The Crown of Aragon

Abstract

in the fourteenth century the Crown of Aragon’s external policy focused mainly on islands in the western Mediterranean and on the Iberian peninsula itself, and it was in these areas that most of its military activity was centred. At the beginning of his reign James II (1291–1327) ruled not only the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia and the county of Barcelona, which made up the lands of the Crown of Aragon in the Iberian peninsula, but also the Balearics and Sicily. Mallorca had been conquered from the Muslims in 1229 by James’s grandfather, James I (1213–76), although the latter had used it, together with Roussillon, Cerdagne and Montpellier, to constitute a kingdom for his second son. Pedro III of Aragon (1276–85) had, however, asserted overlordship over the Mallorcan kingdom in 1279, and in 1285 his eldest son Alfonso, shortly to become Alfonso III (1285–91), had taken Mallorca by force from his uncle, though not the mainland parts of the Mallorcan kingdom; Alfonso later also asserted direct rule over Minorca, which until then had been a dependent Muslim state. Sicily had been brought under Aragonese rule in 1282, when Pedro III had occupied the island following the rebellion of the Sicilian Vespers against Charles of Anjou. This action led to ecclesiastical censure by the French pope Martin IV and the award of the kingdom of Aragon to Charles of Valois, the younger son of Philip III of France; and this in turn occasioned an unsuccessful French invasion of Aragon in 1285.