta and Gozo passed under the Crown of Aragon in 1282, since they formed an integral part of the Kingdom of Sicily. Owing to the long wars between the Aragonese and the Angevins, however, the Maltese nobility gained a large measure of autonomy that lasted until the link with Aragon was severed centuries later. The royal government exercised control through a long series of viceroy/governors. The Arab elite was not expelled; their Muslim faith, Moorish architecture and Arabic language waned very slowly; indeed, modern Maltese is in many respects a derivative of medieval Arabic. The chief city, Mdina, retained its Arabic name while turning into a stronghold of the feudal nobility.68

  The link with Greece also originated as an offshoot of the Crown’s intervention in Sicily. At the end of the War of the Sicilian Vespers, the Aragonese army in Sicily could no longer be paid. So, with the king’s approval, a powerful ‘Catalan Company’ was assembled and sent in 1302 as mercenaries to the Emperor of Byzantium, who was already feeling the threat from the Ottoman advance. The company’s leader was an adventurer from Rosselló, Ruggier Desflors (Roger Deslaur or Roger de Flor). A Catalan soldier, who recorded their deeds for posterity, wrote that they had gone to ‘Romania’:

  The Emperor, in the presence of all, made Frey Roger sit down before him and gave him the baton and the cap and the banner and the seal of the Empire, and invested him with the robes belonging to the office and made him Caesar of the Empire. And a Caesar is an officer who sits in a chair near that of the Emperor, only half a palm lower, and he can do as much as the Emperor in the Empire. He can bestow gifts in perpetuity and can dispose of the treasure, impose tribute, and he can apply the question and hang and quarter… And again, he signs himself ‘Caesar of Our Empire’ and the Emperor writes to him ‘Caesar of Thy Empire’. What shall I tell you? There is no difference between the Emperor and the Caesar, except that… the Emperor wears a scarlet cap and all his robes are scarlet, and the Caesar wears a blue cap and his robes are blue with a narrow gold border…69

  For several years the company, under Byzantine command, fought the Turks in Anatolia and gained a reputation for rapine and pillage. When its indiscipline outweighed its usefulness, it was rounded up by another regiment of Byzantine mercenaries and massacred. The survivors faced annihilation and, gathering an assortment of Balkan hirelings, deserters and desperadoes, set out on the trail of the ‘Catalan Revenge’. In the process, they took possession of Athens: ‘Once under Catalan control, Athens was transformed into a Catalan mini-state. Its nominal dependency on the Duchy of Achaia was renounced. Catalan was declared the official language; Catalan law replaced Byzantine law; and Catalan officials resided in the Parthenon, lords of all they surveyed.’70 The Duchy of Neopatria (Neopatras) in central Greece was ruled in tandem with the Athenian duchy from 1319 to 1390, and outlived Aragonese rule in Athens by a decade.71

  Aragon’s elevated standing in that era can be gauged from the fact that the Angevins, having lost Sicily during the War of the Sicilian Vespers, went to great lengths to recover it by diplomatic and financial means. In 1311 Robert of Naples wrote to his Aragonese counterpart in Palermo offering to exchange the ‘Kingdom of Trinacria’ for the Angevin ‘Kingdom of Albania’ at Durazzo, together with Angevin rights in the Duchy of Achaia. He was rebuffed, but in subsequent years the offer was repeatedly increased until, in addition to Albania and Achaia, it included Sardinia, Corsica, all the former Templar possessions in southern Italy, one half of Sicily and 100,000 ounces of gold. The Aragonese were not tempted. The project lapsed.72

  The rapid expansion of the kingdom-county and the multiplication of its dependencies inevitably generated tensions. The problems that arose can hardly be attributed to ‘imperial overstretch’, as might have occurred in a more centralized system.73 Rather, they must be seen as the product of centrifugal forces that pulled the dependencies away from the heartland. Cadet branches of the ruling house snubbed their seniors, autonomous regimes adopted wayward policies and a widening gulf opened up between the centre and the peripheries.

  Jaime the Conqueror had already identified the dangers when devising a scheme to divide the Crown lands into two co-equal parts. He had hoped that his two sons would co-operate in the interests of dynastic harmony, but his chosen solution produced the opposite effect. Shortly after his death in 1276, fratricidal conflict broke out between the Kingdom of Aragon and the Kingdom of Mallorca which festered for over fifty years. The Conqueror could not have foreseen two key factors, the unplanned acquisition of Sicily and the explosive growth of Mallorcan commerce, which combined to ruin the balance between the various parts of his legacy. Aragonese rule in Sicily prompted an endless feud with the Angevins, and to cap it all, large parts of the state’s heartland were overrun by armed leagues of rebellious nobles. When the Black Death struck, many said that God was punishing His people justly.

  The ‘Kingdom of the Greater Island’ came into being in 1276 following the execution of the Conqueror’s testament and the partition of his possessions. Pedro, the elder son, received the dynasty’s ancestral territories to the south and west of the Pyrenees, while Jaime, the younger son, received the offshore islands, the smaller provinces to the north of the mountains, and a couple of outlying possessions. The ceremonial centre of Jaime’s kingdom lay on Mallorca; his mainland castle was built in Perpinya. The coat of arms of the kingdom betrayed its origins. The four vertical red stripes on a golden background – Or, four billets gules – the emblem of Catalonia, were superimposed by a broad, diagonal, sea-blue band – a bend azure. At the same time, an adjustment was made to the internal frontier between Aragon and the County of Barcelona. The border had traditionally followed the River Cinca; it was now moved eastwards to the Segre, thereby creating the Franja, a border strip within Aragon where m
ost of the villages spoke (and speak) Catalan.

  Pedro III, however, rejected the spirit of his father’s plan and refused to accept his younger brother as an equal. Within three years, he sent his army to surround the walls of Perpinya, demanding that Jaime submit in an act of homage. It was the rule, he declared, that no king should be subject to the wishes of another. Jaime, trapped, decided to comply. Yet, notwithstanding the Treaty of Perpinya of 1279, the dispute rumbled on. Pedro’s lawyers maintained that the terms of treaty, and the subsequent act of homage, had changed the Kingdom of the Greater Island into a fief of Aragon. Jaime’s lawyers maintained that their father’s will remained the definitive document.

  In 1285 the legal arguments turned into open warfare. The king of France mounted an expedition into Catalonia, aiming to block Aragonese ambitions in Sicily. His plans backfired sensationally. Aragon rallied. The French were pushed back. And, since King Jaime was assumed to have been in collaboration with the invaders, the whole of his kingdom, including the Balearics, was taken over by Pedro’s forces and effectively suspended. Papal intervention eventually assured the kingdom’s restoration, but the vulnerability of the junior branch was fully exposed.

  During the Aragonese occupation, Menorca was subjected to a vicious act of retribution. In 1287, aiming no doubt to refill their coffers, the Aragonese crushed the local emirate of Menorca, and rounded up the entire Muslim population; 40,000 souls were shipped off to the slave markets of North Africa. This cruel act, which had no parallel either in Mallorca or Valencia, was a milestone in the grim history of European slavery.74 The island was resettled by Catalan colonists, and the magnificent port of Mahon was added to the growing chain of Aragonese bases.