DURING THE SECOND QUARTER of the thirteenth century, King James the Conqueror of Arago-Catalonia led an international body of crusaders in a series of stubborn campaigns down the eastern coast of Spain. The crusade won an extensive kingdom of Valencia, roughly the size and shape of the crusader Holy Land, whose coastal cities bustled with commerce and whose hinterland comprised an agricultural cornucopia. Valencia spelled riches and rents for the happy crusaders as long as skilled manpower remained available to maintain the complex organization of its irrigated huertas and busy ports. Having expanded too far and too fast in an age of easy opportunity, however, King James found himself unable to induce more than a trickle of Christian settlers to come south. Where he needed a minimum of 0oo,ooo settlers to guarantee basic military security, James confessed thirty years later, he achieved an eventual total of under 30,000. Worse, the crusade and subsequent rebellions caused a hemorrhage of Muslims away from townis and countryside toward the distant havens of Islamic Granada and North Africa.' Though the crusaders, from the king down, had deployed fierce rhetoric about expelling all Muslims beyond the boundaries of the new kingdom, they had in fact gone to extraordinary lengths to retain in place every