Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

This date, 1262, though it marked no fresh acquisition of territory for Aragon, was nevertheless an epoch in her history. Hitherto her main interest had been identical with Castile’s—namely, the freedom of Spain from the infidel—but now, owing to the conquest of Murcia, she was surrounded by Christian neighbours, and what remained of the crusade had become the business of Castile alone. Early in his reign also, King James had closed another chapter in Aragonese history, when, as a result of his father’s defeat and death, he had been forced to cede all Catalonian claims to Provence, and thus to put away for ever the prospect of absorbing France that had dazzled his ancestors.

Where, then, should Aragon turn her victorious arms? King James, a true Aragonese, had already answered this question, when in 1229 he began the conquest of the Balearic Islands, thus clearly recognizing that his country’s natural outlook for expansion was neither north nor south, but eastwards. Already Catalan fishermen and the merchants of Barcelona were disputing the commercial overlordship of the Mediterranean with their fellows of Marseilles and the Italian Republics, and thenceforward Aragonese kings were to take a hand in the game, supporting commerce with diplomacy and the sword.

Peter III of Aragon

James ‘the Conqueror’ did not die in battle-harness, as he had predicted, but in the robe of a Cistercian monk, expiating in the seclusion of a monastery the sins of his tempestuous, pleasure-loving youth. His tradition as a warrior descended to his son Pedro III, under whose rule Aragon entered on her campaign of Italian conquests.

Both the excuse for this undertaking and the occasion have been noticed elsewhere in another connexion. The excuse was the execution of Conradin,[33] last legitimate descendant of the Neapolitan Hohenstaufen. As he stood on the scaffold calmly awaiting his death, the boy, for he was little more, had flung his gauntlet amongst the crowd. The action spoke for itself, the one bitter word ‘revenge’; and a partisan who witnessed it, kneeling swiftly, picked up the glove and bore it away to Spain. Here he presented it to Pedro III, to whose wife Constance, the daughter of an illegitimate son of Frederick II, the claims of the Italian Hohenstaufen had descended.

Pedro did not forget the glove or its message; and when the Sicilians, rising in wrath at the Easter Vespers,[34] massacred their Angevin tyrants, it was Aragonese ships that brought them succour, and Pedro who defied the anathemas of the Pope and the power of France to drive him from his new throne.

All the failures and victories of the years that followed, when Aragonese and Angevin claimants deluged ‘the Kingdom’ and adjoining island with blood, are more a matter of Italian than Spanish history, and it is with Castile that the interests of the peninsula become mainly concerned.

Castile in later mediaeval times consisted of some two-thirds of the whole area of Spain, stretching from the Bay of Biscay in the north to the confines of the Moorish kingdom of Granada in the south. As her name suggests, she was a land of castles, built originally, not like the strongholds of Stephen’s lawless barons in England—to maintain a tyranny over the countryside—but as military outposts in each fresh stage of the reconquest from Islam. Naturally those who lived in such outposts, and might be wakened any night to take part in a border foray or to withstand a surprise attack, expected to receive special privileges in compensation. This was as it should be, and grateful Kings of Castile, in order to encourage traders as well as knights and princes to settle on their dangerous southern border, offered concessions in the form of charters and revenues with a reckless prodigality at which other European monarchs would have shuddered.

Trouble began when, with the steady advance of the crusading armies, outposts ceased to be outposts; and yet their inhabitants, naturally enough again, saw no reason why they should be deprived of the privileges and riches that they had won in the past. Had they known how to use their independence, when danger from the Moors diminished, in securing a government conscious of national needs and aspirations, Spain might have become the political leader of Europe. Unfortunately the average Castilian felt only a selfish sense of the advantages that liberty might afford, without realizing in the least that their possession entailed heavy responsibilities. Thus he allowed his country to degenerate into anarchy.

War seemed the natural atmosphere of life to the Castilian of pure blood, whose ancestors had all been crusaders. Unable to compete in agriculture or industry with the thrifty Moslems or Jews who remained behind on the lands that he reconquered, he decided that labour, except with the sword, was the hall-mark of slaves; and this unfortunate fallacy, widely adopted, became the ultimate ruin of Spain. It turned her from the true road of national prosperity, which can be gained only by solid work, while it prevented nobles and town representatives from understanding one another, and so rendered them incapable of common action in the ‘Cortes’, or national parliament. The fallacy went farther, for it made war between noble and noble seem a natural outlet for martial zeal when no Moslem force was handy on which to whet Christian swords.