Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (32 page)

If Castile took El Cid to its heart, Aragon formally adopted St George as its patron, three centuries before the kings of England did the same. The royal standard of Aragon showed the red cross of St George on a white field, sometimes with the head of a black, crowned Moor in each of the four quarters. The cult of St George the Martyr, a fourth-century Armenian, was popular among crusaders, and was linked to Aragon’s desire to become a papal protectorate. Urban II, the pope of the First Crusade, duly accepted Aragon into ‘The Liberty of the Roman Church’ in 1089, as he did for Barcelona a year later.
²¹

Another milestone was reached in 1118. Thanks to the wars of El Cid, the emirate of Zaragoza grew weak, and Aragonese forces were emboldened to seize it. Henceforth they commanded the central valley of the Ebro. Under Alfonso I El Batallador, Zaragoza became the seat of Aragon’s government, its cathedral the seat of an archbishop and the site of royal coronations and its streets the setting for elegant aristocratic palaces. The Moorish host was incorporated into the kingdom’s army and the emirs’ magnificent Aljaferia Castle became the residence of Christian kings.
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Aragon was ceasing to be a remote backwater. Most importantly, its claim to royal status, confirmed by the pope, was now generally recognized.

Prior to the death of Alfonso I in 1134, the kingdom entered a period of dynastic panic, whose felicitous outcome could hardly have been foreseen. Alfonso, though hugely victorious as a warrior, was hugely inept as a dynast and politician. His nephew’s early death, by which he himself came to the throne, failed to impress upon him the necessity of producing an heir, and his belated marriage to Urraca of León, Regent of Castile, brought none of the expected benefits. In his later years, he separated from his wife, lost his grip on Castile and remained childless. Furthermore, his brother was a celibate priest, an ex-monk who was now the bishop of Barbastro. In his will, Alfonso prepared to bequeath his realms in equal parts to three crusading orders, thereby offending all other interested parties. The nobles of Navarre promptly broke away, and severed the link with Aragon for good. The Aragonese nobility were also spurred into action, persuading the king’s brother to abandon his vows and take a wife. Hence, when the monarch lay dying, the ex-monk was already committed to matrimony; a royal child would be born, and Aragon would receive a prize heiress. The short reign of Ramiro II El Monaco was deliberately designed as a temporary measure and did not avoid turbulence, but it served its purpose. As soon as he could, the dutiful king abdicated in favour of his infant daughter and returned to his monastic cell. A regency council then set about its task of finding a suitable replacement for the broken partnership with Navarre, and a suitable bridegroom for the heiress. Providentially, the neighbouring county of Barcelona had another child heir on its hands.

In 1137, therefore, the one-year-old Petronilla of Aragon –
Peyronella
in Aragonese, and
Peronela
in Catalan – was betrothed in Zaragoza to twenty-four-year-old Ramón Berenguer IV of Barcelona. The girl remained queen, while her husband adopted the style of ‘prince of Aragon’. A further treaty stipulated that Aragon and Barcelona would keep their separate institutions, customs and titles, and that in the event of a premature death both states would pass to the survivor of the betrothed pair. This last precaution proved unnecessary. After fourteen years of waiting, the queen and the prince-count were formally married, and their marriage produced five children. For practical purposes, the husband ruled both in Aragon and in Barcelona, while successfully disentangling himself from involvements in Castile, where his sister, Berenguela, was now ‘empress’. Ramón and Petronilla’s eldest son, also Ramón Berenguer, was appointed their joint heir. After being widowed in 1162, Petronilla renounced all her rights in favour of her son. After a quarter of a century’s delay the betrothal of 1137 finally bore its full fruit; the wedding of two persons had resulted in the marriage of two states.

For his part, Ramón Berenguer dropped his Catalan name on ascending the throne, and in remembrance of El Batallador assumed the title of ‘Alfonso II of Aragon and I of Barcelona’. Henceforth, a long line of monarchs would inherit the dual titles of ‘kings of Aragon’ and ‘counts of Barcelona in Catalunya’. Monarchists, and historians paying deference to monarchy, call them ‘king-counts’; Catalans and Catalanophiles call them ‘count-kings’.

The union of kingdom and county had far-reaching consequences, creating an extended territorial base that combined a secure mountain stronghold with a maritime coastline of huge naval and commercial potential. It stood fair to be as wealthy as it was invincible. At the same time, like the newly emergent Portugal, Aragon-Barcelona presented a significant counterweight to Castile. It was no accident that the eldest daughter of Prince Ramón and Queen Petronilla was to be given in marriage to Sancho the Populator (r. 1185–1211), the second king of Portugal. Nonetheless, the kingdom and the county remained in some respects uncomfortable bedfellows. Each preserved its own laws, its own
Cortes
or parliament and its own language. The Aragonese language was not too dissimilar from Castilian; Catalan was more akin to Occitan, the language of Languedoc. Barcelona, founded by Hannibal’s brother in the third century BC and liberated from the Moors by Charlemagne, was far more venerable than Zaragoza. The House of Berenguer, which was the successor to a line of twenty-four counts in Barcelona since the early ninth century, was undoubtedly senior to that of Ramiro. And its territorial possessions were markedly more extensive. Ever since the time of the first Count Bera (r. 801–20), son of Charlemagne’s retainer William of Toulouse, those holdings had waxed and waned over the generations. But, anchored on the easternmost counties of the former
Marca Hispanica
, and especially on the maritime districts of Empordà (Ampuriés), Ausona, Girona and Barcelona, they formed a solid block of land straddling both flanks of the Pyrenees. In short, the Catalan part of the joint realm was older, larger and wealthier. Pessimists might have forecast that the two parts would never completely gel; optimists hoped each would complement the other. Both proved correct.

This ‘complex monarchy’ appeared on the European scene at much the same time as the troubadours and their cult of ‘courtly love’. Aragon-Catalonia lay in the heart of the countries, including Aquitaine, Languedoc and Provence, where the troubadours flourished. Ramón Vidal de Besalú (
c
. 1196–1252), a subject of the king-count, is credited with the first work of literary criticism in a Romance language, the
Razos de trobar
. (His advocacy of the Occitan idiom of Limoges prompted Dante Alighieri to write
De Vulgari Eloquentia
and to advocate the merits of Tuscan in Italy.) Guillaume de Poitiers (1071–1126), Ponç de la Guàrdia (
fl
. 1154–88) and Huguet de Mataplana (1173–1213) preceded Ramón Vidal; Arnaut Catalan (
fl
. 1219–53), Amanieu de Sescars, known as
il dieu d’amor
(
fl
. 1275–95), Jofre de Foixà (d. 1300) and others came later.
²³
Jofre was a Franciscan friar from Empordà, sent by his Order to Sicily. His tract,
Vers e regles de trobar
, by giving examples of the works of other songsters, became a standard compendium:

Canczon audi q’es bella’n tresca,

Que fo de razon espanescai;

Non fo de paraulla grezesca

Ni de lengua serrazinesca.

…

Tota Basconn’ et Aragons

E l’encontrada delz Gascons

Sabon quals es aquist canczons
.
²⁴

(‘I heard a song which is beautiful in its theme, / and which was in Hispanic style, / neither Greek in its speech / nor Saracen /… All the Basques and the Aragonese / have heard it from the Gascons: / they know what these songs are like.’) ‘The art of the troubadours is the starting point of modern European literature,’ wrote a British medievalist many years ago. ‘And if we wish to find this mysterious element which is the quintessence of the medieval spirit, we cannot do better than to follow the example of the Romantics and look for it in the age and the country of the Troubadours.’
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During the early
Reconquista
, the military functions of castle lords were paramount, and favoured the growth of a powerful landed aristocracy supported by the toil of an enserfed peasantry. A score of these
rics homens
assembled small private states, establishing themselves first as counts and eventually as dukes. They included the Montcadas, the Coloma of Queralt, and the counts of Cardona, Urgell, Empúries and Pallars-Sobira. Their fortunes were to peak in the fourteenth century. The origins of the Montcada clan illustrate this development. Montcada or Moncada is a small castle/village, seven miles inland from Barcelona, close to the abbey of St Cugat des Valles. In the early twelfth century its heiress married an obscure knight called Guillem Ramón (1090–1173), who rose to be ‘Great Seneschal’ at the comtal court. Boosted by the gift of Tortosa-Lleida in the southern district of ‘New Catalonia’, their offspring thrived. In the next generation, they held some twenty to thirty castles and manors, some around Tortosa, some in the diocese of Vic, and others in the district of Girona. One of them, by marrying the heiress to Béarn, founded a trans-Pyrenean branch. From then on, their future was assured.
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All these great families lived off the toil of the unfree, and the serfs of Aragon-Barcelona, many of them Moors, kept company with slaves. Barcelona, Valencia and later Palma all held regular slave markets. Their wares, often Moorish prisoners, were sold on either to noble and merchant households or to foreign traders.

Governmental forms were advanced for their day. Their consultative and delegatory tendencies can be traced back to the eleventh century assemblies of
pau i treva –
‘Sanctuary and Truce’ – attended by the nobility; the first Catalan legal code, the
Usatges de Barcelona
(1068), was based on the decisions of those assemblies. Many authors, however, consider the joint meeting of Catalan and Aragonese nobles, convened by the king-count at Lleida in 1216, to have been the true starting point of a long parliamentary tradition. From then on, parliaments were held in all parts of the Crown lands. In Aragon, the
Cortes
held at Huesca in 1247 led to the formation of the
Fuero d’Aragon
, the ‘Codex of Huesca’.
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In Catalonia, the assembly held at Barcelona in 1283 established three ‘constitutions’, or fundamental laws, one making annual sessions of the assembly obligatory. These
Corts catalanes
consisted of three arms or
braços
representing the Church, the nobility and the citizens of royal towns. Their main function was legislative. With the king-count’s consent, they could pass laws of their own making (
capitols de cort
), on condition that they in turn approved laws initiated by him. In due course they acted as a model for overseas territories.

Thanks to their far-reaching powers under these arrangements, the nobility acquired a strong sense of solidarity, and of equality with their rulers. For a time between 1287 and 1348 they even cultivated a theory of the right of armed resistance to oppressive monarchs. As Pedro IV later remarked, ‘It is as hard as to divide the nobles of Aragon as it is to unite the nobles of Castile.’

Even before the Union, the counts of Barcelona had begun to project their power beyond Iberia. The first step was taken with the acquisition of Provence; the second, only five years later, through the bequest of Cerdanya (Cerdagne) and Besalú.

From 1032 Provence had been a margravate of the Holy Roman Empire in the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy (see p.
119
). Early in the twelfth century a marriage was arranged with papal assistance between Ramón Berenguer I, count of Barcelona, and Douce de Provence, heiress to the margravate. In this way, in 1112 Provence passed under the rule of Barcelona for 134 years. When the male line failed in 1246, the marriage of Béatrice de Provence to Charles d’Anjou propelled it into the French orbit of the Angevins.
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This was to be one of several bones of Angevin–Aragonese contention.