Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (37 page)

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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 most 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.
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The island was resettled by Catalan colonists, and the magnificent port of Mahon was added to the growing chain of Aragonese bases.

The royal feud raged on, but despite the politics and the battles of these years, the infant kingdom’s economy flourished. Agricultural methods were improved, a textile industry was launched, and ship-building developed to the point where the keels of an independent galley-fleet could be laid. Castles and palaces were built, notably the circular Bellver Castle on Mallorca, and the Palace of the Kings at Perpinya. Above all, commerce boomed. Mallorca became the entrepôt for the seaborne trade between Europe and North Africa. It was the place where the small coastal boats transferred their cargoes to larger seagoing vessels. It was equally the entry point for rare commodities – oriental spices, gold and ‘porcelain’ shells. New routes were exploited with Sicily and Sardinia, and even (since Jaime III had been brought up in his mother’s home of Achaia) with Greece and with Mamluk Egypt. Expeditions explored ocean routes to the Canaries and to north-west Europe and independent Mallorcan consulates were set up in the Berber states of North Africa. Genoese merchants were welcomed, creating the
Lonja dels generesos
in Palma, and Mallorcans muscling in on the Atlantic trade appeared in London and Bruges. The records of Francesco Datini, ‘the Merchant of Prato’, reveal that he was importing Iberian wool to Italy, not from the Spanish mainland but from the islands. Naval facilities were expanded for the Aragonese fleet.
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As part of their strategy to maximize income from trade in their own ships, the kings of the Greater Island sought to close their ports to Barcelonan and Valencian vessels. In 1301, for example, they tried to step up the anchorage tax on Catalan ships entering Collioure, signalling their intention of treating them as foreigners. The scheme failed and was replaced by an attempt to make Barcelona pay a flat annual fee of 60,000 silver pounds. That ploy failed, too, when Barcelona argued that a similar sum should be paid to Aragon as a feudal fee for approval of the king’s marriage. The cat was playing with the mouse. In due course, the Mallorcans minted their own coinage in Rosselló, and in 1342 they even launched an independent expedition to explore the Canaries. In the eyes of their Aragonese cousins, they were building an empire within the Empire.
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In Balearic society, the balance between Christians, Muslims and Jews was different than elsewhere. A few free Muslims remained in Mallorca, though the majority were enserfed. The Jews, in contrast, prospered mightily. They belonged to the same cultural network as their co-religionists in Barcelona, Perpinya and Montpellier; they enjoyed the right of
alyama
or self-government; and they participated energetically in the commercial boom. The
Call
or ‘ghetto’ in Ciutat de Mallorca was a prosperous quarter surrounding a single prominent synagogue. Apart from the solitary pogrom in 1391, generalized persecution would not set in until the fifteenth century.
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The kingdom’s best-known subject by far was Ramón Llull (1232–1315). Philosopher, novelist, linguist and reconciler of religions, he was born in Mallorca soon after the conquest, served as a page in Jaime the Conqueror’s court, studied at the University of Montpellier, and later rose to serve as seneschal of the ‘Greater Island’ in Perpinya. His first book,
Le Llibre de la cavalleria
, dealt with the principles of chivalry. A moment of religious ecstasy followed. The rest of his life was spent trying to harmonize the three great monotheist religions. Llull knew Arabic as well as he knew Latin, and had been trained in the work of Muslim and Jewish philosophers. He laboured for many years at the Franciscan monastery at Miramar on Mount Randa, before setting out on long tours to meet popes and princes, journeying as far afield as Georgia and Egypt and teaching in many foreign universities. At the Council of Vienne in 1311, he witnessed the nominal acceptance of his cherished proposal for the teaching of oriental languages. He undertook repeated missions to Muslim North Africa, where he engaged in learned disputations with the
ulemas
(religious scholars), and where his remarkable life reached its term.

Llull’s works were frowned on by the Church, but never lacked admirers. His
Ars major
and
Ars generalis
contain a mass of speculative philosophy. His
Blaquerna
is sometimes cited as the world’s first novel. His poetry, in
El Desconort
or
Lo Cant de Ramon
, is beautifully simple. He even invented a sort of cybernetic machine that claimed to unravel the mysteries of universal knowledge. Llull has rightly been called ‘a great European’.
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Sardinia first came into Aragon’s sights during the suspension of the Kingdom of the Greater Island, when Pope Boniface VIII, seeing Aragon as a useful ally against the troublesome Republic of Genoa, tried to transfer both Sardinia and Corsica to Barcelona.

Medieval Sardinia was divided into four
Giudricati
or ‘Judgeships’, Gallura in the north, Cagliari in the south, Logudoro in the north-west and Arborea on the west coast. The ruling judges were military as well as judicial officials, who passed much of their time contesting control of the castles of the island’s mountainous interior. By the turn of the fourteenth century, Gallura and Cagliari were in the pockets of the Pisans, and Logudoro of the Genoese; Arborea was the only Judgeship to remain fully independent.

Aragon’s claim was revived by the Infante Alfonso of the Trinacrian line. His expedition, having sailed from Mallorca, landed in the spring of 1323:

And the Lord Infante En Alfonso had fine weather and assembled all the fleet at the island of San Pietro. And they went to Palmas dels Sols and there all the chivalry and the almugavars landed. And, immediately, the Judge of Arborea came there with all his power, to receive him as lord, and a great number of Sardinians… [from] the city of Sassari surrendered to him. And there they made an agreement, by the Judge’s advice, that the Lord Infante should go and besiege Iglesias…

The Lord Infante, besieging Iglesias, attacked it every day with catapults. But [he] and all his host had so much sickness, that the greater part of his followers died… and he, himself, was very ill. Assuredly he would have been in great danger of dying, if it had not been for the great care of my Lady the Infanta…

However ill the Lord Infante was, for no physician would he leave the siege. Many times with the fever upon him he would put on his armour and order an attack. By his good endeavour… he reduced the town to such a state that it surrendered. So all the host entered… and garrisoned the fort well. And then he came to Cagliari, and built a castle… opposite Cagliari and gave it the name of Bonaire.
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