Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (34 page)

And the said Infante En Jaime grew more in one year than others do in two. And it was not long before the good king, his father, died, and he was crowned King of Aragon and count of Barcelona and Urgell and Lord of Montpellier.
³⁹

The administration of Montpellier was not a simple matter. Prior to 1204, the predecessors of Dame Marie had shared the city’s jurisdiction with the bishops of Maguelonne. But when the bishops sold their share of the city to the king of France, the Aragonese officials had to work in tandem with French officials, and separate court systems, one Aragonese and the other French, operated in parallel.

Being thus free from direct royal control and hence from restrictive legislation, Montpellier could grow rapidly. Its population at the turn of the century numbered
c
. 40,000; it possessed a thriving silk industry and it was an entrepôt between seaborne and inland trade, especially of spices, attracting a vibrant financial community. Many of the pioneering techniques of credit and banking migrated from Italy to Montpellier in its Aragonese period.

Montpellier’s effective independence also made it a frequent destination for fugitives. Runaway serfs, debtors, criminals evading justice and suspected heretics all sought asylum in the city’s religious houses. An inquiry into these matters ordered by the king of France in 1338 has left us a rich collection of records. The municipal courts were far from lenient; banishment and execution were common sentences. On one occasion, four foreigners who were forced to confess to assaulting a doctor of law and to leaving him for dead, were promptly executed for murder before their victim recovered.
⁴⁰

Montpellier contained a large Jewish community too, which was deeply involved in medicine, in money-lending and in controversy. Their medical and financial activities benefited all their fellow citizens; the controversies were largely theological, and were directed at fellow Jews. The correspondence between Abba Mari of Montpellier and Rabbi Ibn Adret of Barcelona reveals a concerted attack on the authority of the great Castilian scholar, Maimonides, by the prominent Talmudist Solomon of Montpellier and his circle.
⁴¹

The presence of the Roman Church in Iberia stretched back to the days of the Roman Empire. Two martyrs to Roman persecution, St Vincent of Saragossa and St Vincent the Deacon, had both been born in Osca (Huesca). Though their veneration grew, the Church suffered deep setbacks in the centuries of Muslim dominance. The
Reconquista
gave Iberian Catholicism both its intense spirituality and its militancy. The two archdioceses of the kingdom-county – Zaragoza for Aragon and Tarragona for Catalonia – had been wrested from Muslim control in the twelfth century. Many of the churches, like the cathedral at Huesca, were established within the walls of ‘purified’ mosques.

A seminal role had been played by St Olegarius (Oleguer Bonestry,
c
. 1060–1137), archbishop of Tarragona, who presided over the Church Council of Barcelona in 1127, negotiated the marriage of his count to Queen Petronilla, and then consolidated ecclesiastical structures in the dioceses of Lleida, Girona, Urgell, Vic, Tortosa and Solsona. The later transfer of the bishopric of Valencia to Tarragona gave lasting offence to the Castilian archbishop of Toledo, who claimed supremacy in all reconquered lands.

Aragon-Catalonia was affected indirectly by the Church’s war against the Cathar heresy in neighbouring Languedoc. The conflict inspired the creation in 1232 of a Committee of Inquisition; and it helped the rise of militarized, crusading orders, and of organizations such as the Order for the Redemption of Christian Captives. Nonetheless, many of the kingdom-county’s leading clerics laid emphasis on the non-military aspects of the faith. St Raymond de Peñafort (
c
. 1175–1275), born at Vilafranca, apart from being confessor to Jaime I, was the foremost canon lawyer of the age. St Arnau de Gurb, bishop of Barcelona from 1252 to 1284, promoted dialogue with Jews and Muslims; there was no serious bloodletting from religious causes until the pogrom against Jews in Valencia in 1391. In later periods, the Church of Aragon-Catalonia produced numerous prominent prelates. One was Cardinal Berenguer de Anglesola (d. 1408), papal legate and sometime bishop of Huesca. Another was Cardinal Joan de Casanova OP (1387–1436), Dominican bishop of Elne. Born in Barcelona and buried in Florence, he was a royal confessor, and patron of the
Psalter and Book of Hours of King Alfons
o.
⁴²

As in all medieval kingdoms, the coronation of the monarch was an act of supreme significance, cementing the partnership of Church and State. The ceremonies, traditionally held in the cathedral at Zaragoza, gave spectators proof positive of the monarchy’s divine calling:

It is the truth that, at vesper-time on Good Friday [1328], the Lord King [Alfonso El Benigno] sent to tell everyone that on Easter Eve all should quit the mourning they were wearing for, the Lord King, his father, and that every man should trim his beard and begin the feast…

And so, on Saturday morning, at the time of the Alleluia and as the bells were ringing, every man was apparelled as the Lord King had commanded…

And when the bells were ringing madly, the Lord King issued from the Aljaferia to go to the Church of San Salvador… First of all came, on horseback [a procession of knights carrying ceremonial swords] and after the sword of the Lord King came two carriages of the Lord King with two [lighted] wax tapers; in each wax taper there were over ten quintals of wax…

And behind the two wax candles, came the Lord King, riding on his horse, with the most beautiful harness ever made by the hands of masters, and the sword was carried before him.

The vigil proceeded all through the night, accompanied by two holy masses:

And when it was finished, the Lord King kissed the cross of the sword and girded it on himself, and then, drew it from the scabbard and brandished it three times. And the first time, he defied all the enemies of the Holy Catholic faith; and the second time, he engaged to defend orphans, wards and widows; and the third time, he promised to maintain justice all his life… And the Lord Archbishop anointed him with chrism on the shoulder and on the right arm…

And… the Lord King himself took the crown from the altar and placed it on his own head… And… the said Lords Archbishops and Bishops and Abbots and Priors and the Lords Infantes with them, cried in a loud voice:
Te Deum laudamus
. And as they were singing, the Lord King took the golden sceptre in his right hand and put it in his left and then took the orb in his right…

And when… the Gospel had been sung, the Lord King again, with a low obeisance offered himself and his sacred crown to God, and knelt down very humbly. And… he went to seat himself before the altar of San Salvador, on the royal throne, and he sent for all the nobles… and dubbed them knights.
⁴³

Famously, Christianity and Islam coexisted in several parts of the Crown of Aragon. ‘Nowhere was contact between the two cultures closer than on the Gulf of Lyons,’ wrote Christopher Dawson; the County of Barcelona in particular ‘was a kind of bridge between the two worlds’.
⁴⁴
Yet the patterns were not uniform. In the lands newly occupied by the
Reconquista
, the Moors still dominated numerically. In most towns and cities of Aragon and Catalonia, they lived in closed wards, where, nonetheless, linguistic assimilation accelerated. In the countryside, they were often left to the supervision of the Knights Templar. The Jews, too, lived apart, as their own Talmudic rules required, but played a fruitful role in intellectual, medical and commercial life. Questions of tolerance and oppression, however, are almost impossible to quantify. A well-known study of the
convivencia
of Moors and Christians in fourteenth-century Aragon reports that the well-organized
mudéjar
communities experienced good times and bad, and concludes: ‘the general situation of Muslims, whether desirable or undesirable’, was
not
due to ‘the justice or injustice of the Christian authorities’.
⁴⁵

Similar conclusions can be applied to the Jewish community. Prior to the end of the fifteenth century, apart from in Poland-Lithuania, the kingdom-county and its subject lands were one of the few parts of Europe where Jews flourished. They were particularly prominent in the reign of Jaime the Conqueror. Benveniste de Porta (
fl
. 1250–70), the king’s banker, advanced loans on the security of royal taxes, and, with the Crown finances in debt to the tune of over 100,000
sous
, became the royal tax-farmer. Moses ben Nahman Gerondi (known as Nahmanides, 1194–1270), was a famous Catalan rabbi and philosopher from Girona. He starred in disputations both among Jews and between Jews and Christians. In the 1230s he acted as a conciliator in the conflict between Solomon of Montpellier and Maimonides, and in 1263 he took part in the heated Disputation of Barcelona with the convert, Paul the Christian. He had a lasting influence through his commentary on the Torah, which offered alternative interpretations of controversial biblical passages. Exiled through the machinations of his Dominican opponents, he founded a synagogue in Jerusalem that still survives.

Pilgrims were omnipresent among medieval travellers. There was plenty to see. The foremost pilgrimage took thousands to the Benedictine abbey of Montserrat, in the hills behind Barcelona, where one could see the miraculous
Verge negra
– the Black Madonna,
La Morenta
, the Patroness of Catalonia. The abbey of Ripoll near Girona was famous for the tomb of Count Wilfred the Hairy, for its library and for its community of learned monks, who studied Arabic manuscripts, transmitted ancient knowledge to posterity, and compiled the chronicles of the counts of Barcelona.
⁴⁶
The Cistercian abbey of Poblet, in the district of Tarragona, was enthusiastically patronized by the king-counts. Its royal pantheon, surmounted by a magnificent Gothic octagon, sheltered the tombs of almost all the monarchs.

All the cities of Aragon and Catalonia boasted grand cathedral churches, while the countryside was dotted with colossal castles that proclaimed the victorious pride of the
reconquistadores
. In the heyday of castle-building, Aragon and Catalonia had manned the ramparts of Christendom; and the moving Moorish frontier had called for line after line of castles as it went forward. Some of the fortresses, like Loarre in Huesca or the mighty Aljaferia in Zaragoza, were royal foundations. Others, like Cardona, or Peratallada or the Alcañiz in Teruel, were constructed by noble warlords. All served to underline the medieval truism that the Faith went hand in hand with the sword. The Crown of Aragon was also graced by seven universities: Montpellier, Perpignan, Barcelona, Valencia, Catania and later Palermo and Naples.

Many pilgrims passed through Aragon or Catalonia on their way to Santiago di Compostela and the shrine of St James; one of the stops on the ‘seashell road’ was at the monastery of San Juan de la Peña near Jaca. Built in the eleventh century under an overhanging rock at the bottom of a gorge, the monastery was home to the chronicler-monks of Aragon and housed Aragon’s first royal pantheon. Its tombs would certainly have challenged their visitors’ knowledge of history, as they still do. One inscription reads: ‘HIC REQUIESCIT FAMULUS DEI GARCIAS XIMENEZ PRIMUS REX ARAGONUM, QUI AMPLIAVIT ECCLESIAM SANCTI IOHANIS IBIQUE VITA DEFUNCTuS SEPELITUR.’ It refers to a ‘first king of Aragon’, probably the semi-legendary Garci Ximenez, who ruled in Sobrarbe in the eighth century under the supremacy of Navarre long before Ramiro’s time. Another inscription is less obscure: ‘HIC REQUIESCIT EXiMINA, MULIER RODERICI CID’ (‘Here lies Eximina, the wife of Rodriguez, El Cid’).
⁴⁷

Jaime I was the king whose long reign permitted him both to extend and to consolidate a still-vulnerable polity. Born, as we have seen, in Montpellier during the Albigensian Crusade, he seems to have spent time at the court of Simon de Montfort, the crusaders’ commander. His reign started badly, though, thanks to an ill-starred scheme to merge the kingdom-county with the Kingdom of Navarre, and it was some years before royal authority could be firmly asserted. But then, in the late 1220s, Jaime sidelined domestic problems by adventuring overseas. In 1229 he invaded the Moorish-controlled Balearic Islands, declaring himself ‘king of Mallorca’. Three years later, he entered the old stomping ground of El Cid in Valencia. After two decades of campaigning to secure the new conglomeration, he signed the Treaty of Corbeil with the king of France in 1258, gaining mutual recognition of the frontiers and of all sovereign titles.

In later life, Jaime was to compose the famous Catalan
Llibre dels Fets
or ‘Book of Deeds’, an autobiographical chronicle about his life and times. The manuscript, now in the national library of Barcelona, is written in a vernacular similar to Occitan. He made generous provision for his ten legitimate children, and for numerous illegitimate ones. His testament, drawn up in 1262, envisaged the division of his realms between his two eldest sons. One of them was to inherit Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia. The other, with the title of ‘king of Mallorca’, was to inherit the Balearics, Rosselló, Cerdanya and Montpellier.